'I've Tried Very Hard To Just Keep Going': Maria Ressa On Standing Up To A Dictator

So why should you care about what happens in the Philippines? We spend most of our time on the internet, more than 10 hours a day, we spend most of our time on social media globally and as we discovered, lies mixed with anger and hatred spread faster. when you

just

look at the content, it's a game of whack-a-mole. I want to find out what the LIE is. Then look at the network that spreads lives. That's the nervous system. We started looking at an account that attacked all journalists. They are corrupt. account that had 25 followers, they all followed each other, we checked e

very

item, they were all fake accounts, we started counting and found out that 26 fake accounts can influence up to 3 million other accounts, three million, that was a PBS clip from 2020. documentary about Filipino and American journalist Maria Ressa as co-founder of the largest digital news company in the Philippines.

Resa has spent years reporting on government corruption and the spread of misinformation on social media, although her work has earned her global recognition, including a Nobel Peace Prize. The price of

standing

up to those in power came at a cost: In 2020, she was arrested and then convicted on cyber libel charges and could now spend the rest of her life in prison and Maria joins us now as CEO, Co-Founder and president of Rappler and author of the new Memoir titled How to Stand Up to a Dictator, the Fight for Our Future Maria, it's great to have you with us, fellow New Jerseyans, and I was glad to hear it for people who don't know your story, they do. .

You won the Nobel Peace Prize, they know you're Time's Person of the Year for 2018. Just tell us a little bit about your fight for the truth in the Philippines and the pressure you put on former President Duterte and what that's had. I think you know, this is my 36th year as a journalist and I've watched how technology has changed e

very

thing. I created the Manila Bureau, the Jakarta Bureau for a network and suddenly the facts became moot, this is the big change how technology when they took over as gate

keep

ers of news organizations journalists how they essentially abdicated responsibility for the facts, for the safety of the users and here's the strange thing, rappler, which is the company I created in 2012. uh, I was the truest of true believers in social media I thought technology could help drive development in our country and I thought we could have participatory media and help build institutions from the bottom up.

All of that, of course, went downhill when information operations began in 2014 and then the political dominoes began to fall in 2016. Starting with the election of Rodrigo Duterte, so what is the nexus for you between social media and authoritarianism, not only in the Philippines but throughout the world? Oh man, thanks for asking. I refer, first of all, to the design. and we know this from a 2018 MIT study. Lies spread faster than facts. Facts are really boring. You know, we spend our lives trying to

keep

your attention to tell you compelling stories, but because the whole point of this is to keep you scrolling, essentially our biology is. used against us, right? is to fear, anger, hate and the more you LIE, the more your amygdala activates, the longer you stay when that happens, the way to change your world view through your emotions and then once you change your world view , goes directly to your right to vote, so, for example, it is not a coincidence that 60% of the world is under an authoritarian regime today.

We have rolled back democracy globally to 1989 levels and continue to democratically elect illiberal leaders who tear down institutions in their own country. and then end up allying together changing geopolitical power sorry that's a lot of work all in one so obviously one of those illiberal leaders was Rodrigo Duterte tell us about your clashes with him and the legal danger you face now oh it's the militarization of social media, you know? you tell a lie a million times, it becomes a fact um in our case it was attacking journalists uh journalist equals criminal a year later in 2017, President Duterte says the same thing about me and Rappler a week later we received our first subpoena 14 investigations, so weaponization of social media followed from top to bottom by the use of the law as a weapon.

I continue to fight in 2019. There was

just

a six-week period where I was arrested twice. The Philippine government filed 10 arrest warrants against me in less than two years. I'm out on bail thank you for having me here I have to ask the Court for permission even up to the Supreme Court to be able to travel you really don't know how much you value your freedom until you start losing it so you run out of rapine started in 2012 10 years ago for most of it of the 10 years of charity that they had in 2016. Yes, six, yes, a murderer, a murderer, and he proudly says yes, so my question to you is we talked about it before briefly.

Have you ever felt like your life was in danger? I mean, let's say that once online violence is violence in the real world, impunity online is impunity offline, so when the threat started coming and it's not like one or two death threats for breakfast , it's 90 hate. messages per hour and when that happened it was not just against me and my company as well, we had to increase security six times in less than a year and we are still looking at this, so yeah, I'm scared, aren't I? The right word when it's like pollution is part of the air you breathe, so you get used to it and well, it's academically short and it becomes effective if you let it stop you, so I've been trying really

hard

to move on. that's what we try to do at Rappler maybe it's New Jersey I think that's it, you're hanging in there Maria, uh, caddy K from the BBC has a question for you, caddy Maria, it's nice to meet you, we're all journalists.

We have all been admiring and watching what you have been doing for years and praying every day for your safety as well and thank you for the efforts you have been leading. Also came up with some kind of a roadmap on how we can counter this because it's not just in the Philippines of course, it's everywhere where there are social media threats and what you say once something is posted becomes fact we have all now employed disinformation correspondents we have one at the BBC every news organization has one what else works to counter this what are the bright spots or the road map we can all try to follow thank you thank you very much for asking well, first of all, if we were if you were marginalized in the real world before being even more marginalized today, women, for example, as of 2017 in the Philippines were attacked at least 10 times more than men.

There is a book that has just been published and was prepared by the Ice International Center for journalists and UNESCO, it is called the chilling right 60 of the attacks against me were intended to bring down my credibility 40 of almost half a million taxes on social networks They were meant to bring down my spirit so how can we move forward? um in September of this year Dimitri Moratov the Russian journalist who won the Nobel we won the Nobel Peace Prize together in 2021 we presented it uh it's a 10 point action plan with 10 other Nobel Prize winners and about 100 different groups working on disinformation, very specifically information operations and the goal of these ten point action plan is actually three groups, you know, the first one is stopping for-profit surveillance.

It all starts with data privacy. It starts with cloning each of us and then using it to micro. Direct our weakest point to a message that is first. The second is to stop coding bias. true, but that this technology that was prepared in Silicon Valley but that has now moved to tick tock is an extremely rebounded inequality and, finally, the third is journalism as an antidote to tyranny, these are the three large groups that are at constitutional level, but there is a lot of work to do. I am part of the United Nations Internet Governance Forums and we are trying to do this.

It's time to intervene and there are some lessons we can learn here in the United States and certainly the new book is titled How to Stand Up to a Dictator The Fight for Our Future Nobel Peace Prize Winner Maria Ressa and the Pride of Toms River New Jersey thank you for being with us this morning we appreciate it thank you for having a good look