[ If you live in a country where democracy is still intact:
Don’t wait.]
[[link removed]]

HOW TO FIGHT FASCISM BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE  
[[link removed]]


 

Maria Ressa
November 14, 2022
The Atlantic
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ If you live in a country where democracy is still intact: Don’t
wait. _

, Getty; Alex Cochran

 

In retrospect, I should have seen that democracy was collapsing around
me sooner. I wish now that I’d understood then how quickly it
happens. At the time, over the summer of 2016, in the months after the
presidential election of Rodrigo Duterte, several things seemed to
happen all at once.

First, Duterte’s minions were changing our information ecosystem in
the Philippines in plain sight. They did this through multipronged and
relentless attacks that were intended to discredit journalists and
disorient the public. These attacks worked, and they continued nonstop
for years before Facebook—one of the primary places where they
occurred—took any action.

What happened in the Philippines in 2016 is a microcosm of every
information operation launched in democratic countries around the
world. A combination of bots, fake accounts, and content
creators—real people doing the bidding of a government determined to
mislead its people—infected our citizenry like a virus. Many of
those who were infected didn’t even know. This is how disinformation
operations work everywhere. Lies that are repeated over and over
change the public’s perception of an issue and spread exponentially.
This is a tactic that powerful and corrupt forces have long used, but
one that has gained terrifying new meaning and pitch in the age of Big
Data and social media.

There’s a word in Filipino,_ talangkaan_. It describes the behavior
of crabs crawling over one another to get to the top. When I reflect
on the surreal events of the past six years—the powerful autocrat
determined to silence me and other journalists; the 10 arrest warrants
the government issued against me in less than two years; the
possibility that I will still go to prison for life; the warping of
information across the social web; and the refusal of the powerful men
who control social platforms to do anything—this is the word
that’s come to me again and again: _talangkaan_.

Looking back today, I can see what I missed at the time. In my case,
dangerous individuals seeded the narrative that would unravel
democracy. Propagandists across the web chanted “Journalist equals
criminal” and “Arrest Maria Ressa” years before my first arrest;
in doing so, they softened public acceptance for legal cases that
later became a reality. Let me say this to you as clearly as I
possibly can: This happened to me. It can happen to you.

In October 2016, Mocha Uson, an entertainer whose enormous Facebook
audience made her an Alex Jones–like figure in the Philippines,
attacked me and my news organization, Rappler, continuing her rant
against journalists and mainstream media, whom she called
“presstitutes.” As a co-founder and leader of Rappler, I had found
myself at the center of a storm. We had published a series of stories
about how the Duterte administration was weaponizing the internet
against the people, silencing those attempting to hold Duterte
accountable, and paving the way for the support of the drug war and
extrajudicial killings of citizens in the Philippines. It was a
blockbuster story, one that other outlets didn’t touch. And it set
off a chain reaction that would alter the course of my life. In the
moment, we were caught in a cycle that went like this: My team would
publish information about the corruption of the Duterte
administration; the administration would launch unabated attacks and
targeted harassment against us; those attacks would be amplified
across the social web to tear down our reputation and confuse the
public; and platforms like Facebook would cash in on the confusion.

Uson’s live video attacking me and Rappler contained a perfect mix
of interactivity, vitriol, “us against them,” and easy
engagement—exactly what Facebook algorithms reward. Nearly five
years later, that attack video remains on Facebook, with more than
3,100 shares, 12,000 comments, and 497,000 views.

The personal attacks against me came, too, in her comments section;
the worst were posted by men, or by accounts pretending to be men.
This is a common dynamic all over the world—Facebook actually
rewards behavior that women and other vulnerable groups globally have
spent decades fighting. All of it was something we flagged early on
for Facebook because it was in the comments that we saw a lot of
astroturfing create an artificial groundswell of support.

The attacks on my own Facebook page also increased. I tried to
respond, but my feed was inundated with comments. Midway through
Uson’s live broadcast against me, I started counting the attacks. By
midnight, I had reached an average of 90 hate messages an hour. I was
angry, and my heart was pounding. I stood up and walked around my
apartment, trying to understand what was happening, debating how
exactly I should try to fight back. I saw real people being persuaded
to change their minds about my long journalistic track record, which
no longer seemed to matter. It was like drunk frat boys coming
together. Just like that, the credibility I had built up during my
entire career crumbled. I watched it happen in real time.

So I did what I had learned to do while in war zones: I took five deep
breaths in a row, pushed my emotion to the pit of my stomach, and
decided on a course of action. I decided to take the abuse that was
sent to me directly, which only I could see on my Facebook page, and
post it publicly for everyone to see. I would document the attacks.

In one night, the impact of the government’s campaign on Rappler’s
Facebook page was immediate: 20,000 accounts unfollowed Rappler, the
highest ever in a single day, and the attrition continued in the
coming days. In a month, we lost 44 percent of our weekly reach and 1
percent of our total followers, a little more than 50,000 accounts. It
was, in essence, a new and insidious form of state censorship—one
that enlisted both citizens and officials to participate in propaganda
and attacks to take advantage of Facebook’s algorithms. Twenty-five
percent of our page views from Facebook disappeared.

No self-respecting journalist would do what Uson and others like her
did to take over our country’s information ecosystem, which meant
that in the beginning, most journalists like me chose not to respond
to what seemed like kindergarten antics and bullying. We were fighting
a war in a new world using old-world paradigms, thinking that doing
the work of journalism was enough.

We didn’t grasp that Facebook, the website that millions of people
still believed fostered community and connection, had supplanted
traditional media. We didn’t realize that those “content
creators,” with their crude, sometimes lewd, manipulative posts, now
passed as political pundits, even as journalists reporting
“facts.” Those accounts were at the core of a propaganda machine
that bullied and harassed its targets and incited its followers to
violence. The same thing happened with Stop the Steal in the United
States, anti-Muslim riots in India, the invasion of Ukraine by Russia,
and many other events around the world. Facebook didn’t only provide
a platform for those propagandists’ speech or even only enable them;
in fact, it gave them preferential treatment because anger is the
contagious currency
[[link removed]] of
Facebook’s profit machine. Only anger, outrage, and fear led to
greater numbers of people using Facebook more times a day. Violence
has made Facebook rich.

I often tell people that what happened to me, and what happened to
Rappler, is an early-warning system for the rest of the world. The
year 2016 had been the target year for Rappler to break even—and we
were on track to do that until we published our
weaponization-of-the-internet series, and Duterte’s propaganda
machine tore us apart.

We began reaching out to Facebook’s representatives to tell them
what was happening to us, sharing concrete evidence of the harassment
we endured and the extent to which their platform was being used to
inflict harm on civic life in the Philippines. For two years, Facebook
largely ignored the data we gave it, maybe because we were in the
Philippines and not the United States. Those years, during which
information operations functioned with impunity around the world, were
characterized by systematic, large-scale manipulation that distorted
facts, changed the public narrative, and destroyed public trust.

Within six months of Duterte’s taking power in the Philippines, the
checks and balances of the three branches of government—executive,
legislative, and judicial—collapsed through a system of patronage,
blind loyalty, and what I started calling the “three C’s”:
corrupt, coerce, co-opt.

If anyone refused what the government desired or offered (often
privately and often linked to business opportunities), they were
publicly attacked. That happened in two ways. In the first,
indiscriminate, repeated online attacks created a chilling effect,
curbing online conversations and speech. A climate of fear settled in
the virtual world, mirroring the violence and fear that a drug war in
the Philippines was creating in the real world. Then the
administration targeted high-profile individuals in specific sectors:
business, politics, and media. Duterte needed to make highly visible
examples of what happened when anyone challenged his power. This is
how one of the most successful business figures in the Philippines saw
his company’s stock tank. It’s how Senator Leila de Lima wound up
publicly humiliated and thrown into prison for daring to investigate
the president.

Looking back, it should have been obvious that the checks and balances
of our democracy were collapsing. Here was our president, successfully
jailing an opposition politician who had fought to expose his crimes,
with the support of the people and institutions that should have kept
him in check. Duterte, like Facebook, benefited from the system of
trust that they both destroyed. The weaponization of the internet had
evolved into the weaponization of the law. It was only a matter of
time before the government came for us, too.

Before Senator Leila de Lima’s arrest, Rappler received a tip that
Solicitor General Jose Calida was pushing the Securities and Exchange
Commission, which is under the executive branch, to open an
investigation into our company. Despite all that had gone on in the
previous months, it was still hard for me to take such an outlandish
idea seriously. For all the corruption that I’d witnessed over the
years in my country, the use of government levers for this kind of
retribution against the press seemed strange and unlikely.

Still, I felt helpless in dealing with the online attacks, which
continued uninterrupted. My anger was building. I funneled that anger
into more investigations, more data. I told anyone who would listen
exactly how we all were being manipulated. We were not going to be
intimidated into backing off our hard-hitting coverage of the new
administration.

We did not relent, nor did Duterte and his online army. In May 2017,
we published a transcript of a call between Duterte and then-President
Donald Trump during which Duterte called North Korea’s leader a
“madman.” In response, the blogger and Duterte-defender RJ Nieto
posted a video in which he called me a “traitor” who had made the
Philippines a target of North Korea. By November 2017, the video had
83,000 views and encouraged comments such as “#ArrestMariaRessa”
and “Declare Rappler & Maria Ressa as enemies of the Filipinos.”

Despite the churning in my stomach, I learned to embrace my fear and
change what I could. We gathered data, monitoring the evolution of
tactics as well as the growth and messaging of disinformation
networks. Then we published stories that forecast what might happen in
other democratic countries. We knew we were wading into dangerous
waters. By then it was clear that online violence led to real-world
violence: Reports had detailed the way social-media groups had fueled
the fury of white supremacists in the United States. We prepared for
the worst-case scenarios and increased our security. After that, we
had to increase our security six more times.

In April 2017, I flew to San Jose, California, for the F8,
Facebook’s annual developer conference. Facebook had asked me to
attend, meet with its officers and partners, and talk about our work
at Rappler. At the F8, I was invited to a small meeting with Mark
Zuckerberg to give him perspectives about how companies use Facebook
around the globe. I was the only journalist in the room. A Facebook
employee next to me held down the top of my computer when I was about
to open it and take notes.

When it was my turn to speak, I first invited Mark to come visit the
Philippines. He thanked me, but said he planned to stay in America
instead—he’d recently developed a plan to spend 2017 traveling to
every U.S. state because he wanted to understand his country. “You
have no idea how powerful Facebook is in the Philippines,” I told
him.

For six years in a row leading to 2021, Filipinos spent more time than
any other country on the internet and on social media. And despite
slow internet speeds, Filipinos consistently uploaded and downloaded
the largest number of videos on YouTube in 2013. As a Filipino and the
only journalist in the room, I wanted to warn the group how social
media was fundamentally changing journalism and our information
ecosystem.

“Ninety-seven percent of Filipinos on the internet are on Facebook,
Mark!” I exclaimed, hoping, in part, that that tidbit might entice
him to visit. Perhaps then he would better understand the problems we
were beginning to see: how journalists were coming under attack and
how the government had hired social-media influencers to wage its
propaganda war.

Mark was quiet for a beat. Maybe I had been too pushy. “Wait,
Maria,” he said, looking directly at me. “Where are the other 3
percent?”

At the time, I laughed at his glib quip. I’m not laughing anymore.

It wasn’t until 2018 that Facebook began high-profile post takedowns
in the Philippines and around the world, which included limiting the
reach of Uson’s page and taking down the network built by
Duterte’s social-media campaign manager. By then, of course, it was
too late.

Without any real solution from the tech platforms, it would be easy to
give up. But we can’t do that. Not when the integrity of our
elections is at stake. So we do our best with what we have: We act,
and each day we iterate. This, so far, is our only collective defense.
The only way to find a solution is to act.

First, we must demand accountability from technology. This has to
start with government action, because the social-media companies
regard public pressure and outcry as something that can be safely
ignored.

We also must protect and grow investigative journalism. One global
initiative I’ve helped lead is the International Fund for Public
Interest Media, an immediate short- and medium-term solution to the
drop in advertising revenues—which have filtered away from news
organizations and to tech platforms instead.

After funding, journalists need protection, starting with the law.
Impunity must stop. I learned firsthand just how frail the legal
protections are for journalists worldwide. In many ways, lawyers are
also playing whack-a-mole, and just as with the official development
assistance funds from democratic nations, there needs to be a
concerted systemic effort for international law. It makes sense that
if we don’t have facts, we can’t have law, and we have no
democracy.

“The struggle of man against power,” the novelist Milan Kundera
wrote, “is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” I have
lived through several cycles of history, chronicling wild swings of
the pendulum that would eventually stabilize. When journalists were
the gatekeepers to our public-information ecosystem, those swings took
decades. Today, they take months.

As for me, there are times I struggle. Because I refuse to stop doing
my job, I’ve lost my freedom to travel. I can’t plan my life,
because I still have seven criminal cases that could send me to
prison. But I refuse to live in a world like this. We deserve better.
I _demand_ better. In the lecture I delivered
[[link removed]] to
accept the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021, I asked for a defense of our
democracies—of our freedom, of equality—that begins at the
individual level. In the long term, the most important thing is
education; in the medium term, it’s legislation and policy to
restore the rule of law in the virtual world—to create a vision of
the internet that binds us together instead of tearing us apart. In
the short term, right now, it’s just us: collaborate, collaborate,
collaborate.

World War III won’t just be a conventional war. The fight for
democracy requires a person-to-person defense of our democracies.
Microtargeting means that this is hand-to-hand combat for all of us on
social media. This is us—you and me and everyone you
know—resisting dictatorship through our values not only in the
public sphere but in our daily lives. That begins with trust.

_This article is an adapted excerpt from Ressa’s new book, How to
Stand Up to a Dictator
[[link removed]]._

_Maria Ressa [[link removed]] is a
contributing writer at The Atlantic, the CEO of Rappler, and a
recipient of the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize._

* Fascism
[[link removed]]
* Philippines
[[link removed]]
* Facebook
[[link removed]]
* disinformation
[[link removed]]
* fightback
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]

Manage subscription
[[link removed]]

Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]