FULL SPEECH: Maria Ressa at the Freedom of Expression Conference

the founder and ceo of the new site rappler the journalist author and nobel peace prize laureate maria reza directly from the airport and ready to talk to us about truth and trust and how technology is affecting our rights to freedom of information please give her a warm welcome maria reza hi uh when ingville was introduced to me i was like oh my god that's me i'm speaking can i get a clicker is that um oh i forgot to ask so um let me riff i see it i see it here thank you wonderful i really literally just got off the plane um that is what nobel has done um oh so look from what i have heard uh how wonderful to be in the room with you and to be back this is my third time back in oslo since december so i am thrilled to be here and to be in the peace institute um how quickly 10 minutes talk about courage and part of it is because it sounds like the day so far has been not just telling each other what the problems are because we certainly know what they are we're living through it but um hopefully going to what are we going to do right that's what i hope to get to and uh and here's the thing i just put in my my book last night at midnight graphics galleys it went in so i have five lessons from it so where are we with courage well look the last time at the nobel lecture i talked about a person-to-person defense of our democracy right because what are we dealing with it's death by a thousand cuts and you think about that in terms of states but it is also very personal to everyone in this room it's death by a thousand cuts of your hopes your dreams your integrity right so so kind of look at it that way with me micro macro and when that happens to you it's happened to me uh you just have to like bust through it and i see peter in the back hi peter uh you know you bust through it and that's the i come out of it with this thing of embrace your fear whatever it is you're most afraid of you have to touch it hold it i think that the world is going to turn fascist and what are we going to do it's much harder when it happens it's easier right when we're on the precipice which is where we are right now um if we go i just got the report from vdem you know if we go by where we are which is there are less democracies in the world today we're back at 1989 uh numbers if we you just have to look at the philippines we had presidential elections on may 9th this year and there is no better example of the impact of disinformation and our kind of crazy information ecosystem when we watched history change in front of our eyes right there's 32 elections this year uh kenya just finished you have brazil coming up and it is the same existential problem you're seeing a kind of stop the steel metanarrative being seeded on social media if we follow the trends we have brazil in october the u.s midterms in november next year you have africa nations you have turkey by 2024 we have indonesia the world's largest muslim population you have india the world's largest democracy and then the u.s presidential elections if we follow the trend that we're at and we don't do something now i think 2024 will be the year we fall off the cliff that will be the end of democracy we will have elected enough illiberal leaders that the geopolitical balance of power will shift and democracy will die i said i would be hopeful right so at least we know the problem right so we embrace our fear what are we gonna do well every person in this room is very powerful so i'm gonna ask you for your courage because that will determine our future uh so here's my update invil asked me to just quickly tell you what's happened to us since then well and this leads to ours our second panel the attacks online have increased so it's not just information operations on social media it's not just information warfare on social media it is also like quick things death by a thousand cuts distributed denial of service attacks ddos attacks you guys familiar with that right because it started with the nobel stream um in december from oslo to manila so the nobel foundation said that that stream was targeted uh on that day but then i went home and all the media organizations the news organizations in the philippines were attacked all together and then it just got worse we found like this hacker group that was mounting attacks against the major philippine news outlets and then our government praised them that's the upside down world we're welcome right and then we went we dug deeper with the swedish group we found that there was one man in davao city who was at the core of it davao city is where president former president duterte that's his home base so we found this guy once we talked to him the ddos attack stopped but then we looked at where they were recruiting people than it was on facebook so facebook took him down hi khadijah uh that's the that's the first ddos attacks the second is that they didn't just come frontally they came in the back end so check your websites guys who knows what a black hat seo attacks are yeah you gotta know yay blackout seo attacks meaning they take junk links to ai generated stuff some of them on easily like these are sites that google could do something about and has i hope but what this means is it sends death by a thousand cuts tens of thousands of junk links to your website in our case to philippine news groups so we as an industry were under attack and when we looked at it you have to like physically actually um annul these links tens of thousands right so it takes your time it just takes time time and time and we weren't the only ones all the news organizations what this means is you have less people finding your site less people finding the news so this was something i stopped working for raptor i just we just started telling our all the philippine news organizations how they were being insidiously attacked behind the scenes and guess what one of the largest ones was a commercial black hat seo operator from sweden and that company not only like attacks you with tens of thousands but then asks you to pay them to take it down so it's really interesting here's the third one so anyway if that's happening to new sites in the philippines it's got to be happening to others right it just takes a while to find that death by a thousand cuts on the back end this is the third thing the third and last update of what happened it's the weaponization of the law in january this year we had a dozen cyber libel complaints right you know i have seven existing criminal cases now rappler has eight but uh in order to be here i have to ask for court permission norway and the nobel always gets me court permission thank you um but here's what happened after i got back we had these complaints their cyber libel complaints kibaloy is the pastor of former president duterte he's also wanted by the fbi for sex trafficking his site is kind of like a pseudo news site that is the fastest growing attacks all the news groups in the philippines um and they have just been awarded a franchise the abs one of the franchises of abs-cbns was given to them so here's what happened we had that and then we found out that you know will our justice system work so it was thrown out the first seven were thrown out by april but also in april we found out that you know there were more that we didn't even know about because this is death by a thousand cuts right there were cases that were filed in different remote provinces of the philippines and we had to take time to respond to those uh otherwise you get an arrest warrant because i'm reliable as you know it's criminal in the philippines right well by april we actually had 16 more complaints and 50 counts of cyber libel this is really just to harass you right so that you you take your eye off the ball well here's the best part all of them have been thrown out all including the one in davao city so you see there's hope it's um but then that wasn't enough you know around uh when was this and the end of june the philippines reiterated we lost we lost at the sec again uh in april well around i guess this would have been june we were told that we needed to shut down that's another one of those moments um and i was like no you're gonna have i can't say this because you're you're watching philippines so um but we decided to keep going because we're not violating anything in the constitution so so every day we go to work and we're not sure whether we will get shut down that day and at the same time because we're doing well i'm trying to recruit people to a company that may or may not get shut down it's kind of a strange place to be and then of course this is the last thing that happened it's really slow july um i lost my colleague and i lost the appeal at the court of appeals on cyber libel and then the decision added more jail time you know it's you have to laugh you have to laugh um so that's my update for you right more attacks more insidious death by a thousand cuts attacks online more attacks death by a thousand cuts i mean that's like more cases this year than i've had in the last six years but there's an upside to it most of them have been thrown out the ones that have progressed it means we're going to be arguing this at the supreme court it means it's a very high-stakes game of chicken and you cannot veer off course we hold the line so let me then go to where how does this come back to you and what are we going to do about it because i promised you that the person-to-person defense of our democracy short medium and the long term we already know and you know that academics will know will have said this there have been numerous reports education it's like everything the medium term the the eu has taken this it's legislation it's necessary the social media platforms the technology companies are not going to do this voluntarily there must be legislation and the eu is is paving the way the digital services act the digital markets act too late for the philippines but you know it kicks in spring next year and then in the short term in the short term this is where it's person to person and where we can do much more together this is where we have to figure out what civic engagement looks like in the age of exponential propaganda in the age of a behavioral modification system that is our information highway right so what is that i have an example for you we tried this in the philippines we didn't do it long enough for our elections we decided and and we worked with the google news initiative and with another a tech based kind of pipeline uh called medan it's san francisco based but look it's a whole of society approach that's what i wind up calling it but it starts with with this pyramid so we started it really truly in february because it took a few weeks to set up but 16 news organizations working together for fact checking fact checking is really boring right and you used to think this was like implicit in everything a news organization does on the internet fact checking is critical so for the first time these 16 news groups nation nationwide and local hyper local news groups we work together and it was fantastic to do that everything that we created was creative commons anyone can repurpose anyone can repost and then the second layer is the most important part because remember fact checks are really boring they don't spread on social media which is how filipinos get our news so we created the mesh layer mesh these are civil society groups business groups business finally joined power and money's got to come into this battle the church asia the philippines is asia's largest roman catholic nation um and what we did is we told the mesh so nobel peace center for example right we told we organized ourselves so that the mesh shares these fact checks and they add emotion because it's a thinking fast distribution system it needs emotion and we journalists aren't very good at that so mesh and look it it was actually really good and i got the idea for mesh did you guys watch that movie don't look up you remember how the planetary system came together bit by bit by bit mesh it was a mesh it created a mesh before to throw off the asteroid that's so the mesh was the distribution system and it worked anyway the third part is research if if the first is to create truth the second is to distribute the third is to analyze and we had this is the first time seven research groups came together with the data pipeline that we all could see right so the data pipeline brought that and every week we did a webinar where each each research group would come out with their finding and tell our public our our people who's doing what what meta narrative what lie is being seeded who benefits from this who is the target so the research groups did that they did we did 21 research groups research papers um and these are now all being peer reviewed but it we reversed the academic cycle instead of peer review and then media it was like atomize it first bring it to the public first because you need to do that and then it'll go to the peer reviews after but but we checked each other right so there's lots of stuff that was incredible 21 in like from march to may 21 that's pretty cool and the last one the one that's most important is the law where the heck are all the lawyers because impunity online is impunity offline right if there is no rule of law online how do you expect our rule of law in the real world to survive it hasn't that is the erosion right so what happened here is that our legal groups in the philippines came together and and what they did is they filed more than 23 legal cases strategic and tactical litigation that helped protect the journalists who were being attacked that helped protect the academics because now history is under attack so that academics are feeling the heat that the journalists have felt before this worked for a period of time but not enough to stop the overwhelming win of a new marcos the namesake of our former dictator ferdinand marcos jr he's our new president but it works and how do i know it works the impact it created within the first two weeks that we rolled this out uh the solicitor general the office of the solicitor general filed a petition at the supreme court against rappler and the commission on elections calling fact-checking illegal saying that it is prior restraint it's we fought that also and it's gone but it was at the supreme court so all right let me i have less okay let me just come with the five lessons now this is for you i tell you i just finished it so um at the nobel lecture i ask you what will you sacrifice for the truth and i realized that you know in writing this book i wrote 400 pages that got edited down to 200. these are the lessons that i put in there and they may sound really naive but you know i think that's what the world needs remember when i pulled out the t-shirt that said in order to be the good you have to believe there is good in the world that's the part that social media has taken away from us that emergent human behavior that is coming out today emphasizes fear anger hatred it it makes us our worst selves so remember these things these are this is what i'm told by my publishers i should say inside the book when you read the book in the book i actually go through and show you the data behind all of this right but you know lesson number one for me is learn you're here learn this is a time when it seems like the world is falling apart which it is but last night i was with a climate scientist who was optimistic i think that's the most existential problem we face and we cannot fix climate if we do not fix our information ecosystem right how can we get the right information to you so learn um the studies also show that the people in the middle the people like us uh are the ones who are quiet um they said that this most extreme six percent are the ones that are that are taking over the information ecosystem so don't bury your head in the sand right the second speak speak i was on the same stage where salman rushdie was attacked in chautauqua new york and you know it was a community that had it was a community that had been together for 149 years and when i sat it's like it seats 2 000 3 000 people and when i sat and spoke in front of the community i had to face my fear because i was like oh my gosh how could that happen right it was in front of so many people that he was stabbed this is a man who dealt with a fatwa for speaking um and someone said don't go and i was like no no no no no we go and and i went and i was so glad i did because i could see a community that was shattered but yet came back together believed in the community believed in the good and it was fantastic to speak to them because if you don't speak you say everything is okay silence is consent and now at this time you cannot you can't be quiet if something in your area of influence is wrong this is the time to clean up our areas of influence the third you've heard me say a lot i've been saying it since 2016 draw the line where on this side you're good and on this side you're evil it has to be that clear in your head because that's how you act because this is also a time to act right um the fourth is this sounds naive again we have to trust because that's what's been broken so each of us in our area of influence even if our families are being torn apart we trust our families are easier because we love that's the other part love right it's connected to this but trust what's being used to manipulate us is fear anger hate um so think slow not fast us against them when you run into that and there are many ways to talk about that it could be it's now part of state ideology in hungary it's moving in all different parts of the world we need to avoid that and europe more than any part of the world understands what could happen when us against them is pushed to the end grow and to the nth point we have to grow the shared reality in the nobel lecture i talked about that shared reality being anchored by facts right and then finally the last one again sounds crazy but we have to have faith i'm not a religious person but more than at any other time it's kind of connected so i went back to this thing from the bible do unto others as you would have them do unto you it's an empathy that can get lost again on social media so if you're not on social media stay off um hi facebook live stream um so and then that last part right we will these are my lessons just people ask me how do you find the courage it's in these five things because it's naturally not about fighting something it's about holding the line on who you are who you want to be and i think this is the part that is exciting everything is falling apart the world is insane right now our politics i already told you 2024 please please do something um it's also exciting in a weird way because we're going to create the world we want and the world we want is actually better than where we are today you know that's what i think so please you have to ask yourself the same question what are you willing to sacrifice for the truth that shared reality because your courage will help determine our future thank you thank you thank you