"If the Nobel has taught me anything, it is that doing the right thing is the right thing," explains Philippine journalist Maria Ressa, a benchmark for press freedom and an inexhaustible scourge of former President Rodrigo Duterte and his atrocious "war on drugs." During the six years that the president was in power, Rappler, the outlet that runs the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize, denounced human rights violations committed with the connivance of the Philippine government, and did so by enduring a fierce campaign of discredit orchestrated by Duterte's team on social networks that later culminated in a judicial persecution that almost cost him his life in prison.Ressa, despite himself, was able to observe from his vantage point in the Philippines how platforms like Facebook or YouTube they went from becoming tools for the liberation of peoples to weapons against democracy on a global scale.This experience is reflected in How to fight against a dictator (Peninsula), an allegation I stand in defense of journalism as a pillar of defense of democracy and a cry of alert against the dictatorship of technology companies.
Duterte has left, but you continue to drag lawsuits. She has recently been cleared of tax evasion.
They could have sentenced me to 34 years, a great weight has been lifted off my shoulders. In 2016, a campaign to use social networks as a weapon against us began, later in 2017 President Duterte attacked us in his state of the nation address, a week later our first court summons arrived – there were up to 14 investigations against Rappler – and then the arrest warrants and up to 10 criminal charges started pouring in. Now we have been acquitted of four charges of tax evasion that should never have come to justice. There is still a fifth evasion case whose verdict will come out in June, another on the alleged foreign ownership of Rappler and another for slander, which is already in the Supreme Court. We have lost him on two levels, if we lose he could go to jail for seven years.
The Philippines once again has a Marcos as president.
After the departure of Duterte there is no longer so much fear. We have a president, Bongbong Marcos, who has to prove that he is not like his father, the Marcos who was in power for 21 years until he was overthrown. On the other hand, this Administration has said that its priority is the economy. And lastly, the president cares what the rest of the world thinks, in his first 100 days he has traveled more than any other Philippine president. I am optimistic.
In his book he warns about the global dictatorship of social networks. Are we aware of the danger?
We have seen how violence online is violence in the real world. Part of what has allowed the spread of lies and the death of democracy is that there is legislation that allows it. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 gives impunity to mostly American technology companies for spreading lies and hate. They are not held responsible for the content. But the reality is that it is very different. These companies use algorithms (coded feedback) to make decisions about what content is distributed and to whom. And they make more money distributing lies than facts. There is a study from MIT that says that lies are distributed six times faster than facts on social networks. Without facts, there can be no truth, without truth there is no trust and there is no shared reality, so you cannot have democracy. These platforms are addictive, they are made to make you spend more and more time on them and they are detrimental to the user. The incentives with which they are designed encourage the worst in human nature. They are not a reflection of our behavior, they create it. There are studies on Brazil in which it is shown that YouTube grouped far-right videos together with others of conspiracy theories. These groups would never have met in the real world, but the algorithm did group them together.
He claims that the old powers, governed by checks and balances, are unable to compete against the new power of technology companies.
There must be legislation that guarantees us protection. But in the short term we only have ourselves. We have to stop being passive users to become citizens again. If we can organize in the real world to call for improvements, our legislators will have the impetus to pass laws. You could compare this to the birth of unions during industrialization. Right now the merchandise is not labor, but attention.
Why did the Philippines become the test tube for the use of networks as a weapon?
We are pioneers in the use of networks. For six consecutive years, ending in 2021, Filipinos spent the most time online and on social media. Christopher Wylie, the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower, revealed that they tried their crowd manipulation tactics in countries like ours because they could do so with impunity. Forbidden Stories just published an investigation into the social media manipulation industry. Countries, political powers, geopolitical powers... create metanarratives that allow democracies to be attacked on a cellular scale, on an individual scale. It is a way of influencing elections that allows for the democratic election of illiberal, digital authoritarian leaders, who, once elected, break down institutions from within and ally globally.
One of the main arguments of misinformation is that the media lies. How to fight against that idea when in many cases it has been like that?
Journalists are the first to be attacked because if you destroy their credibility, people no longer know who to trust. And that's what they want. Every year there are more journalists imprisoned or assassinated. Are we wrong? Of course, but if you work in a medium with standards and ethics, you have a faith in errata. On the other hand, we are legally responsible, we can be brought to justice. I prefer good journalists a thousand times over influencers created by social networks, because for journalists it is not a popularity game, it should never be. We are relevant to our audiences, but we appeal to their slow thinking part, the part that listens. Is this an anachronism? Yes, I'm surprised that Rappler survived six years of Duterte with these standards [laughs], but this is part of what the Nobel has taught me, that doing the right thing is the right thing, and I think journalists feed off of that same thing. sense of mission
Their teams have basically been made up of women. What is the reason?
I've always known that there are things I don't know and in every decision I've made I wasn't just trusting myself, but a group of people. Strangely they have been women. I think it's partly because the low wages in the profession don't encourage men to enter. The Philippines is one of the few countries where there is no glass ceiling for women in the media. There have always been women leading. In general, look at the people fighting against misinformation, they are usually women.
