When she met him in 2017, journalist Maria Ressa told Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg that 97% of Filipinos on the internet were on Facebook.
That year (and at least up until 2021, the year she won the Nobel peace prize) the 113-million people in the Philippines were the global citizens who spent the most time on the internet and social media.
“Mark was quiet for a beat,” Ressa says. “’Wait Maria,’ he said, looking directly at me, ‘where are the other 3%?’”
The rise of the internet and social media has upended politics and relationships around the world. Ressa, a former CNN journalist who co-founded online news platform Rappler, is a pioneer in unpicking data to show how the business model of social media platforms benefits from — and rewards — outrage, running rings around laws and institutions intended to maintain balance.
Ressa documents her shift to despair from enthusiasm about the way social media was used as a tool to challenge authorities the world over in the Arab spring of 2011 to the global winter that descended when leaders, starting with Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte, used it right back to amplify misinformation and spread discord for their own gain.
Abuse of a Facebook-enabled online world spread into the real world. By 2018 Filipino authorities had 14 investigations under way against Rappler, which kept reporting fearlessly in the face of Duterte’s corruption and violent war against drugs.
In 2019 Ressa had 10 arrest warrants filed against her. To date she has one conviction — on a charge of cyber libel — but last month was acquitted on four politically driven criminal charges of tax evasion.
And while Duterte has now left the country’s presidency and Ressa hopes the world is rediscovering its better side, problems remain. Duterte’s successor, Bongbong Marcos — son of the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos, ousted in a popular revolution in 1986 — has been using the same social media tools and techniques as Duterte to whitewash his family history.
How does the battle for facts sit in a social media environment built on the outrage that keeps people scrolling for longer? With one hand behind its back. The reach of genuine journalism on social media will always be limited because it can never compete. Balanced news and opinion are different products from the outrage social media algorithms seek out and promote.
In How to Stand up to a Dictator (a term she uses for both Duterte and Zuckerberg) Ressa also shows developing countries are the crucibles for social media platforms to hone and perfect the techniques they then export to the rest of the world.
Duterte was able to use the Facebook business model to push his own agenda. What played out in the Philippines after Duterte’s election in June 2016, when he targeted Rappler and Ressa and ultimately set authorities such as the tax authorities against them, was a microcosm of every information operation launched in democratic countries around the world.
And it was far more powerful because it could amplify that way as never before. By “astroturfing” — presenting an orchestrated campaign as a popular uprising — political leaders could tap an army of bots, fake accounts and content creators to play power politics like never before.
“Those accounts were at the core of a propaganda machine that bullied and harassed its targets and incited its followers to violence,” Ressa writes. “That same thing happened with Stop the Steal in the US, anti-Muslim riots in India, the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, and many other events around the world.”
Where developing countries go, the developed world will follow. An emerging democracy such as Philippines — for 300 years a colony of Spain and then an American colony for nearly 50 more — with weaker regulators and law enforcement, lets them probe weaknesses and behaviour that assist in spreading misinformation or disseminating propaganda before taking them elsewhere, as with Donald Trump’s Stop the Steal campaign.
“If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t matter, you won’t get caught,” Cambridge Analytica whistle-blower Christopher Wylie tells Ressa in the book. Ressa says journalism needs to rely more on online search and direct sharing among communities of readers than social media to reach an audience.
Twenty years before Zuckerberg and Ressa met in California, writer and traveller William Dalrymple told a joke Syrians told about one of the many rigged elections late Syrian dictator Hafez al-Assad used to uphold power.
Assad’s advisers came to him with good news, Dalrymple recounts in From the Holy Mountain. “Ninety-nine percent of the people voted for you. Only 1% abstained. What more could you ask?”
“Just one thing,” Assad replied. “Their names and addresses.”
Sound familiar, Mark?
• Bleby is a senior reporter with The Australian Financial Review, based in Melbourne.
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