Filipino journalist Maria Ressa called the architecture of social networks an “invisible atomic bomb”, which she accused of spreading hate faster than fact, when she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in December 2021.
About two months later, in February, Russia invaded Ukraine, and in May, Ferdinand Marcos Jr., son of dictator Ferdinand Marcos who had been overthrown in a popular revolution in 1986, was elected president of the Philippines.
These two facts have in common that they were preceded by social media campaigns that created the narrative Russia used to justify the invasion and, in the case of the Southeast Asian country, Marcos Sr. “from a pariah into a hero”.
This is the premise of Rising Up Against a Dictator: The Fight for Our Futurethe book launched by Maria Ressa at the end of 2022, the Portuguese edition of which was published by Ideias de Ler, from Porto Editora.
With a foreword by her lawyer, Amal Clooney, the book tells the personal story of the journalist and now president of the Rappler Group, a digital news site she co-founded in 2012, in a way she uses to promote the impunity of the companies that control the networks, such as Meta, by Mark Zuckerberg.
Maria Ressa, 59, says in the book she wrote it to try “to show that the lack of rule of law in the virtual world is devastating.””.
Ressa has been a journalist for over 36 years and gained international fame in the 1990s on the American television network CNN.
From his “place in Southeast Asia” he claims to have witnessed the rise of democratic movements in former colonies, from “Islamic terrorism long before 9/11” or of new leaders “democratically elected who would turn their countries into quasi-dictatorships”.
He also saw “the potential and dizzying power of social networks, which would soon play a decisive role in overthrowing everything”, which he says was dear to his heart.
It was because she considered herself “the staunchest of the true believers in the power of social networks to do good in the world” that Ressa has used Facebook and other platforms to assert Rappler in investigative journalism and social campaigning in the Philippines.
That involvement led the Rappler team to understand and document how Facebook’s architecture promotes the spread of hate over facts.
In addition to the Russian and Philippine cases, the author also mentions the role of social networks in the dissemination of stories by extremist groups that led to violence in the United States in January 2021, when Donald Trump lost the election to Joe Biden.
“I believe Facebook poses one of the most serious threats to democracies around the world,” he says in the book.
Ressa says Rappler began to denounce impunity on two fronts: “in President Rodrigo Duterte’s drug war and on Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook.”
Duterte’s war on drugs (2016-2022) was a campaign of summary executions of alleged drug dealers and consumers that caused an estimated 27,000 deaths between 2016 and 2018, according to the Human Rights Commission of the Philippines.
Named after King Philip II, but also colonized by the United States and under Japanese occupation, the former Spanish colony is an archipelago of 7,600 islands and a population of 113 million, mostly Catholics.
In 2021, for the sixth consecutive year, it was the country whose population spent the most time on social networks, according to data from London-based company We Are Social, cited in the book.
Ressa says when he told Zuckerberg at a 2017 rally that 97 percent of Filipinos were on Facebook, the platform’s boss replied, “where are the other three percent”?
“At the time I laughed at his empty joke. I don’t think he’s that funny anymore,” he says in the book.
According to Ressa, the Philippines is a hotbed of fake accounts involved in disinformation campaigns in various countries.
“What I have seen and documented over the past decade is the divine power of technology to infect each of us with a virus of lies, turning us against each other (…) and the rise of despots and dictators across the the whole world, the world,” Ressa says as she introduces the work.
This process he calls “death by a thousand cuts of democracy”, resorting to an ancient form of torture and execution in China that consisted of cutting the victim countless times to cause a slow and agonizing death.
According to Ressa, the platforms that bring the news to a significant portion of the world’s population are “fact-biased” and spread “lies seasoned with anger and hatred” much faster than the facts.
“Without facts, there can be no truth. Without truth, there can be no trust. Without these three things, we don’t have a shared reality, and democracy as we know it — as well as all major human endeavors — are dead,” he argues.
Together with the Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov, Ressa received the Nobel Peace Prize. Until then, only one journalist had been awarded the prize, the German Carl von Ossietzky in 1935, “who could not accept it because he languished in a Nazi concentration camp”. He would die on May 4, 1938, aged 48.
Ressa argues in the book that the Norwegian Nobel Committee’s decision to re-attribute journalism was an indication that the world was “at a different existential point for democracy”.
Therefore, warned in his speech about accepting the Nobel Prize for the “invisible atomic bomb” that he said had exploded in the information ecosystem.
He then denounced that technology platforms had “offered geopolitical powers a way to individually manipulate each of their users.”
Ressa says the world is dealing with this “silent nuclear holocaust” as it did in the aftermath of World War II with the creation of the United Nations, NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) or the Universal Declaration of Human Rights Human.
“Today we need new global institutions and a reaffirmation of the values we hold dear” to create a world “more compassionate, more just, more sustainable. (…) A world free of fascists and tyrants”, he defends in the book.
In September 2022, Ressa and Muratov launched a plan to, among other things, “end the surveillance business model [das redes sociais] for profit” and rebuilding “independent journalism as an antidote to tyranny”.
The plan contains specific requests to democratic governments, the European Union and the UN, proposing the appointment of a special envoy of the Secretary-General for the safety of journalists.
Even acknowledging that he is lucky compared to other journalists who are “in hiding, in exile or in prison,” Ressa knows what he is talking about: “in less than two years, the government of the Philippines has issued 10 arrest warrants against me issued,” he says in the book.
And in 2018, he began wearing a bulletproof vest when traveling across the country.
Source: DN
