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Maria Ressa, investigative journalist and media executive, 2021 Nobel Peace Prize and UNESCO/Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize Laureate, has been at the forefront of fighting for press freedom and media accountability, particularly in the face of online harassment and disinformation. In this interview she offers valuable perspectives on one of the most pressing challenges of our time: how to maintain trust in an increasingly complex and interconnected online world.

It is time to do this because what is happening globally is that freedom of speech is being used to stifle freedom of speech and UNESCO is uniquely placed to actually define that because its mandate is about protecting freedom of expression and safety for journalists, both are under extreme attack. First through principles, the business principles, something that we did not even have a name for in 2019, surveillance capitalism, the business principles of tech companies and then the second thing is, it’s like learning a new language. The world has been turned upside down, the principles have been turned upside down and there is no better place than UNESCO to go back. What are the principles, the values of human rights? What are the values of democracy that we need to protect?

That fear is what tech lobby firms have exploited. And as of a year ago, you’re talking about 70 million dollars in the United States. That fear has allowed the weaponization of technology, of social media, and the first people under attack are journalists and news organizations. It has eroded facts, these three sentences I say over and over again, I have said it in the Nobel lecture. Essentially, by design, these technology companies prioritise the spread of lies over facts. That is the fundamental failure. Imagine if you tell your child, “lie, I will reward you” and then you keep saying, “lie all the time, and I will keep rewarding you”. That is the fundamental principle in the design of these tech companies. Why? Because when you are scrolling, when it is a fight for your attention, what keeps you galvanized on the platform is fear, anger, hate.

Essentially, these platforms, using a principle called ‘A/B testing’ that is hacking our biology, manipulating our emotions to keep us scrolling. What started as an advertising and marketing tool, has become a weapon of dictators. And I know this first hand, I lived in 2016 through the weaponization of social media. You say a lie a million times it becomes a fact. And then a year later, from top-down, the weaponization of the law. I can still go to jail for decades but as of 2018 I faced almost a century in jail, just for doing my job.

Women journalists, women politicians, women researchers, who are trying to tell people how they are being insidiously manipulated are being attacked. And the goal is not to actually make you listen, or to engage you in dialogue, the goal is to pound you to silence. This is what the UNESCO based on a global survey of 901 journalists finds. In my case, they went over almost half a million social media attacks. In 2016 I was getting an average of 90 hate messages per hour, imagine if you were getting 90 hate messages per hour. But the goal of that was to pound me to silence. The study showed that 60% of the attacks were meant to tear down my credibility, to make everyone else believe that I am lying, so it's gaslighting. And the other 40%, meant to tear down my spirit. I go back to that fundamental principle of tech companies which is: reward the lies, because if you reward the lies the incentive structure of the entire world is upside down. Is it any wonder that if you don’t have integrity of facts, you cannot have integrity of elections.

And this goes with your first question, you know? Will this stifle freedom of speech? There were always gatekeepers, always. The difference with journalists is we had evolved a set of standards and ethics that were transparent to everyone, you could check it. The goal now of what we should be doing is that we should be taking data from these tech companies and making it easy for academics, for journalists, for the public, to actually see what the tech companies are doing. So we can see that they are incentivising the worst of human nature. It’s something I lived through. I think, in a strange way it was both a blessing and a curse to be attacked because I ran the largest news source in the Philippines so I understand what old power was like, I run our business, I know that these new advertising microtargeting is not like the old advertising, I know how the tech is a multiplier of both good and evil and then finally when you are the target of attacks, you are the only one that sees all the attacks, and that is by design. So, coming to this in an evidence-based way makes you understand that the old argument of freedom of speech?

The only way to fight hate speech is with more speech, in the age of exponential lies, loses meaning because of information warfare. And this is where geopolitical power comes in and exploits the weaknesses of what was once an advertising marketing tool because it insidiously manipulates us, it pounds open identity fracture lines. It essentially walks into democracies, comes in at the cellular level, and tears it apart. This is the world we live in today.

Not possible in today’s information ecosystem, until you stop the impunity. I have been at the receiving end of this, I know what it is like to get pounded with exponential lies. It is, it attacks you at the core of your insecurities and you must come out of it. The biggest problem we face now is, I think, gendered disinformation, again another UNESCO . Gendered disinformation is going to take women out of the public space because no one wants to have to deal with these types of attacks. This is impunity that must stop, same way that we have building codes, and we know this building is not going to fall down around us. As consumers, as citizens of a democracy, we demand better.