Ever wanted to see a Nobel Peace Price speech, where the audience reacts shocked, to the point where their mouths remain open physically - and then still has to clap, because, you know… protocol? Maria Ressa delivers.
What happened? Oh, people in the west that visit Nobel piece price laudationes just got confronted with a journalist from a country where facebook changed the political and journalistic landscape. In large parts, because of a personal impunity deal between Facebook and the president of the Philippines. Ressa spoke about a society in which fake news could be used as political tools, without restrictions. Here are some quotes:
Ressa stressed most of all how journalists have lost their role as the professional “gatekeepers” who worked to make sure the flow of public information was factual, edited and in keeping with journalistic principles before being published. Now technology and especially social media can allow an unedited flow of information, with Ressa slamming their “god-like power that has allowed a virus of lies to infect each of us, pitting us against each other, bringing out our fears, anger and hate, and setting the stage for the rise of authoritarians and dictators around the world.”
She specifically mentioned Brazil, Hungary, France, the US and her own Philippines, where elections next year can be heavily influenced by social media. She noted how “American internet companies” can “make more money by spreading hate and triggering the worst in us.”
Attacks on her own newssite Rappler [source of the video] “began five years ago,” she said, “when we demanded an end to impunity on two fronts: Duterte’s drug war and Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook. Today it has only gotten worse, and Silicon Valley’s sins came home to roost in the United States on January 6 with mob violence on Capitol Hill.” She maintains that online violence has become real world violence.
She called social media, meanwhile, “a deadly game for power and money” in which “highly profitable micro-targeting operations are engineered to structurally undermine human will.” It has also ruined the business model for established media, Ressa believes, as “destructive corporations have siphoned money away from news groups and now pose a threat to markets and elections.” Facebook is now the world’s largest distributor of news, yet “lies laced with anger and hate spread faster and further than facts on social media.” Journalist-gatekeepers have been replaced by these “American companies controlling our global information ecosystem, biased against facts, biased against journalists. They are, by design, dividing us and radicalizing us.”
Ressa hopes the world can act as it did after the atomic bomb attacks on Japan that ended World War II: “We need to create new institutions, like the United Nations, and new codes stating our values to prevent humanity from doing its worst.” She called for “shifting social priorites to rebuild journalism” while “regulating and outlawing” the big tech firms and “surveillance economics that profit from hate and lies.”
She was referring to how companies like Facebook and Google gather data on human behaviour and sell it to the highest bidder. It can then be used as a weapons, like meddling in elections.
src: click
So what will be happening now? Well, judging from the circumstance that Frances Haugens message in Germany was largely moved to an online only clip in the comedy format ZDF magazine royale, I’d say a whole lot of posturing, followed up by a whole lot of nothing, like the Forum Alpbach approach of staffing callcenters with trained ‘broaden online speech specialists, financed by the private sector’, and ‘easy counter’ meme creation later outsourced to fiverr. ([Interpretation] Fiverr was promoted in this Alpbach 2018 session (Our work in our future), as a ‘great and cost-effective tool’ even for the scientific sector.)
Full disclosure: Why am I actually that invested? Well I strongly suggested, that micro targeting in political advertising on facebook had to stop - with the european commission having to be engaged in making this a reality, in an Alpbach seminar in 2018. Which today - finally is a position held by stakeholders at the european level.
In Alpbach, I was met with this familiar blank stare that always warms your heart to the point it stings a little, only to then be followed up with the high intensity question ‘But how is social media microtargeting different from what the european postal system is doing in distributing advertising’? On which the professor holding the session promptly stopped the person asking it from from trying to get answers out of me - because ‘look at the time..’.
Small unimportant anecdote, I would have forgotten by now - were it not for the ‘introduction into polite society’ event a few days later, called ‘The future of data economy’, where Trevor D. Traina, the new US ambassador to austria at that time, prompted by two questions in a row ‘If it wouldn’t be overdue to regulate big tech companies’ (the second one asked by yours truely, to drive the point home, that this was important) responded with “I’ve got this. [Question asked for the entire panel to answer.] You see, this is why we’ve got the free market - this is like with Firefox, where a competitor could come along tomorrow, innovate, and then change the landscape entirely - so no regulation is needed.”
The other people on the panel (see click), including some very distinguished guests and young experts in the field were very helpful, by literally attempting to stare holes in the ceiling of Elisabeth-Herz-Kremenak-Saal at that point of the evening.
Two days ago, I then couldn’t help to notice that the way out of this that Forum Alpbach and the Mercator foundation (as well as probably Mr. Traina himself) could agree on, would be to fund a few callcenters worth of microjobbers that would then be paid to “broaden online discussions, using science”, and “distribute preproduced ‘easy counter’ memes in image form” for the general public engaged in democratic debate online.
My respect for political and intellectual elites grew three sizes that day.
Sorry for the filler, back to the topic at hand:
“These were strong speeches that gave everyone a lot to think about,” Støre told Norwegian Broadcasting (NRK) on his way out of the prize ceremony. “It also makes an impression that these two travel home with great uncertainty over what will meet them there.”
Great uncertainty indeed, but not so much over what will meet them there.
