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Ressa urges vigilance, rebuilding of trust despite social media
Being committed as she is to pushing back against political harassment and arrest in her homeland of the Philippines, it was something of a feat for Maria Ressa to come to Greencastle.
Ressa has posted bail at least 10 times, and was convicted in 2020 for libel under the Philippines’ Cybercrime Prevention Act. Her advocacy has come from calling out the oppressive regimes of Rodrigo Duterte and “Bongbong” Marcos.
Ressa did not know until last week whether she could travel from the Philippines for her Ubben Lecture at DePauw University. Though given the right to do so, she was also given a gag order. She talked about the facts nonetheless.
“One of the most wonderful things today is walking around your campus, walking around the neighborhood — no guards — and feeling safe, feeling peaceful,” Ressa began her remarks Wednesday evening.
Ressa’s career as an investigative journalist spans more than three decades, during which she has served as the bureau chief in Manila and Jakarta, Indonesia, for CNN’s Asian news network. She has also pursued global terrorism links spanning from Southeast Asia.
In 2012, Ressa co-founded the Rappler news site, which has been targeted for coverage of fake news campaigns and corruption in the Philippines. She, along with Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov, was named a co-recipient of the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts.
She might say that she is lucky facing life imprisonment and being nicknamed “Scrotumface” online. Other fellow journalists have been killed.
Energetic and positively defiant, Ressa centered her lecture around the concept of information operations. She separated dis-information from mis-information, as the former occurs when lies or half-truths are weaponized and consistently promoted.
She advocated a journalistic principle being that truth cannot be understood without facts. Without truth, there can be no trust. As such, she related, there cannot be a shared reality, much less a functional democracy.
“This is what we’re living in today,” Ressa said, in that the hold and instantaneousness of social media allows lies and half-truths to spread decidedly faster than facts.
The power behind this, she provided, is “big data” hitting personal information and influencing how people think and act. Emotions — and thinking fast, as opposed to slowly — are then weaponized.
“Machine learning comes in and builds a model of you that knows you better than you know yourself,” Ressa said in terms of clones being built and purposefully targeted. “That is the behavior modification that happens.”
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine being a conventional conflict, the overarching adversity for Ressa is rampant information warfare on social media. It is a battle for minds, emotions and values that determines reality.
Polarization being built into social media, Ressa posited, rewards and incentivizes fear, anger, hate and division, both political and social-wise. The kicker, she added, is that this negativity can become addictive.
“We are encouraging the worst of human nature,” Ressa said. “What social media has done is gagged the angel, flicked it off your shoulder and given the devil a megaphone directly into your mind and heart.”
With conviction and no hint of irony, Ressa surmised that society is in “the last two minutes” in a game of preserving democracy. This is because there is little integrity being valued now in facts. This can lead to having no integrity in one exercising their civic duty.
Ressa advocated that courage is needed from person to person, even as individuals will behave differently in groups. Targeting such as which she has come up against, she said, leads to dehumanization and violence in general.
“Online violence is real-world violence,” Ressa said. “The problem with our societies and our democracies today is that impunity is allowed to reign online.”
Ressa yearned that it is up to people to rebuild trust not merely in sharing information, but in society. This, she provided, lies in continuing to learn, speaking up, drawing the line between good and bad and having faith.
“In order to be the good, you have to believe in the goodness of human nature,” Ressa concluded. “It is what social media has done its best to stamp out of us, and it is here in your community.”