Category: Hong Kong On Air

At the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival in Bali, Nobel laureate Maria Ressa warns about the pernicious impact of “manipulated social media” on public discourse and civil society. “The wisdom of the crowd becomes a mob,” the co-founder, CEO and editor in chief of Philippine news platform Rappler.com says. Ressa questions whether good journalism still matters: “In a cacophony, in a Tower of Babel, does it really tip the scale?”

Part of a festival panel on journalism, ethics and freedom of speech, Ressa places the blame on social media. “How did we get some polarized? The ‘family and friends’ algorithm.” The 2021 Nobel Peace Prize recipient says, “Family and friends don’t necessarily have the facts.”

During the term of Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte that ended in June 2022, Rappler was repeatedly sued and Ressa harassed and threatened, leading her to wear a bulletproof vest and increase corporate and personal security.

“We had Duterte, who collapsed our institutions in six months,” Ressa says. “But he had a six year term limit. The biggest dictator is Mark Zuckerberg.”

“People go on and on about Rupert Murdoch. I say look at the new moguls,” London Times columnist and historian Sathnam Sanghera says.

“It’s completely ruined the internet,” investigative reporter at Tortoise Paul Caruna Galizia, who briefly worked at Facebook in 2011, says. “Now people can’t go on the internet or Facebook and see what they want to see. The narrowing of the internet is wildly toxic.”

“What tech has done is turn politics into a football game,” Sanghera says. With a right wing press, “All the money is going into one side of the equation.”

Ressa, long time CNN correspondent and former head of the Philippines’ largest news network ABS-CBN, calls it “the shitification of the internet.” She says, “Big tech takes our weakest moment and sells it for profit.”

To “get us out of the sewer,” Ressa proposes a three point plan: stop surveillance for profit to starve the algorithm beast; stop “tearing our shared reality apart” though personalization of news feeds that reinforces even the most misguided ideas; and journalism as an antidote to tyranny. “We need the novelist, we need the artist, but first we need the facts.”

“Journalists are no longer the gatekeepers of information,” broadcast journalist Drew Ambrose, who moderated the panel, says. “We can’t even agree on what’s true.” Ambose’s current Al Jazeera series Flattening the Curve looks at the role of misinformation and disinformation int the response to Covid-19 and what it means for the next crisis.

“There is room for optimism,” Galizia, following in the footsteps of his assassinated mother Daphne
Caruna Galizia, says. “I’ve never understood why the platforms cannot be responsible for what’s on their platforms.” As for the argument that they’re too big to police themselves, he says, “No one asked them to become that big.”

“Tech encourages the worst of our humanity,” Ressa, who cooperated with Faebook when Rappler rolled out, says. “Remember the goodness is there. It’s being buried by the thirst for profit.”

To help the internet recapture its goodness, Ressa and colleagues have developed an iterative chat app using the open source Matrix Protocol. It’s running in the Philippines and will be rolled out to other markets including Brazil, South Africa and Indonesia. “An atomic bomb exploded and destroyed our information system,” Ressa says, and it’s up to all of us to rebuild it.

Former US diplomat and broadcast news producer Muhammad Cohen is Asia editor at large for iGaming Business, a longtime contributor to Forbes, columnist for Asia Times and author of Hong Kong On Air, a novel set in his adopted hometown during the 1997 handover about TV news, love, betrayal, high finance, and cheap lingerie. See his biography, online archive and more at www.muhammadcohen.com; follow him on Facebook, ex-Twitter @MuhammadCohen and LinkedIn.