Maria Ressa: The information apocalypse is threatening democracy

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1:16Hello, I'm Marianna Spring, the BBC's social media investigations correspondent. And this is the interview from the BBC World Service. The best conversations coming out of the BBC. People shaping our world from all over the world.

1:56For this interview, I meet Maria Ressa, the Nobel Prize winner and author who I speak to from the Manila newsroom of Rappler, the media organisation that she founded in the Philippines. You're going to hear about online misogyny and the weaponisation of social media, as well as some lessons learnt in the Global South on standing up to authoritarian practices. Maria Ressa is a veteran journalist of 40 years and says that reporting in today's online world is like covering a war zone. The online abuse she and others have received, like doxing, where personal information is released online, derogatory hashtags or humiliating photoshopped images can contribute to real-world violence.

2:37That violence can have a chilling effect, curbing freedom of expression. It's a weapon deployed by politicians and authoritarian leaders and in Maria's view the social media companies allowing the spread of this abuse need to be held accountable. Maria also discusses the solutions and how she thinks democracy can be protected. But she does think time is running out. You know, in the Nobel lecture in 2021, I called it toxic sludge. When you only feed us poison, you kill us. I believe that people are basically good. Journalists for 40 years in war zones, in disasters, I've seen so much good. But this, that, you know, the public information ecosystem, the tech stack that's been built by big tech that mirrors the physical world virtually, this is rewarding the worst of humanity.

3:32Welcome to the interview from the BBC World Service with Maria Ressa. What really triggered it was our three-part series, the Propaganda War series is what we it. And then this influx, 90 hate messages per hour, and no one had really talked about it before. So at some point it was like, you know, is this real? Is this not real? And since you can't tell what's real and what's not, at the beginning, I started trying to respond. And then at a certain point, I stepped back and I realized, okay, I can't do this as a person, but, and here's the blessing and curse, right? The curse is you're getting it and you're feeling it.

4:13But the blessing is that you don't have to ask the tech platforms for anything because the data is coming at you. And that's what we did. We took the data, we analyzed it, we mapped the narratives, and then we mapped the distribution network. So it's like, I mean, I used to track the social networks of the terrorists in Southeast Asia, right? The Al-Qaeda linked terrorists. That was the framework I looked at it at. And then about a year later, they started trending hashtag arrest Maria Ressa. So and these online attacks also translated to real world attacks, we were doxed repeatedly. And then we had protests outside the office at a time when we didn't know whether the police would actually protect us.

4:57So we had to increase security. 2017, hashtag arrest Maria arrest trended. I was arrested two years later. So this stuff on social media is like fertilizer, changes the way people think and see. And I say this all the time, right? Because the design of social media platforms spreads lies faster than facts. If you seed it with fear, anger, and hate, and by 2017, the gendered part of this information was really clear because women were getting attacked at least 10 times more than men. And then after that happened, the weaponization of the law, the first arrest warrant. Well, I didn't get the warrant.

5:37They came into the office and handed it to me and kept me deliberately overnight and unable to post bail. And then within a little over a year, I had 11 arrest warrants. And it took six years to be able to fight those cases until the end of the Duterte administration. It's interesting when you talk about that distortion or influencing of the narrative around you and that hashtag in particular. What do you know about the accounts and profiles that were responsible for those kinds of social media posts at the time? We map them. I start calling them recidivist networks, like terrorists, right? My new terrorists were not terrorists in the real world, but they were literally the troll farms.

6:21And it's funny because I went to Facebook with this And I said, because we knew what the networks were. And they said, oh, no, but they're real people. Right. So at that point, by 2017, 2018, Facebook was looking at what they called CIB, coordinated, inauthentic behavior. But we were being attacked by real accounts. Right. We brought these networks to Facebook and Facebook said, well, we really can't do anything about it. And doing this in real time, not protecting people in real time and journalists in particular, this is something that, you know, was shocking to me and continues until today.

7:00What was fascinating in that time period was when I went to Facebook, they said, well, look, Maria, you can report it. I'm like, 98 messages per hour. There aren't enough hours in a 24 hour day for me to report it to you. And then I have absolutely no idea. And they said, but you're a public figure. Hello, the Constitution of the Philippines is patterned after the United States and there are protections there for us. So things that should never have happened actually accelerated the attacks in the real world, in the physical world. And this is what all the studies have shown since then. When it came to the type of abuse you're experiencing, you mentioned this concerted effort to attack women in particular.

7:47Why do you think that that was the case? What's your explanation for the gendered abuse? What we did is we splintered out our data and tech team so that we could actually chart what was happening in the virtual world. And in every single country that we've been in, the two fracture lines that are pounded open by information operations, at best information warfare at worst, the two fracture lines are gender and race, right? In the United States, for example, you can see that every single immigration debate connects to race in some point. And that the immigration and race debate, these are the most unhinged from reality.

8:33The Haitians did not eat their dogs, right? In terms of women, I think we've been set back decades because that sexism at best, misogyny at worst attacks. You've been the target of some of these attacks, right? This is not normal. And in the old days, the days before social media's design allowed this, society would have used a name and shame way to fight back. This does not work in the age of exponential lies. This does not work with the design of social media. And I would say that's the first rollout of AI at mass scale. The second, of course, is generative AI. And again, what are the main things that happen there?

9:17It's the kinds of pornography, the kinds of attacks on women that's in generative AI. So sexism and misogyny. And I know, again, know this firsthand in the Philippines when we had a president who attacked women. And on purpose, it's ironic because he would attack women, but who were the first to come up and fight back? At the very least, in our case, hold the line. It was also the women. When you talk about that gendered abuse, what are examples of that that you experienced? Oh, my gosh. So many death threats are normal, but it was more the more creative one. So I've been a reporter by early next year.

9:58It'll have been 40 years that I've been a reporter. Right. I opened the Manila Bureau for CNN here. I opened the Jakarta Bureau in 1995. So I've been on camera. I've been a reporter for a very long time. I'm not corrupt. There's no way that that could be thrown at me. So what were the attacks? It would be the way I sound, the way I look, that I'm brown. I have dry skin. So I have eczema. Who thought dry skin could be used to attack you? Right. Well, every single photo they would make look like, and here's the nickname that they coined for me, scrotum face, right? Because I have dry skin. But this is the normal trajectory when it comes to dehumanization, which is the goal, right?

10:43Because ultimately, this is free speech used to pound free speech to silence. If you're targeted by this kind of attack, the goal is to shut you up. So do not shut up. Online violence is real world violence. In order to make more profit, surveillance capitalism for profit makes the virtual world more dangerous for women, journalists, women politicians, young women. My first book is called Seeds of Terror. I charted the networks of terrorism, this kind of virulent ideology that created suicide bombers. This kind of isolation that separates a potential suicide bomber from their family, radicalizes them, goes down the funnel, right?

11:34What social media did is to release those same tactics to the public.

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13:04For this episode of The Interview, I'm speaking to Maria Ressa. I've spoken to her several times before, sharing our experiences of online abuse and misinformation. The hate Maria has faced, though has had extreme consequences. In spite of that, she is always full of energy, her face open and smiley. She doesn't flinch when she talks about death threats or arrest warrants and takes time to ask me how I'm dealing with the harassment that I face online. Maria spends her time between the US, where she is a professor at Columbia University, and the Philippines and works with organisations around the world sharing best practice on journalism.

13:40Often when experts talk about the threats of technology, you can be left feeling a bit helpless. But talking to Maria leaves a feeling of empowerment and hope. Okay, let's return to my conversation with Maria Ressa. You mentioned quite a few times that the design of the platforms themselves, and I've been spending quite a lot of time investigating the recommendation systems, the algorithms and how they favour engagement and the consequences of all of that. It feels like there's been a narrative shift from the companies themselves. So when I contact them and attempt to hold them accountable, the response will often be along the lines of, we are a mirror reflecting society back to you.

14:18What do you make of that argument from the companies? It's a lie. I mean, come on, call a spade a spade, right? Because again, at the beginning, I listened to that and I thought, well, maybe. But no, when you only feed the worst of humanity, You know, in the Nobel lecture in 2021, I called it toxic sludge. When you only feed us poison, you kill us. Right. I believe that people are basically good. And again, journalists for 40 years in war zones, in disasters, I've seen so much good. But this, that, you know, the public information ecosystem, the tech stack that's been built by big tech that mirrors the physical world virtually, this is rewarding the worst of humanity.

15:08And when you do that, I mean, you can see as of March this year, VDEM in Sweden said that 73 % of the world is now under authoritarian rule. It is literally changing us when they talk about young men being radicalized or staying in their homes while becoming more conservative, while young women are more progressive. These are all offshoots of the design of the technology that connects us. I mean, that is the design sparked by the design of these big tech companies that are making hundreds of billions of dollars commodifying our humanity. How do you fix that, Maria? What's the solution? Journalists have to stand up and realize that when it is a battle for facts, journalism is activism.

15:59It's much harder. You need to have more courage because we become far more vulnerable. You've got to call a spade a spade. You look at the level of corruption and then you look at the way citizens react. How are they reacting? Is that in the form of protests? In the old days of CNN, we only covered a protest if it was humongous or violent. Those things have to change. So journalism needs to shift. The standards and ethics need to stay the same. We need to be more transparent. If the tech companies are not going to be transparent, we force the transparency. The second is the technology itself. There is no public interest tech stack.

16:40Big tech is corrupting the water supply. Think about it like that, right? So what did we do? In Rappler, a few years ago, we began to build a public interest tech stack. We built on top of the Matrix Protocol, which is end-to-end encrypted. It's open source and it's decentralized. And we built a login to our news group. We rolled it out in time for our midterm elections. And now we have the Philippine Press Institute, which has 65 community news organizations, Real people talking to real people who are not being manipulated by algorithms for profit. When we built this, I thought the biggest danger could be that people are bored.

17:22But you know what? The public tech stack is so corrupted. The inshittification, and that's from Cory Doctorow, the inshittification of the internet is full steam ahead, right? You don't want to swim in crap. So you go to the matrix protocol and we're good. So that's the second. What is a public interest tech stack look like? And that's a question for democratic governments, because it wasn't only big tech that abdicated responsibility. It was also democratic governments that didn't take care of our safety. And the last one is communities, the communities you build. Those communities are fragmented, polarized, and isolated if you stay here.

18:09But if you go on the matrix protocol, then you can have that shared reality. You know, the three sentences I've said over and over since 2016, and I said it first in Silicon Valley. Without facts, you can't have truth. Without truth, you can't have trust. Without these three, we don't have a shared reality. You can't begin to solve existential problems like climate change, let alone sexism, misogyny, right? Like you can't solve these problems. If you're a journalist, you're handcuffed. You can't have journalism. You can't have democracy. So, you know, I appeal to UK, to the Brits, to the French, to the German.

18:48The patterns and trends are clear. What actions are you going to take? And that's the question I asked in my book, How to Stand Up to a Dictator, right? The question is simple. What are you willing to sacrifice for the truth? Because that's the battle today. You know, it's an information Armageddon because I'm optimistic. I was choosing between information Armageddon or information apocalypse. The apocalypse, you've lost the battle. Both sound incredibly joyous. But think about it, right? Because this is the time. I'd say we have about a year. For news organizations, small and medium ones, six to eight months.

19:32If all the patterns and trends, because the three ways that you get traffic to a news site, which is direct, social and search. Google is now using generative AI, right? You don't get traffic. We've lost that traffic. Social media, Facebook, the largest distributor of news, has choked traffic to news sites. So it's time for us to create radical collaboration. Those are the three things, journalism, technology, and community. What do you think about the impact of AI and the growth of generative AI on all of this? It's made it worse because we're making the exact same mistakes that we made with social media.

20:09There are no guardrails. I talk about it as impunity, right? Like what the impunity in the physical world with all the wars that have started, whether it's Putin or Netanyahu, you bring it to the impunity of the CEOs in the virtual world where, you know, copyright, does that exist? Oh, no. But it does. Running a news organization is expensive with all the guardrails in place because we're accountable. It's time to make tech accountable. With generative AI, now with Sora 2, you can't tell the difference. How can people know what's real and what isn't? Because if citizens in a democracy cannot tell the difference, civic engagement dies.

20:55There is no way to act or to hold your government accountable. Democracy cannot exist. In terms of the lessons learned, you know, your experience in the Philippines and also, you know, lots of the global south, which has been subjected to these kinds of tactics in different ways for different periods of time. What can we learn here in the UK or in other places from the global south? So much. I'll say two things. And again, this is in how to stand up to a dictator. The Philippines has moved from hell to purgatory. And I feel like many Western democracies have just gone down to hell and are on their way to hell.

21:34So look at our experience, right? There are several things that were clear for us. Number one was embrace your fear. You know, whatever it is that you're most afraid of, you have to neutralize it. And the way we did it in Rappler is we workflowed it and then we drilled it going backwards. And then once you neutralize your fear, you can hold the line. You have to live your values when it matters, because if you don't, you will lose them. The way to reclaim your rights is not to wait until you're very weak, until your rights have been stripped. You defend them now. Right. And that is the advice I would give to my American friends, my friends in Western democracies, that you are strongest in defending your democracy at the beginning.

22:26I wish I had known that even. That's one. I think the other part is that when we were under such intense attack online, Rappler, it came hand in hand with the pandemic, the attack on media in the Philippines by Duterte. And it also came with a brutal drug war where bodies were dumped on the sidewalk. And that created fear. So I understand fear is real. But the way you fight that is you move out of the virtual world, you create your communities of action, and you will be surprised by the kindness of strangers. And then the last one I would say, there is no silver bullet for all of this. All we did was we lived our values every day.

23:11You walk each step every day to your North Star. And I can tell you that, you know, there are days when I thought, oh, my gosh, maybe I'll get arrested tomorrow. I still think that today sometimes, you know, maybe I'll get arrested tomorrow, but it doesn't matter. Today, I will live a life of no regrets. I will live my values. And, you know, I will say this, the man who tried to close Rappler down, the man who tried to jail me for the rest of my life. He was arrested in March this year, and he's now in detention at The Hague facing charges of crimes against humanity. I believe people are basically good.

23:49I believe that people who may be afraid will wake up and will defend it. Because here's the thing at stake for all of us around the world. If we do not act now, the world will fundamentally change. And is that your hope that people will be able to do that? Or do you think that the combination of the algorithms and AI mean that we're fighting a bit of a losing battle? I will say that I was much more optimistic five years ago, four years ago, right? Over time, what I've seen is that more and more people are beginning to understand the problem, but not enough are acting yet. But here's the exciting part of this.

24:34And I say this to young journalists, this is a time of creative destruction. And we have to act like the world we knew has been destroyed. You're standing on the rubble of the world that was. It looks deceptively familiar, right? The old rules don't work anymore. You only have to get online to know that. So what's the option? You can create better. And that's part of the reason. Look, Rappler is a small company. We're about 120 people. And yet we built public interest tech. That's what we need to do. And frankly, the EU has the Digital Services Act, the Digital Markets Act. These laws still are not enough because as soon as they were rolled out, generative AI jumped ahead and generative AI breaks reality.

25:23Again, how do governments, how can governments, I guess that's a call to action for you, especially if you're in government. So much is on your shoulders, man, move. If we were speaking right now to some of the people who would disagree with you, Maria, let's take Elon Musk or one of the social media bosses who would say this is about freedom of expression. This is about censorship. This is about how people's voices have been shut down. Even some politicians who would make those same arguments and that would be their argument for not regulating the social media companies. What would you say to them?

25:56I think we can recognize gaslighting. I think we can pull out all of the research reports that are there. And frankly, if you're a CEO of one of these companies, come on, how much money is enough money? We've seen this. A friend of mine, Doug Rushkoff, wrote about the tech fantasies of the billionaires. This was a while ago. Enlightened self-interest. This is when ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, was trying to come together. It was the idea of enlightened self-interest. Some of these tech billionaires are building, want to go to the Mars or the moon or to build bunkers down south.

26:39And they've given up on the sustainable development goals. We cannot give up on the world. You can't, unless you're completely heartless and amoral. So I hope you're not. Take that idea of enlightened self-interest and do what's right. we all know what that is.