I’m so incredibly DELIGHTED for @mariaressa but I also want to explain why this decision by @NobelPrize is so important at this moment (& why it’s more very bad news for Facebook)
More perhaps than anyone, @mariaressa has explained how ‘a lie told a million times becomes a fact’.
She’s watched how her country became a brutal dictatorship & understood first hand how this was done through control of the information space
theguardian.com/world/2021/apr…
She’s spent much of the last 5 years trying to warn the west what is coming for us.
How the firestorm of lies & distortions & fake news are a dictator’s best friend.
And how Silicon Valley’s failure to deal with it is a fundamental danger to democracy
In the Philippines, Duterte took over the information space first. Violence, intimidation, co-ordinated attacks took place online before the extra-judicial killings began.
Maria came under a systematic co-ordinated attack.
And it all happened on Facebook.
‘You cannot have integrity of elections, if you do not have integrity of facts’
And we don’t. We have neither.
@mariaressa has been beating this drum & trying to make us understand the existential assault on the truth. And where this leads
The election that brought Duterte to power was a month before Brexit.
We now know that in 2016, social media sites - but especially Facebook - were profoundly, deeply corrupted.
The Philippines was @mariaressa says ‘the first of the dominoes to fall’
@mariaressa has not just courageously risked her freedom to stand up to Duterte, she has used her situation to explain these wider truths.
And to hammer away at Facebook’s complicity time & again
Anyway, small thing, but I’m very very pleased that I got to raise what happened in the Philippines directly to the Facebook executive in charge of global elections at the time, this week.
The expression on her face..
And I hope it’s okay to share this. This was Maria’s message to our group yesterday. The situation in the Philippines is going from bad to worse.
This could not have come at a better time.
This is just too cute. The moment @mariaressa finds out she’s won the Nobel in the middle of a live seminar:
And this was the other side of the conversation…!
Adding this by @julieposetti to this thread.
The online harassment @mariaressa faces & which has such awful real world consequences is not just harassment against her as a journalist but as a female journalist: the victim of a terrible confluence of authoritarianism & misogyny
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