Humanity running out of road, the edge of a cliff approaches in 2024
Maria Ressa warns democracy being destroyed by disinformation & corruption
Maria Ressa on facing down dictators, disinformation & standing up for democracy
Nobel Peace Prize-winning journalist Maria Ressa is a force to be reckoned with. She’s a celebrated investigative reporter whose recent memoir How To Stand Up to a Dictator outlines both her work exposing government corruption and misinformation in the Philippines, and the personal and legal attacks she's faced as a result. She joins Piya Chattopadhyay to talk about why we need to have more regulation of tech companies, how Canadians should think about threats to our country's democratic process, and why she continues to warn the world about what she sees as very imminent threats posed by authoritarianism and disinformation.
Aired: Dec. 3, 2023
Maria Ressa
PBS Firing Line: DECEMBER 01, 2023
Maria Ressa, a Nobel Peace Prize-winning journalist who faces prison time for standing up to authoritarianism in the Philippines, discusses how the spread of false news through social media threatens democracy and the importance of a free press.
GUEST Maria Ressa
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/firing-line/video/maria-ressa-l8fobp/
HOOVER: You say that you quote, “believe that Facebook represents one of the greatest threats to democracy around the world.”What is the pernicious effect that social media is having on democracies?
RESSA: It’s that lies are rewarded. It’s that simple, right. By design. What the technology platforms were able to do because they focused on technology, and they didn’t look at the potential societal harms, they didn’t have a set of standards and ethics. What they did is they kept you scrolling you know, they treated us like Pavlov’s dogs. Which tactic will keep you on site–
HOOVER: And what tactics keep people on sites?
RESSA: Lies laced with anger and hate. And it’s inevitably fear, anger, hate, us against them.
HOOVER: You describe the impact of social media in your Nobel Prize speech.
RESSA NOBEL SPEECH 12/10/21: an invisible atom bomb has exploded in our information ecosystem and the world must act as it did after Hiroshima.
HOOVER: What did you mean by that?
RESSA: It is as devastating as an atom bomb, what has happened in our information ecosystem. When news organizations lost our gatekeeping powers to technology, two groups abdicated responsibility for protecting the public sphere. The tech platforms themselves, they actually don’t distinguish between lies and facts. And then the other group that abdicated responsibility was our governments. Here’s what happened in 2016, right? We didn’t debate facts. But in 2016, if you were pro Duterte you moved further right. And if you’re anti Duterte you move further left. You can substitute Trump, Duterte, Orban, Bolsonaro, any strongman, digital populist with authoritarian tendencies. This is where we are. So it’s about behavior. It’s about algorithms that are replicated millions of times. That’s the impact on our society.
HOOVER: But I want to unpack it for the audience. So a 2018 MIT study determined that false news spreads on social media, quote, significantly further, faster, deeper and more broadly than the truth, sometimes by a factor of 100. Why is that? And how can facts compete?
RESSA: We can’t. You can’t go up against salacious lies. You can’t go up against hate. You can’t go up against this kind of manipulation that– it’s just like forming a mob in Indonesia. When a mob happens, it’s like throwing a match in kindling. And so that’s the dilemma. Lies will spread.
It’s so funny. The old world relied on name and shame, right?. We get better behavior from all of us when people know that there’s a light shining on you. Well, name and shame doesn’t work anymore in the age of exponential lies. This day of the modern authoritarian they lie. You lie. Step one, you lie all the time. Step two, you say it’s the journalist. You have to hit the journalist because you have to take down their credibility. Step three, everyone looks around and says, Who’s lying? What’s the truth? There is no truth. We don’t have a shared reality. So again, when we become the targets, we’re defenseless. We just have to keep taking the blows. And that’s what I’ve learned.
HOOVER: Okay. We’ve talked a lot about the problem, but I know you also have spent a lot of time thinking about solutions. What are some key areas of focus that can fix the problem?
RESSA: So you can see I’m very, very focused on the corruption of the information ecosystem, right. So when I look at solutions to that, we know in the long term it is going to have to be education. And medium term, it has to be legislation. Hello, America. Kick in here. That’s medium term. In the short term, we realized that you have to have a whole of society approach. And it wasn’t politics. We protected the facts. When we did that, we found that inspiration spreads as far, as fast, as anger, as hate. That’s an interesting discovery. And I think for Americans, as you walk into your presidential elections, you came out of midterms, right? How are you going to protect the facts? The facts aren’t partisan. I think every country needs to figure out what are the critical segments of society that protect the facts. Because everyone should have that same interest, regardless of which political party you’re from. But the reality is that we shouldn’t be here. There should be laws in place to protect us against this insidious manipulation, and we should all be demanding that.
Maria Ressa: ‘Last two minutes of Democracy'
1 year ago (that means we’re down to the last minute, in 2024)
CBC Radio, IDEAS
Duration53:59
Nobel laureate and renowned journalist Maria Ressa warns that we’re in the "last two minutes of democracy." She delivered the 2022 Beatty Lecture at McGill University and then joined IDEAS host Nahlah Ayed to discuss what can be done to change the course against disinformation.
https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/2106356803841
'Silence is consent': Why journalist Maria Ressa risks her life for truth in journalism
'You can't have democracy if you don't have integrity of facts,' the Nobel laureate said in her Beatty Lecture
She warns of the speed at which social media can be manipulated to propagate lies to the point where lies become 'truth'.
"If you don't have facts, you can't have truth. Without truth, you can't have trust. Without these three, we have no shared reality. We cannot attempt to solve any problem. You can't have democracy if you don't have integrity of facts.
"And the lies come laced with this bullet of hate or fear, or anger which comes out as 'us against them.' When that happens, what's your incentive to be good? What's your incentive to be generous? To trust? That's kind of trampled because the goodness of human nature grows out of our shared reality. When we reach some kind of shared ground, like we believe in the same things, we see each other's eyes. You don't see this on social media."
And so then, given that, you've often said that we need to be willing to sacrifice things for the truth. You've sacrificed a lot. What do you expect other people to sacrifice in pursuit of the truth?
I hope you are willing to sacrifice as much as we are, because if you don't, it's also your children.
Think about it like this. I became a journalist because information is power and information leads to justice, the rule of law. But then more than that, with climate change, with the health issues, with coronavirus, as it mutates, how are we ever going to find global solutions for global problems? How is the next generation going to survive our apathy?
This time matters. We're all going to look back in time and we're going to see that [at this] moment we should have done more and we have to do it now.
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/maria-ressa-democracy-nobel-prize-beatty-lecture-1.6645842
Note from Bee:
Americans need to get a life-saving slap of reality for the road directly ahead, woken up from normalized insanity & corruption.
In 2024, every aspect of our lives, our resources, our relationships, our reality are on the line to be overturned, burned, trampled, eradicated. A fascistic/trumpian/putin regime would mean the end for many of us.
At this point, trump, bannon, flynn, miller, putin, are making no bones about what they have planned, from rounding up millions to executions, to all-out civil war for white-right radicalism. Every day trump ramps up the terrorizing, threats, madness. Meanwhile, the poorly prepared establishment media continue to cave-in, pretending it’s all just a normal election cycle & not a gang war fomented by a global criminal conspiracy.
Ask NPR next time they report the “polls” saying trump is inevitable, why they are only reporting half of that story. Are you saying the destruction of democracy by a violent criminal fraud enterprise is an acceptable possibility?
Maria Ressa reports something I noticed pre-trump regime, the influence & algorithmic aggregation of extremist movements on youtube, a division of google. It’s ongoing, how the platform allows outrageous disinformation, monetizes it, then brings extremist groups together behind weaponized disinformation, much of it created outside the USA. Youtube is pernicious because it penetrates into so many corners, onto TVs, phones, workplaces, schools. And as she points out, there are more regulations on your toaster than on social media companies.
In 2024 humanity will either rise up & cooperatively fight back the far-right global corruption cults, or be pushed over the edge where no rescue is possible, no climate action, no human rights, no Indigenous recognition, just a constant punching of the face, being blamed for being punched, the fascist sub-reality of domination. We don’t have to look very far to see how that turns out.
https://vote.org
“The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.” ~ Plato
Alexis deTocqueville’s Democracy in America (Vol. II, Ch. 4):
Despotism which by its nature is suspicious, sees in the separation among men the surest guarantee of its continuance, and it usually makes every effort to keep them separate. No vice of the human heart is so acceptable to it as selfishness: a despot easily forgives his subjects for not loving him, provided they do not love one another. He does not ask them to assist him in governing the state; it is enough that they do not aspire to govern it themselves. He stigmatizes as turbulent and unruly spirits those who would combine their exertions to promote the prosperity of the community; and, perverting the natural meaning of words, he applauds as good citizens those who have no sympathy for any but themselves.
“We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Wherever men and women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must - at that moment - become the center of the universe.”
― Elie Wiesel (end the maga cult active measures kremlin war on usa)
who decides whether a deranged psychopath rapist mobster is a viable presidential candidate? everyone w/a microphone, every authority figure, every journalist, pollster, media executive. finally of course, the voters... but why is America being gaslit & hounded w/dogwhistles through this orwellian insanity? the establishment & cowardly bureaucrats are allowing it
you need to define at the outstart that this advanced research bulletin board tech is being poisoned & dominated by hyper-corrupt enemy agents, such as putin's warehouses of bots, psyops trolls & propaganda, now permeating all social media & metastasizing w/malware demon trump & co... musk "bought" the social commons for why?...
Senate Intelligence needs to pass a resolution declaring TFG defendant a "threat to national security" (incapable of passing secret access) therefore, along w/14th, not a viable candidate for Exec office
Want to see the collected evidence? It's online:
Trump-ocalyp$e Exposed! ♨ 💫 click here