Bullies only respond to strength. Complicity won’t due. When confronting an authoritarian, best to “hold the line.”
That’s from the 2022 book “How to Stand Up to a Dictator: The Fight for Our Future,” written by Maria Ressa, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning journalist-entrepreneur behind Rappler — a respected, digital-first news site in the Philippines. Ressa was jailed and harrassed for her unwavering coverage of Filipino corruption.
The book is memoir and field guide, with a telling mirror for American audiences: the rise and fall of her enthusiasm for social media, and her battles with elected officials disdainful of free press and democratic norms. She’s charming and energetic. I spoke at a recent journalism funders conference where she was the headliner, and she gushed on-stage, effusing advice and perspective and vision. It’s easy to believe in her, and she tells a story of optimism, provided we work for it.
Of building open discourse-use and democratic values in the Philippines, in 2016, she thought Facebook was the solution; by 2018, she thought of them as indifferent and by 2020, she thought that “Facebook was the bad guy.” For all her reporting and operating a fearless news organization, she was jailed.
Why return to the Philippines to be jailed, even though she has American citizenship and family there? “There is no choice,” she wrote — couldn’t turn on Rappler and her employees and community and it’s where she wants to be. This will remind of Navalny, as she writes: “Over time, you get used to fear”
So, how do you stand up to a dictator: “by embracing values, defined early.. you have to create a team, strengthen your area of influence” — and know your lines and stand firm by them.
Below I have notes for my future reference.
My notes:
- She founded Rappler in 2012 as a Facebook believer; By 2016 saw Facebook as part of the problem
- “The very platforms that deliver the news we need are biased against facts”
- Her mantra: “Without facts you can’t have truth. Without truth, you can’t have trust. Without all three we have no shared reality.”
- Research found most of Donald Trump’s Facebook likes came from abroad, and 1 in 27 were from Philippines — content and spam farms
- The 1983 assassination of Benigno Aquino Jr., and later peaceful overthrow sparked a wave of successive movements in South Korea, Myanmar, China and eastern Soviet Union (Vaclav Havel credited Philippines)
- The Brechtian framework, also known as Epic Theatre is a theatrical approach developed by Bertolt Brecht that prioritizes critical thinking and social commentary over emotional engagement. It aims to make audiences aware they are watching a performance, rather than being immersed in a realistic illusion, through techniques like the Verfremdungseffekt (distancing effect)
- Her “envelopmental journalism” which she learned about by using her Fulbright to work with the new guard replacing the post-People Power TV news
- “In the 1980s, another agreed-upon fact, a foundation of our shared reality, was that without good journalism, without the sound production of facts and information, there would be no democracy. Journalism was a calling.”
- Rene Santiago cameraman: she drove Into rebel-held territory to score an interview the first international press for CNN
- On coming out as gay: “I felt the censure in their eyes”
- Ted turner fined anyone at CNN who used the word “foreign,” because he wanted a global perspective
- Of faster turnaround times on stories: “Somehow technology both saved us time and stole it from us.”
- Her May 1988 coverage of Indonesian riots after Suharto’s departure — witnessed boys playing soccer with an old man’s head
- Her journalism days in 20s and 30s was a journalism golden age
- After reporting on a flash flood in Philippines in 1991, she got out of her car driving through the aftermath and stepped on a human hand
- In her 2000 speech at the rotary club of Manila, she articulated the difference between the mythical objective journalist a process with “the goal of objectivity”
- For journalism even in early 2000s: “Aside from legal accountability, there was a sense of moral responsibility- to help create a better future”
- She argues even under “some corporate media firms, that information was only slightly affected by vested interests. Now under the technology companies, the information you get is directly determined by the corporation’s drive for profit. This is the transition we are living through.”
- Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler 2007 three degrees of influence rule: our feelings radiate out (if you feel lonely, 54% chance your friend does, 25% that a friend’s friend does and 15% that friend’s friend’s friend)
- “The thread became more dispersed and harder to track down” was line she used to describe the fracturing of al Qaeda post 9/11 and 20 years later how she described social media disinformation
- “The news shapes the public as much as the public shapes the news,” she says of of her ABS CBN station being involved in nation building
- Filipino “untang na loob “ the debt from within
- “If you try to change a culture, it will fight back,” she writes of layoffs and news organizations culture change with new ethics standards.
- “Hold the line” started as her advice after the original November 29 2007 arrests of Filipino journalists
- Negotiation of her reporter hostage taken
- 2010 voter and gotv drive inspired by the book Tipping Point and crowdsourcing ideas
- The Rappler’s “manangs” (older sisters) was the name for the founders
- Launched Rappler as Facebook forward (if Facebook search had worked better “perhaps we would never have launched our own website”) including live stream trainings in 2011 “social media for social change”
- “I cringe now when I remember that presentation” — because what helps them helped bad actors too
- She thought of it like an iceberg: the story (written and video) was tip with metrics and Increasingly emotion that rippled out from social media “four times more powerful than physical networks” — they wanted to change behavior and make Philippines rid of corruption
Julie Posetti Oxford journalism innovation project: women three times as many online attacks as male journalists (An attack on one is an attack on all)
- Mood meter and their annual report “the year in moods”
- Disinformation networks would “exploit the greed of Facebook and YouTube”
- Social media phone verified accounts (PVA)
- Why was Philippines a spam bot leader? Three reasons: sophisticated tools; cheap educated workforce and lucrative online fraud
- AlDub phenomena of fan users for the show
- Facebook CIB: coordinated inauthentic behavior
- Rappler spoke to Filipino teens doing the “astroturfing” of rising drug-crime issues to support Duerte to become president
- First Rappler op-ed on the topic : Online mob creates social media wasteland
- In an August 2016 meeting with Facebook executives about growing use of CIB, they all laughed about the prospects of a Trump victory
- Bomb man Rappler story from March 2016 was repurposed after Sept 2 2016 explosion in Philippines that Duerte used to justify martial law
- Initially people (they assumed with journalism training) shared the Rappler link along with the implication social media posts saying the bomb was breaking news, later it was just screenshots and then fully pasting the news stories
- Zuboff: surveillance capitalism
- Sheryl Sandberg brought surveillance capitalism to Facebook
- “I believe that Facebook represents one of the greatest threats to democracy around the world, and I am amazed that we have allowed our freedoms to be taken away by technology companies, greed for growth, and revenues”
- Zuckerberg chose” company over country”
- In September 2015, Zuckerberg was presented with knowledge that 16,744 Facebook employees had complete access to to personal data — an example of the entrepreneur out of depths as ceo
- Their analysis: 26 Filipino fake accounts had influenced at least 3 million others in their election
- Experiencing the pro Duerte bot attacks, she began to understand the attacks; Mocho Uson and others attack their weaponization internet series
- “I was beginning to grasp that journalists were no longer the gatekeepers of facts and information. The new gatekeepers, the technology platforms, had put into place rules that give the equivalent of nuclear weapons to digital populists and authoritarians to turn our society and democracy – all around the world – upside down”
- Leila M. de Lima, Member of the House of Representatives of the Philippines, was a bright light
- Camille Francois’s “patriotic trolling” paper that Google wouldn’t release; also called “state-sponsored trolling” and related to “enlisting useful idiots” paper
- Don’t let anyone else tell your story in the golden hour: she and cofounders (manangs) did a press conference right after the Philippines revoked their license to operate, even touch their legal teams hadn’t yet approved
- “Free speech is being used to stifle free speech” she said at Paris conference to address “infodemic” with draft “international declaration on information and democracy”
- Why return to Philippines though she has American citizenship and family there? “There is no choice” — can’t turn on Rappler and her employees and it’s where she wants to be. (Reminds of Navalny) “over time, you get used to fear”
- In 2016, she thought Facebook was part of the solution; by 2018; she thought of them as ambivalent lacking action and by 2020, she thought that “Facebook was the bad guy”
- Facebook’s Supreme Court was addressing the wrong problem— focused on content rather than distribution: “an oversight board on content could never match the speed of the dissemination of information online”
- “The Real Facebook oversight board” — their focus was on combating claims around election integrity
- Philippines had second highest number of compromised accounts from the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal— behind only United States — part of the Philippines outsized role in Internet that Maria Ressa tried to argue
- Christopher Wylie: “colonialism never died, it just moved online”
- “News ecosystem quality” from Facebook
- Red tagging: calling good guys terrorists
- By prioritizing “official” sources, Facebook enabled state attacks against independent journalists
- Soshanna Zubroff to Maria Tessa: “journalism is coerced into self-optimization for social media”
- Their collab with Meedan startup and Google News initiative to gather 140 groups from news, civil society, NGOs and law firms to band together and fact check an election in Philippines
- “When journalist are the gatekeepers to our public information ecosystem, those swings took decades. Once technology took over and abdicated responsibility for our emotional safety, history could be changed in months. That’s how easy it became to shift our memory through our emotions.”
- How do you stand up to a dictator: “by embracing values, Defined early.. you have to create a team, strengthen your area of influence”
- “The tech platforms, insidiously, manipulate our biology, regardless of our nation or culture”