Speaking at the Hay Literary Festival in Colombia, Maria Ressa, Nobel Peace Prize laureate in 2021, former CNN Journalist, founder of online news outlet, Rappler, spoke about how we can collectively protect democracy.
For those of you who don’t know Ressa (it’s hard to believe how little was reported in Australia at the time), she is CEO and co-founder of Rappler, the Philippines’ top digital news site.
A fearless defender of independent journalism in the Philippines, Ressa has exposed numerous human rights violations committed by president Rodrigo Duterte.
For speaking the truth, she has been landed with multiple arrest warrants and, at one stage, faced 100-plus years in jail.
Ressa said: “This is not a freedom of speech issue. Social media has taken away our free will”.
For Ressa, social media is a powerful tool for manipulation.
“100% of Filipinos are on the internet via Facebook. And Facebook actually administers most of them. And what they did is they tested these tactics of mass manipulation in our country. And the target was the West”.
The question Ressa is asked all the time is how does she find the courage? She says that what news journalists do is fundamentally dangerous.
A big risk now, she says, is that social media will rewrite history.
“What we are now fighting is the struggle of memory to remind us of evil and corrupt power. A rampant social media campaign that propagated a form of ‘revisionist history’. Social media platforms were flooded with content that life under Marcos senior was a golden age in the Philippines”.
By ‘Marcos senior’ she refers to the rule of notorious dictator Ferdinand Marcos – whose son was recently elected.
Ressa expects something transformative will occur the in the next two years. And whether democracy survives or whether fascism wins, is what she thinks about every day.
She says that this latest iteration of tech intelligence operates at a microscopic cellular level, quoting examples such as America in 2016 and Brexit in the UK.
The use of fear and anger gets the population inflamed she adds. Ressa describes this as ‘toxic slosh’ because this misinformation makes us afraid and angry.
“It becomes divisive. It changes actions and behaviours. That’s how (Trump) happened. How Brazil happened. That’s how Brexit happened. That’s how genocide happened in Myanmar,” she added.
“In the Philippines, we still have no idea how many people were killed in Rodrigo Duterte era. The police will say 8000 but human rights activists will say it is possibly as high as 27,000. There is is an MIT study from 2018 that researched and discovered lies on social media spread 36 times faster than facts. Data is the incentive structure of the technology companies. It shows that we are blindly addicted and it’s a business model called surveillance capitalism. We have been polarised because of algorithmic amplification. This is not a freedom of speech issue. Social media has taken away our free will”.
Ressa then went on to tell her personal story, how she was the target of Information Operations.
In her case, despite 37 years as a respected journalist, a series of disinformation networks were created to discredit her and her news outlet, Rappler, which led to a suite of fabricated charges (many that she has recently been acquitted of).
“Female journalists are attacked in the Philippines, at least 10 times more than men and news organisations were targeted by Information Operations”.
For all the misuses of this power, there has been as many positive outcomes from the social revolution, Ressa added.
Its true power social media’s power rests in its universal appeal and its ability for anyone to speak to the world.
