The more you do the right thing, the harder it is to do the wrong thing.
Propaganda has been around forever, but never have you been able to do it at this scale. Exponential lies have become facts.
When people don't know what is real and what is fake, when facts don't matter, then the voice with the loudest megaphone gains the power.
We could lose democracy if we lose the facts.
You move things forward just by talking about them.
We will not be intimidated. The news is not propaganda. It is not something to be manipulated, distorted nor censored. Recent events have only strengthened our resolve to continue giving the public the truth in line with the strict guidelines of our Code of Ethics.
We are meant to be a cautionary tale. We are meant to make you afraid. I appeal again, don't be afraid because if you don't use your rights, you will lose them.
The easiest part is dealing with the impact of online violence and disinformation on me. I just see the impact on the world, and I don't know why we're not panicking.
Facebook
needs to regulate its greed, clean up the toxic waste, and be
accountable for its role as the new gatekeeper to information.
What do you do when the president lies? Then it's repeated a million times.
Start with your area of influence: demand accountability from power; stand up against bullies; report the lies. Courage spreads. We begin by taking care of what's in front of us.
* * * * *
Our greatest need today is to transform that hate and violence, the toxic sludge that’s coursing through our information ecosystem, prioritized by American internet companies that make more money by spreading that hate and triggering the worst in us.
This pandemic of misogyny and hatred needs to be tackled now.
At the core of journalism is a code of honor. And mine is layered on different worlds — from how I grew up, the Golden Rule, what’s right and wrong; from college and the honor code I learned there; and my time as a reporter and the code of standards and ethics I learned and helped write. Add to that the Filipino idea of utang na loob — literally, the debt from within — at its best is a system of paying it forward.
Now, let me pull out so we’re clear about the problem we all face and how we got here. The attacks against us in Rappler began five years ago, when we demanded an end to impunity on two fronts: Rodrigo 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.
What happens on social media doesn’t stay on social media. Online violence is real-world violence. Social media is a deadly game for power and money, what Shoshana Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism, extracting our private lives for outsized corporate gain, our personal experiences sucked into a database, organized by AI, then sold to the highest bidder. Highly profitable micro-targeting operations are engineered to structurally undermine human will. I’ve repeatedly called it a behavior modification system in which we are all Pavlov’s dogs, experimented on in real time with disastrous consequences in countries like mine, Myanmar, India, Sri Lanka, so many more. These destructive corporations have siphoned money away from news organizations, and now they pose a foundational threat to markets and elections.
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 facts. These American companies controlling our global information ecosystem are biased against facts, biased against journalists. They are, by design, dividing us and radicalizing us.
I’ve said this repeatedly over the last five years: Without facts, you can’t have truth. Without truth, you can’t have trust. Without trust, we have no shared reality, no democracy, and it becomes impossible to deal with the existential problems of our times: climate, coronavirus, now the battle for truth.
Hannah Arendt wrote about the banality of evil when describing men who carried out the orders of Hitler, how career-oriented bureaucrats can act without conscience because they justify what they’re doing because that they’re only following orders. This is how a nation — and a world — loses its soul.
You have to know what values you’re fighting for. You have to draw the lines early, but if you haven’t done so, please do it now: where on this side, you’re good; this side, you’re evil. Some governments may be lost causes, and if you’re working in tech, I’m talking to you. How can you have election integrity if you don’t have integrity of facts?
That’s the problem facing countries with elections next year — among them, Brazil, Hungary, France, the United States and my Philippines, where we are at a do-or-die moment with presidential elections on May 9th.
So, what are we going to do? An invisible atom bomb has exploded in our information ecosystem, and the world must act as it did after Hiroshima. Like that time, we need to create new institutions, like the United Nations, and new codes stating our values, like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to prevent humanity from doing its worst. It’s an arms race in our information ecosystem. To stop that requires a multilateral approach that all of us must be part of.
It begins by restoring facts. We need information ecosystems that live and die by facts. We do this by shifting social priorities to rebuild journalism for the 21st century while regulating and outlawing the surveillance economics that profit from hate and lies.
We need to help independent journalism survive, first by giving greater protection to journalists and standing up against states which target journalists. Then we need to address the advertising model of journalism.
Democracy has become a woman-to-woman, man-to-man defense of our values. We’re at a sliding door moment, where we can continue down the path we’re on and descend further into fascism, or we can each choose to fight for a better world. To do that, please ask yourself: What are you willing to sacrifice for the truth?
The destruction has already happened. Now it’s time to build — to create the world we want. So, please, with me, just close your eyes for just a moment and imagine the world as it should be: a world of peace, trust and empathy, bringing out the best that we can be. Open your eyes. Now go. We have to make it happen. Please, let’s hold the line, together.
No comments:
Post a Comment