Maria Ressa: Defending Truth

Learn English with Maria Ressa. In this powerful Nobel Prize lecture, delivered in Oslo, Norway, Maria Ressa, a renowned journalist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, speaks about the challenges faced by journalists in the digital age. She highlights the dangers of disinformation, the role of technology in spreading falsehoods, and the sacrifices necessary to uphold the truth. This speech is a must-watch for those passionate about press freedom and the fight for democracy.

In her powerful Nobel Prize lecture, Maria Ressa addressed the existential threats facing journalism in today’s digital age. As a fearless advocate for press freedom, Ressa painted a stark picture of the dangers journalists face worldwide, from state persecution to the insidious spread of disinformation. Delivered in Oslo, Norway, on December 10, 2021, her speech serves as both a rallying cry and a roadmap for defending democracy against the rising tide of authoritarianism and the weaponization of social media.

Challenges in the Information Ecosystem

During her lecture, Maria Ressa delved into the complexities of the modern information ecosystem, outlining the severe consequences of disinformation and unchecked power. She cited her personal experiences and the sacrifices made by journalists around the globe to highlight three critical issues:

1. Disinformation and Surveillance: Ressa emphasized how disinformation spreads rapidly on social media platforms, driven by algorithms that prioritize sensationalism over truth. This not only erodes public trust but also endangers the lives of those who seek to expose the truth.
2. Authoritarianism and Impunity: She spoke about the growing trend of authoritarian governments using technology to suppress dissent, illustrating how impunity for those in power is becoming the norm rather than the exception.
3. Journalistic Sacrifice: Ressa paid tribute to journalists who have been persecuted, imprisoned, or killed for their work, reminding the world that the fight for truth often comes at a great personal cost.

Ressa’s insights underscore the urgent need for global action to protect press freedom and ensure the survival of independent journalism.

Key Lessons and Themes

Maria Ressa’s speech brought forward several key lessons and themes that are crucial not only for journalists but for anyone who values democracy and truth:

1. The Importance of Facts: Ressa stressed that without facts, there can be no truth, and without truth, trust breaks down. She argued that the erosion of trust in journalism leads to the disintegration of democratic societies.
2. The Role of Technology: While technology has the power to connect and inform, Ressa highlighted its darker side, where it is used to spread lies, manipulate public opinion, and bolster authoritarian regimes.
3. Defending Democracy: The lecture emphasized that defending democracy requires more than just holding the line—it demands proactive measures to restore and protect the integrity of information ecosystems.
4. Global Solidarity: Ressa called for global solidarity in the fight against disinformation and the defense of press freedom. She underscored the need for new international frameworks to address the challenges posed by the digital age.

Reflecting on her words, it becomes clear that the battle for truth and democracy is one that requires collective action and unwavering courage. Maria Ressa’s speech is a poignant reminder that in the face of adversity, it is essential to stand firm, uphold the truth, and fight for a better, more just world.

Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, distinguished members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Your Excellencies, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen, I stand before you as a representative of every journalist around the world who is forced to sacrifice so much to hold the line… to stay true to our values and mission, to bring you the truth and hold power to account.

I remember the brutal dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi and the assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia in Malta. My friend Luz Meli-Reyes in Venezuela, Roman Protasevich in Belarus, whose plane was literally hijacked so he could be arrested. Jimmy Lai languishing in a Hong Kong prison. Sunny Hsueh, who, after getting out of more than seven years in jail, started another news group and now is forced to flee Myanmar. And in my own country, 23-year-old Frenchie May Kumpio, still in prison after nearly two years, and just 36 hours ago, the news that my former colleague, Jess Malabanan, was killed with a bullet to his head.

There are so many to thank for keeping us safer and working. The Hold the Line coalition of more than 80 global groups defending press freedom and the human rights groups that help us shine the light. There are costs for you as well. At least 63 lawyers—more lawyers have been killed than journalists in the Philippines. At least 63, compared to the 22 journalists murdered after President Rodrigo Duterte took office in 2016. Since then, Karapatan, a member of our Courage on Human Rights coalition, has had 16 people killed, and Senator Leila de Lima, because she demanded accountability, is serving her fifth year in jail. Or ABS-CBN, our largest broadcaster, a newsroom that I once led, which last year lost its franchise to operate.

I helped create a startup, Rappler, turning 10 years old in January. We’re getting old… Our attempt to put together two sides of the same coin that shows everything wrong with our world today, the absence of law and democratic vision for the 21st century. That coin represents our information ecosystem, which determines everything else about our world. Journalists—that’s one side, the old gatekeepers. The other is technology, with its godlike power, the new gatekeepers. It has allowed the virus of lies to infect each of us, pitting us against each other, bringing out our fears, anger, hate, and setting the stage for the rise of authoritarians and dictators around the world.

Our greatest need today is to transform that hate and violence… The toxic sludge that’s coursing through our information ecosystem, prioritized by American internet companies that make more money by spreading that hate and triggering the worst in us. Okay, well, that just means we have to work harder. You know, in order to be the good, we have to believe there is good in the world. An old t-shirt from Rappler from 2014. I’ve been a journalist for more than 35 years. I’ve worked in conflict zones and war zones in Asia, reported on hundreds of disasters. And while I’ve seen so much bad, I’ve also documented so much good when people who have nothing offer you what they have. Part of how we at Rappler have survived the last five years of government attacks is because of the kindness of strangers. And the reason they help, despite the danger, is because they want to, with little expectation of anything in return. This is the best of who we are, the part of our humanity that makes miracles happen. This is what we lose in a world of fear and violence.

You’ve heard that the last time a working journalist was given this award was in 1936, awarded in 1935. He was supposed to come and get it in 1936. Karl von Ossietzky never made it to Oslo because he languished in a Nazi concentration camp. So we’re here… Hopefully a little bit ahead, we are both here. By giving this to journalists today, thank you, the Nobel Committee is signaling a similar historical moment, another existential point for democracy. Dmitry and I are lucky because we can speak to you now. Yay for court approvals. But there are so many more journalists persecuted in the shadows with neither exposure nor support, and governments are doubling down with impunity. The accelerant is technology when creative destruction takes on new meaning. You’ve heard from David—we are standing on the rubble of the world that was. And we must have the foresight and courage to imagine what might happen if we don’t act now. And instead, please… create the world as it should be, more compassionate, more equal, more sustainable.

To do that, please ask yourself the same question we at Rappler had to confront five years ago: What are you willing to sacrifice for the truth? I’ll tell you how I lived my way into the answer in three points. First, my context and how these attacks shaped me. Second, the problem we all face, and finally, finding the solution… because we must.

In less than two years, the Philippine government filed 10 arrest warrants against me. I’ve had to post bail 10 times just to do my job. Last year, I and a former colleague were convicted of cyber libel for a story we published eight years earlier at a time the law we allegedly violated didn’t even exist. All told, the charges I face could send me to jail for about 100 years. But the more I was attacked for my journalism, the more resolute I became. I had firsthand evidence of abuse of power. What was meant to intimidate me and Rappler only strengthened us. At the core of journalism is a code of honor, and mine is layered on different worlds… from how I grew up, the golden rule, what’s right and wrong, from college and the honor code I learned there, and my time as a reporter, and the code of standards and ethics I learned and helped write. Add to that the Filipino idea of utang na loob—literally, the debt from within—and at its best, it’s a system of paying it forward. Truth and ethical honor intersected like an arrow into this moment where hate, lies, and divisiveness thrive.

As only the 18th woman to receive this prize, I need to tell you how gender disinformation is a new threat and is taking a significant toll on the mental health and physical safety of women, girls, trans, and LGBTQ people all around the world. Women journalists are at the epicenter of risk. This pandemic of misogyny and hatred needs to be tackled now. Even there, though, we can find strength. After all, you don’t really know who you are until you’re forced to fight for it.

Now, let me pull out so we’re clear about the problem we all face and how we got here. The attacks against us in Rappler began five years ago when we demanded an end to impunity on two fronts: Rodrigo Duterte’s drug war and Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook. Today, it has only gotten worse, and Silicon Valley since came home to roost in the United States on January 6th with mob violence on Capitol Hill. What happens on social media doesn’t stay on social media. Online violence is real-world violence. Social media is a deadly game for power and money. What Shoshana Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism, extracting our private lives for outsized corporate gain. Our personal experiences sucked into a database organized by AI, then sold to the highest bidder. Highly profitable micro-targeting operations are engineered to structurally undermine human will. I’ve repeatedly called it a behavior modification system in which we are all Pavlov’s dogs, experimented on in real-time with disastrous consequences in countries like mine, Myanmar, India, Sri Lanka, and so many more.

These destructive corporations have siphoned money away from news organizations, and now they pose a foundational threat to markets and elections. Facebook is the world’s largest distributor of news, and yet studies have shown that lies laced with anger and hate spread faster and further than facts. These American companies controlling our global information ecosystem are biased against facts, biased against journalists. They are, by design, dividing us and radicalizing us. I’ve said this repeatedly over the last five years. Without facts, you can’t have truth. Without truth, you can’t have trust. Without trust, we have no shared reality, no democracy, and it becomes impossible to deal with the existential problems of our times. Climate, coronavirus, now the battle for truth.

When I was first arrested in 2019, the officer said, “Ma’am, I’m only doing my job.” Then he lowered his voice to almost a whisper as he read my Miranda rights. He was really uncomfortable, and I almost felt sorry for him, except he was arresting me because I’m a journalist. This officer was a tool of power and an example of how a good man can turn evil, and how great atrocities happen. Hannah Arendt wrote about the banality of evil when describing men who carried out the orders of Hitler, how career-oriented bureaucrats can act without conscience because they justify what they’re doing by saying they’re only following orders. This is how a nation and the world lose their soul. You have to know what values you’re fighting for. You have to draw the lines early, but if you haven’t done so, please do it now, where on this side you’re good, and on this side you’re evil.

Some governments may be lost causes, and if you’re working in tech, I’m talking to you. How can you have election integrity if you don’t have integrity of facts? That’s the problem facing countries with elections next year, among them Brazil, Hungary, France, the United States, and my Philippines, where we are at a do-or-die moment with presidential elections on May 9th. Thirty-five years after the People Power Revolution ousted Ferdinand Marcos and forced his family into exile, his son, Ferdinand Marcos Jr., is the front-runner for president, and he has built an extensive disinformation network on social media, which Rappler exposed in 2019. It’s literally changing history in front of our eyes. To show how disinformation is both a local and global problem, take the Chinese information operations taken down by Facebook in September 2020, a year ago. It was creating fake accounts using AI-generated photos for the U.S. elections, polishing the image of the Marcoses in the Philippines, campaigning for the daughter of President Duterte, and attacking me and Rappler—Chinese information operations.

So what are we going to do? An invisible atom bomb has exploded in our information ecosystem, and the world must act, as it did after Hiroshima. Like that time, we need to create new institutions, like the United Nations, and new codes stating our values, like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to prevent humanity from doing its worst. It’s an arms race in our information ecosystem. To stop that requires a multilateral approach that all of us must be part of. It begins by restoring facts. We need information ecosystems that live and die by facts. We do this by shifting social priorities to rebuild journalism for the 21st century, while regulating and outlawing the surveillance economics that profit from hate and lies.

We need to help independent journalism survive, first by giving greater protection to journalists and standing up against states that target journalists. Then we need to address the advertising model of journalism. This is part of the reason that I agreed to co-chair the International Fund for Public Interest Media, which is trying to raise money from overseas development assistance funds. Right now, while journalists are under attack on every front, only 0.3% of ODA funds are spent on journalism. If we nudge that to just 1%, we can raise a billion dollars a year for news organizations. That will be crucial for the Global South. Journalists must embrace technology. That’s why, with the help of Google News Initiative, Rappler rolled out a new platform two weeks ago designed to build communities of action. It won’t be as viral as what the tech platforms built, but the North Star is not profit alone. It is facts, truth, and trust.

Now for legislation. Thanks to the EU for taking leadership with its Democracy Action Plan. For the U.S., reform or revoke Section 230, the law that treats social media platforms like utilities. It’s not a comprehensive solution, but it gets the ball rolling because these platforms put their thumbs on the scale of distribution. So while the public debate is here, down here on content moderation downstream, the real sleight of hand happens further upstream, where algorithms of amplification, algorithms of distribution, have been programmed by humans with coded bias. Their editorial agenda is profit-driven, carried out by machines at scale. The impact is global. With cheap armies on social media rolling back democracy, tearing it down in 81 countries around the world. That impunity must stop. Democracy has become a woman-to-woman, man-to-man defense of our values. We’re at a sliding-door moment where we can continue down the path we’re on and descend further into fascism. Or we can choose to fight for a better world.

To do that, please ask yourself: What are you willing to sacrifice for the truth? I didn’t know if I was going to be here today. Every day I live with the real threat of spending the rest of my life in jail because I’m a journalist. When I go home, I have no idea what the future holds, but it’s worth the risk. The destruction has already happened. Now it’s time to build, to create the world we want. So please, with me, just close your eyes for just a moment and imagine the world as it should be… A world of peace, trust, and empathy. Bringing out the best that we can be. Open your eyes. Now go. We have to make it happen. Please, let’s hold the line together.

Thank you.