One two, one, two, three, yes perfect.
Hello from Manila and thank you for your time.
I feel that there's so much at stake for our world today
and what we do this year could potentially
determine what our next decade will look like.
Closing the distance has never been harder.
I have three points I want to share with you.
First, my context and why the lessons I'll share
are hard-earned.
Second, I'll define the problem and finally
share the principles we're using to live our way
into the solution, because we must.
So why should you care about the Philippines?
Because for the sixth year in a row,
Filipinos spent the most time online
and on social media, globally.
A hundred percent of Filipinos on the internet
are on Facebook according to Hootsuite
and We Are Social, YouTube. this year overtook Facebook
as a top social media site here.
And because of the pandemic, new users are coming online
in Southeast Asia at a blistering pace,
adding 40 million new internet users last year
compared to a hundred million, the previous five years.
As this is happening, it is getting harder and harder
for journalists to hold power to account.
I know this, in less than two years
the Philippine government filed 10
arrest warrants against me.
That's 10 criminal charges, 10 times I posted bail
because I'm doing my job.
Last June, I and a former colleague were convicted
of cyber libel for a story we published eight years earlier,
at a time the crime we allegedly violated didn't even exist.
All told, all these charges carry a cumulative penalty
of more than a hundred years in prison.
It's crazy.
Okay, but it's not all bad, right?
There's hope I think I bring three strengths together
that help me find the way forward and stay hopeful.
First, I head our business and tech
so I'm forced to evaluate the changes
and build for the future.
Second, I'm an investigative journalist and finally
I'm the target of attacks online and in the real world.
So I get to see these evolving tactics
and tell you about them.
On International Women's Day, the International Center
for Journalists analyzed nearly half a million
social media posts and showed that 60%
were aimed to tear down my credibility
built up over 35 years of journalism to tear down
trust in our reporting.
The other 40% are visceral.
They're personal, sexist and misogynistic attacks
meant to pound me into silence.
As you can see, that's not working,
but this brings to the problem we need to solve
if we are to close the distance, American biologist
E.O. Wilson said it best, we're facing paleolithic emotions,
medieval institutions, and godlike technology.
Social media has become a behavior modification system
and we are Pavlov's dogs experimented on in real time
with disastrous consequences.
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 really boring facts.
The very platforms in social media that deliver the facts
to you are biased against facts.
They're biased against journalists.
They are by design, dividing us and radicalizing us.
Let me give you an example we've lived through
in the Philippines.
One technical decision made by every social media platform
that's to grow with algorithms,
recommending friends of friends, right?
They've all realized that's the most efficient way
through A/B testing, so in 2016, after Rodrigo Duterte
used social media to help him get elected,
this friends of friends algorithm, along with this divisive
us-against-them rhetoric, did this.
Here we were, all agreed on the facts in the center.
We didn't debate the facts, but if you're pro-Duterte
and you were getting recommendations to grow your network
for friends of friends, you move further right.
If you're anti-Duterte, you move further left.
And over time, five years, the chasm grew.
The algorithms also radicalize.
They bring you down the rabbit hole
and this is best shown in the work of Renee DiResta
who she looked at do it yourself moms on Facebook,
who formed a group to make their own baby food right?
If you were in that group, Facebook recommended
you join anti-vax groups and if you clicked
on their recommendation, then the next recommendation
you got for a group, was Q Anon.
This is the impact of a business model
Shoshana Zuboff called surveillance capitalism.
When a system gathers your data, knows you better
than you know yourself and serves your most vulnerable
moment to a message to a company that's called
the new advertising, or to a government,
the new propaganda, changing your behavior.
In today's world, a lie told a million times
becomes a fact, without facts you can't have truth.
Without truth, you can't have trust.
Without any of these three, democracy as we know it
and beyond that, all meaningful
human endeavor becomes impossible.
Without facts, we have no shared reality and it becomes
impossible to tackle the existential problems
our world faces today.
Climate change, coronavirus, the battle for truth.
We are living in the matrix, fed an illusion.
We are predisposed to believe,
determined by power and money
and our shared reality is splintered
into more than 3 billion Truman shows.
So what are we going to do?
How do we close the distance?
It's been nearly five years for us in Rappler
that we've been living through this hell
in order to live our way into the answer,
we focus on three pillars.
I like threes, technology, journalism and community.
On technology we have two initiatives.
I'm working very hard with global groups
to find regulations that will leave the best
and put guard rails on the worst of tech's manipulations.
Last year, I co-chaired the Infodemic's working group
with former EU parliament member, Marietje Schaake.
She's now in Stanford, in our paper released last November
by the Forum on Information and Democracy,
we recommended a dozen systemic solutions
and more than 250 tactical steps.
I'm watching closely the evolution
of the EU's Digital Services Act,
The Digital Markets Act the UK's online harms bill,
the US debate on section 230.
Separately, we at Rappler are building our own tech
that protects the public sphere that protects the facts,
that protects the users.
We rolled out our new platform called Lighthouse last year
and continued to build not just for distribution,
but for our communities to grow.
When we created Rappler, my elevator pitch is simple.
We build communities of action.
The food we feed our communities is journalism.
We must help independent news organizations survive
because even as the dangers increase for us,
the mission of journalism has never been more important.
That's part of the reason I sit on the advisory board
at the International Fund for Public Interest Media,
which aims to raise a billion dollars a year
to help news organizations survive.
In many ways, the virus of lies
in the virtual world is more dangerous
than the coronavirus because it is not only
highly contagious when you get infected,
you become impervious to facts.
You change the way you look at the world.
You become angrier, more isolated
and it erupts in events like January 6th on Capitol Hill.
Like a drug addiction it will take years
for rehabilitation to close the distance
and bring back a shared reality.
So what do we do?
I became a journalist because I knew
that information is power.
Now we have to act, to come together and realize
that an atom bomb has been dropped
on our information ecosystem and just like the world did
after World War II when it created NATO, Bretton Woods,
the universal declaration of human rights,
we need to upgrade our medieval institutions
to put safeguards around the godlike technology
that is manipulating our biology, our paleolithic emotions.
In some ways I feel like I've jumped out of the plane
and I don't know whether my parachute will open high enough
for me to survive.
What you do at this time matters.
Please act now, close the distance.
I caught up with Maria earlier.
After her keynote, we sat down to discuss some of the
critical issues that she's been campaigning about,
like the access digital platforms have to our personal data.
How far do we need to go to protect ourselves?
I asked Maria if we had to wean ourselves
off current social platforms
and find new ways of communicating.
I think this is, you know
this thing of enlightened self-interest.
I think they built their way into this.
I don't know how it was by accident,
but that's what happened and now they have to have
the political will to treat the facts
differently from lies, right?
That's the fundamental problem.
That's why we are in a battle for facts and for truth
because all of the social media platforms treat the data,
unlike journalists, they don't make a distinction
between lies, which spread faster and facts.
So they must do that.
So that means they have scale.
We're already there.
They're just going to have to have the political will
to say, we need to protect the public sphere.
We need to protect our rational way of thinking
and so we're going to have to make less money
There are many people in the world of media
and outside of the world of media, who look up to you,
who see your fight in the Philippines
they see what Rappler is doing right now,
standing up against fake news.
The infodemic, as you described it
is more dangerous perhaps than COVID-19 even,
but there is also responsibility from us as consumers.
What is that responsibility?
How do we share the burden?
It can't be just in your shoulders.
So I don't think it's on my shoulders.
I think if you were in my place
you would be doing the same thing.
We grew up at a time when this was the mission
of journalism, and I don't think I have any other choice
but to do what I'm doing.
Having said that, you know, I've heard a lot
of news managers kind of like beat themselves up
to say what could we have done?
What did we do?
Should we be building trust?
And then I hear users just like you did.
You know, it's really the users.
It's really them.
I mean, that's certainly what we hear
from social media, right?
We need media literacy, that's not true.
Go back to E.O. Wilson's quote, right?
This is manipulating our biology, our paleolithic emotions.
It takes the weaknesses of human nature and manipulates it.
It's almost like you went to a psychologist.
Here, I'm going to quote Tristan Harris.
You know, like you went to a psychotherapist
and you told your psychotherapist
your deepest, darkest secrets and then he goes out
and says, I've got this for sale.
We have no defenses against this
and that is something we've seen.
Look, the other optimistic way to redefine this
is to realize that all of us around the world
actually have far more in common
than we have differences because those global companies
are affecting us all the same way.
So, you know, there's no solution
for how to manipulate our emotions,
how to manipulate our mind.
Pavlov's dogs, you know?
So the only solution is to make it illegal.
We're there, this is how potent the technology is
and we've got to realize that.
I am clicking on your Twitter page right now.
Idealist, skeptic, pragmatist, journalist, author,
CEO of Rappler, which person wrote that keynote?
Wow, I guess all, right?
So I'm more emotional than I would normally be
because, well because of the times, right?
And because I'm talking to you, I mean,
we became journalists at a far easier time.
I just see the runway getting shorter,
but I don't have any other choice.
I know that whether I go to jail or not
will depend on how well we fight the battle for facts.
Give us an assignment, the Skoll World Forum,
attendees are watching you right now,
what assignment, would you give us?
I'll give you three.
Demand accountability from technology.
Put those guardrails in, help, independent media survive
and the third one is, do more.
You know, I've been forced to ask myself
what am I willing to sacrifice for the truth?
You are so powerful, help communities come together.
Do more, what are you willing to sacrifice for the truth?
This is it, that's the precipice we're standing on
and the more you do, the greater the chances
I won't go to jail.
Okay, thank you so much.
How can we fail that assignment?
There's a lot of pressure right there
and we're willing to take that on.
Maria Ressa, idealist, skeptic, pragmatist,
journalist, author, CEO of Rappler.
Thank you for the assignment.
Thank you for the keynote.