OP-ED: When journalists are under attack, democracy is under attack By Maria Ressa
This is an edited version of Maria Ressa’s keynote address at the Global Investigative Journalism Conference for 2019 in Hamburg, Germany, at the weekend.
I’ll talk about three points: The battle for truth; the role of American social media platforms; and what we can do about it. Without facts, we don’t have truth. Without truth, there is no trust. Without all three, you can’t have democracy. This is why democracy is broken around the world. When I was first arrested early in 2019, the officer said, “ma’am, trabaho lang po”. Then he lowered his voice to almost a whisper as he read me my Miranda rights. He was clearly uncomfortable, and I almost felt sorry for him. Except he was arresting me – the last act in a chain of events meant to intimidate and harass me because I’m a journalist.
We are the canary in the coal mine because globally Filipinos spend the most time online and on social media . But we are also democracy’s dystopian future. So … this nightmare began for me more than three years ago. Rappler wrote the first pieces about it globally in 2016. I wrote two of the three parts of our first series and was rewarded with an average of 90 hate messages per hour.
These social media platforms are behavioral modification systems we voluntarily enter. We are Pavlov’s dogs – and let me quote Wylie again as well as Blackberry co-founder Jim Balsillie: they said that data at this micropersonal level isthe new oil. It is plutonium. And we need to treat it like plutonium – with all the care that requires. Remember, I said, an atom bomb has exploded – and we all don’t know about it. Until we accept that, we can’t solve the problem.
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