Thread by @rapplerdotcom

Southeast Asian studies professor Leloy Claudio sits down with Rappler CEO Maria Ressa as they talk about disinformation and its effects on local and global spaces.

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Maria Ressa: Despite all of the battles that we're facing, despite #HoldTheLine, this is a really exciting time. It's really creative destruction. I don't think we've lived through anything like this. I certainly haven't in my lifetime.

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Ressa: The fact that the pandemic happened once in a century, the fact that news groups, business models are disintegrating

Ressa: The very platforms that are actually getting the advertising revenues are being used as a way to kill the facts, to kill the credibility of the institution.

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Ressa: It's an experiment, an ongoing experiment, and we are all part of it, especially Filipinos, because 100% of Filipinos on the internet are on Facebook, Facebook really is our internet.

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Ressa: Much lower on Twitter, the last time we checked, it was maybe like a fraction 40% 30% to 40%, on Twitter and still growing, because the folks who were involved in the machine have shifted to Twitter as well.

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Ressa shares 3 ideas in understanding the framework of disinformation campaigns online: The first is that we don't look at the content because the content is like changing clothes, it's like playing whack-a-mole.

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.@mariaressa: Which is why when you're only talking content moderation, that changes so fast, you're never going to get it.

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@mariaressa .@mariaressa: The idea came from tracking down Al-Qaeda operatives, cracking down al Qaeda in Southeast Asia, which is something I've been doing for 20-25 years.

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@mariaressa .@mariaressa: So I just took what we were doing in the real world, which is the spread of a virulent ideology physically amped up on social media.

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@mariaressa .@mariaressa: I think the first idea is don't think content, think networks. So we look at the networks of disinformation, and those networks are created and they keep doing that despite whatever content is there.

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@mariaressa .@mariaressa: The way Rappler does it is for fact-checking partners of Facebook. Whenever we see a lie, we look at how the lie is spread.

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@mariaressa .@mariaressa: The second concept is to think about influence operations and these are identical to information operations. It is how influence operations are used by the military, that's where it came from.

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@mariaressa .@mariaressa: In the Philippines in the late 80s, early 90s, we called it psyops.

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@mariaressa .@mariaressa: When I was a young reporter, I remember covering the Philippine military and psyops in left-controlled areas.

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@mariaressa .@mariaressa: The Russians are the ones to look at here, because they were the most successful in 2014. They created an alternate reality in Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea, so 2014 was a banner year for a lot of things.

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@mariaressa .@mariaressa: When you think about influence operations, think about it like this, it's a closed system. So our system that we look at is in the Philippines, you throw in, you open a virus, it's a virus of lies.

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@mariaressa .@mariaressa: And epidemiology is the right way to think about it, because when you throw that virus in, it infects real people, and those real people then change.

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@mariaressa .@mariaressa: So in that information ecosystem that's closed, you feed in a virus, a lie, and it changes the way people think, and the way they act.

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@mariaressa .@mariaressa: It's been four years of these influence operations, not just in the Philippines, but globally. And hand-in-hand with that, you see the deterioration, the crumbling of democracies all around the world.

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@mariaressa .@mariaressa: From 2017, it was counted at 28 countries, to 2019, Oxford University's Computational Propaganda research project, put it at least 70 countries.

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@mariaressa .@mariaressa: And then this will lead to the last part, which is how the narrative spreads.

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@mariaressa .@mariaressa: In the end, what's the goal of these influence operations, it isn't just to make you click on one story or even just to make you believe President Duterte is wonderful, that's not the goal.

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@mariaressa Ressa: 1) you can't act; 2) you can't have civic engagement; and then 3) the voice with the loudest megaphone, the person in power, the government in power, gains greater power, because they have formal authority.

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@mariaressa .@mariaressa: So all around the world, what we've seen is the birth of these digital authoritarians who have used this well.

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@mariaressa Ressa: They come bottom up exponential lies, and then they use the power that they have been given through elections and they come top down to cave in democracy from within.

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@mariaressa Ressa: It's like using the levers of democracy to turn it to – in our case – a dictatorship. I mean, this is where we're headed. You can see it.

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@mariaressa Ressa: Nothing is unique about the Philippines, nothing, absolutely nothing except for the fact that we were probably a guinea pig for the real target, which was America.

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@mariaressa Ressa: Chris Wylie said that we were the petri dish that the Cambridge Analytica tested tactics of mass manipulation in the Philippines, and countries like ours.

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@mariaressa Ressa: When you only look at the advertising industry and how it has been co-opted as the foot soldiers, you're looking at the letters and not the thesis.

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@mariaressa Ressa: So when you're talking about the foot soldiers, you miss the entire infrastructure, and it is the same in every country, even the ones who have done it. So when you're talking foot soldiers, who puts them to work?

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@mariaressa Ressa: Here we have some names in the Philippines, someone like Nic Gabunada, who was both CEO of Omnicom Media, a top advertising agency, but also was in charge of social media of then-mayor Duterte’s campaign.

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@mariaressa Ressa: That's fascinating, because he was the only private person that's been named by Facebook, and the only private person whose networks were taken down in one chunk, right before the 2019 elections.

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@mariaressa Ressa: The big picture, which is local is global and global is local. The tainting of our information ecosystem, the fact that we live in the upside down today is because of decisions made in Silicon Valley.

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@mariaressa Ressa: Those decisions attacked countries in the global south far more because our institutions are weak, we have endemic corruption, we have no regulation or if the regulation is in place, they're co-opted by the power that wants to retain this is.

@mariaressa Ressa on Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg: [Facebook] has oversized power. He's as powerful as the President of the United States, if you think about it.

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@mariaressa Ressa: I mean, which platform puts together, I think it's almost 2.8 billion accounts, cutting across all of the vertical silos of media? That is a tremendous power.

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@mariaressa Ressa: That's the reason why I joined the Real Facebook Oversight Board.

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@mariaressa Ressa: With Carole Cadwalladr who broke the Cambridge Analytica investigations and Shoshana Zuboff, who wrote this 750-page book called ‘The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.’

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@mariaressa Ressa: [Zuboff] basically looks at the economics of Facebook, of YouTube, of the social media platforms and tells you that this extractive process, that isn't essentially insidiously manipulates us, sells our most vulnerable moment to a message.

@mariaressa Ressa: And they can sell it to a company or a country, and literally impacts how we behave, that that should be outlawed. She compares it to the slave trade.

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@mariaressa Ressa: We like to think in the Philippines, that what's happening here is unique: it isn't. It is happening in every democracy around the world.

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@mariaressa Ressa: The first step, at least for me, of fighting back is changing the role of the new gatekeepers, demanding accountability from them as well as we do from our government.

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@mariaressa Ressa: So in 2016, we came out with this three-part propaganda war series. The first was weaponizing the internet. The second is how fake algorithms impact democracy. The third is manufacturing consensus, how 26 fake accounts impact 3 million others.

@mariaressa Ressa: I wrote two of the three parts of that series that we published, and I got clobbered online, never felt anything like it before.

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@mariaressa Ressa: When I listen to the Armed Forces chief talk about where he defends the soldiers who are handling ‘Hands Off Our Children,’ and that makes me just realize they don't understand how digital creates a map of your behavior, and can be traced.

@mariaressa Ressa: Digital forensics is far more accurate than investigative journalists have been able to do in the real world. You don't have to ask anyone, you just have to look at how they behave, and that data is online.

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@mariaressa Ressa: So what we tried to do was to get a sense, a snapshot at every moment; here's the database of the Philippine information ecosystem.

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@mariaressa Ressa: And once we saw that, once we saw the tactics, once we saw the design of the platform, that was how I got confidence to fight back.

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@mariaressa Ressa: How do you stand up to the President? How do you stand up to a government with its vast powers?

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@mariaressa Ressa on standing up to power: We're just a small little group and I'm only one citizen in this and the reason is because we see the data and the data is damning.

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@mariaressa Ressa on Pulse Asia President Ronnie Holmes’ remark that television remains the superior media in the country: Here's what's wrong with that answer. Rappler actually came out with an entire editorial afterwards, point #1 is that that's no longer true that television is king.

@mariaressa Ressa: If you look at surveys that have been done of the Philippines, and the actual behavior on digital, you'll see that, brands for example, it's almost 50/50 now. 50% look at television, 50% on social media.

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@mariaressa Ressa: 2) in terms of disinformation, 100% of Filipinos on the internet or on social media, did they actually ask “so how do you define news?” If your sister told you what this is, and they got it from disinformation, is that news or is it not news?

@mariaressa Ressa: What I would suggest is that our statistical survey companies look at several factors that they refuse to look at, because I understand why they want to stick to the methodology because they want to compare it with the past.

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@mariaressa Ressa: But there's a break, because technology has fundamentally changed the landscape.

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@mariaressa Ressa: So what happened here is in 2016, Rappler actually partnered with Globe, and we went in between, instead of doing a statistical survey, we used phones to be able to do surveys that were in between.

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@mariaressa Ressa: So instead of doing 1,200, we did 80,000, we could do tens of thousands in one chunk and ask more questions. And we did it every month leading up to the elections.

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@mariaressa Ressa: I really appeal to these amazing people because Pulse Asia and SWS have been there forever. But I think that this is the time when their industry has been overturned by technology, and then you add the Duterte administration.

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@mariaressa Ressa: I have always said this, governance with the three C's: corrupt, coerce, co-opt, then you add violence and fear. It's a very different landscape.

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@mariaressa Ressa: And if you don't get the numbers right, you then become an enabler to influence operations, which is already happening on social media.

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@mariaressa Ressa: The Philippines is different from other parts of the world in the sense that President Duterte attacked traditional media from the beginning.

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@mariaressa Ressa: The administration attacked the Inquirer first, the administration filed cases against the owners.

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@mariaressa Ressa: Then they attacked ABS-CBN, they were the second target, the largest broadcaster, President Duterte said he would not renew their franchise, fast forward a few years, the franchise isn't renewed.

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Ressa: Then we were the third attacked in 2017. So again, understand that the media is under attack.

#BasaganNgTrip: https://t.co/6dvRMV9U9a

@mariaressa Ressa: The second part is, as the media is under attack, it's the owners that tend to get attacked first. I'm in a very strange position in the sense that they attacked our business at the same time they attacked me online.

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@mariaressa Ressa: But they did the same thing to the owners of the Inquirer. That kind of level of intimidation and fear and harassment has not been felt by owners in the same level since 1972.

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@mariaressa Ressa: The last part is: separate the owners from the reporters. And this is why I have hope because I do think the reporters want to do the story, but the pressure that is being put on the business prevents them.

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@mariaressa Ressa: The reason why we can do this in Rappler, is, you know, how many more cases will the government file against us? I've already had 8 criminal charges.

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@mariaressa Ressa: I just think that they forgot that our standards and ethics are really clear, I have spent most of my career outside the Philippines. Their tactics of intimidation are familiar, and we won't buckle. We also don't own any other businesses, we have nothing else to protect.

@mariaressa Ressa: Understand that the core of every battle is the facts because if you don't have facts, and it is a fact from all of the studies from the data, that lies laced with anger and hate spread faster and further on social media than really boring facts.

@mariaressa Ressa: If lies spread faster, that means you make facts irrelevant. Think about a democracy: if you don't have facts, you can't have truth. You can't have trust, you can't have democracy.

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@mariaressa Ressa: Look at the US elections, how can you have elections if you don't have facts?

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@mariaressa Ressa: The problem is that the insidious manipulation we are facing on social media is something humanity has never dealt with. That's why I move it away from media all the time because traditional media has lost its power. We're no longer gatekeepers.

@mariaressa Ressa on exposing disinformation networks: I look back four years later, and I am so glad we did those stories, because that helped alert the public.

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@mariaressa Ressa: Power will always hold information back from people but the idea always was you push to publicize the threat as much as you can, because you have to warn people when they are in danger.

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@mariaressa Ressa cites Sinan Aral’s book ‘The Hype Machine’: He's been studying this for 20 years. He's an engineer, he looked at neuroscience, and then he looked at public policy. This is the technology trifecta.

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@mariaressa Ressa: What's the technology trifecta? It starts with your smartphones that collect data from you. That is your gateway to the upside down.

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@mariaressa Ressa: On your smartphones lie your social networks: that's Facebook, YouTube, Shopee, Netflix.

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@mariaressa Ressa: That is all data, it takes your data, and it feeds it back to you. And that's where machine intelligence comes in.

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@mariaressa Ressa: What do we do on a social media platform or on any digital platform? We put in our data, we put in what we want what we think and machine learning pulls it up to build a model of you, that model knows you better than you know yourself.

@mariaressa Ressa: That model is then along with others pulled up by artificial intelligence and that takes the most vulnerable moment you have to a message, and it will sell you, it will sell that vulnerable moment.

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@mariaressa Ressa: That can be to an advertiser that's kind of benign, but not really because this is not advertising in the old sense. It could be to a country, which is what's happening.

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@mariaressa Ressa: State-sponsored propaganda is different. This is a behavior modification system and we are Pavlov's dogs. When you're fed that, regardless of whether you take the message, the machine then pulls your response and learns.

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@mariaressa Ressa: It knows you better the next time it does that. This is continuous 100% of the time. And what that does is it creates these trends on the right.

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@mariaressa Ressa: What is personalized mass persuasion? This is why we can have alternative facts, alternative realities, because every feed is different, it's personalized.

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@mariaressa Ressa: But if I pay enough, if a country pays enough, or seeds this information enough, it can sway you to think the fact is fiction and fiction is fact.

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@mariaressa Ressa on how China ops could influence the Philippines: On September 22, Facebook took down an influence operation from China. It had targeted Taiwan first, then Indonesia, then the Philippines, and it was most successful in the Philippines.

@mariaressa Ressa: This Chinese influence operation was seeding pro-Duterte, pro-Marcos, pro-Sara Duterte for president. It was a pro-China, Chinese Navy, and it was attacking me. That's an influence operation that is foreign.

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@mariaressa Ressa: The second trend that was there is hyper-socialization. And this is critical because this leads to the virality of the messages that are seeded.

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@mariaressa Ressa: In the physical world we have 6 degrees of separation. On Facebook, on social media, that six degrees, because of hyper socialization, because the design of the platform has collapsed, it's actually less, far less, it's 3.75 degrees of separation.

@mariaressa Ressa: Every single social media platform has a different, shorter, smaller level, what that means is that things go viral faster online, than in the real world, because it's no longer six degrees of separation.

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@mariaressa Ressa on feedback loop in the Philippines: In 2016, we were all in the center in terms of facts, we agreed on shared facts, regardless of which side, and we weren't as polarized as we are now.

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@mariaressa Ressa: After the election of President Duterte, the social media platforms, and this is Facebook, YouTube, they made one technical decision: the recommendation engine for growth uses friends of friends.

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@mariaressa Ressa: This is what it does to society; if you're pro-Duterte, and you grow your network with friends of friends, you move for the right.

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@mariaressa Ressa: If you're anti-Duterte and you grow your network with friends of friends who further left, Facebook is growing on both these points.

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@mariaressa Ressa: So regardless whether you're pro- or anti-Facebook benefits or whatever social media platforms, and as they grow over time, you splinter the public sphere even further apart. That means the echo chambers are there, that means you can have the alternative facts.

@mariaressa Ressa: To go back to the statistical surveys, there's absolutely no way that those surveys happened without being influenced by disinformation.

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@mariaressa Ressa: I know this firsthand, in Facebook, the message of “journalists = criminal” was seeded in 2016 about me.

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@mariaressa Ressa: In 2018, the government filed 11 cases against me and Rappler. In 2019, they arrested me, you know, in a five-week period, I was arrested twice in February. Valentine's Day, I was finally released on bail.

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@mariaressa Ressa: This is the weaponization of the law, you're attacked bottom-up, top-down. And what happened in 2020? I was convicted of cyber libel, a crime that didn't exist when the story we published 8 years ago happened.

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@mariaressa Ressa: It's for a story I didn’t write, edit or supervise, at a time when the law didn't exist. As you pointed out, journalist equals criminal.

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@mariaressa Ressa: I think what this time period I hope will show is that the old world is destroyed. We're standing on the rubble of the old world, and we are actively creating the new world right now.

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@mariaressa Ressa: We need to be really aware of the impact of technology, especially because so many of us were forced online.

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@mariaressa Ressa: The tyranny of trends, and that's the kind of manufactured consensus. If you're not with us, you're against us. That's the kind of thinking there, that's where the nastiness of human nature is enabled. This is really wrong.

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@mariaressa Ressa: I believe that the design of social media truly has to be changed because you can destroy with this, but you cannot create. And here are the levers for how we are going to move forward.

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@mariaressa Ressa: First, outlaw the selling of our behavioral patterns, outlaw that insidious manipulation. So the second is code, why not like for doctors where they are legally liable coders, when they build something. There's a code.

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@mariaressa Ressa: Norms are our culture, our standards, Filipinos like to think that we're like the only ones affected by this. We're not and our norms have drastically changed.

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@mariaressa Ressa: The fourth lever is laws…. I'm not for breaking up Facebook, because we're a Facebook partner. We're frenemies, right?

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@mariaressa Ressa: But I appeal to their enlightened self-interest and some regulation is absolutely necessary now because it's been the wild wild west for too long, and we bear the brunt of it.

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@mariaressa Ressa: In fact, I say I bear the brunt of this. I could go to jail because of what they failed to do right.

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@mariaressa Ressa on whether or not Facebook has done enough to fight disinformation in PH: In the Philippines, not enough. There have been four takedowns since 2018, and these takedowns all are connected to the propaganda machine of the administration.

@mariaressa Ressa: The biggest takedown, Twinmark Media, is the kind of site that Mocha Uson shared the most.

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@mariaressa Ressa: This takedown implicated Nic Gabunada. For the record, we exposed that more than a year before the takedown.

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@mariaressa Ressa: This most recent takedown is instructive to us because they’re influence operations and finally Facebook is becoming far more transparent.

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@mariaressa Ressa: They pointed out that the Philippine influence operations was linked to the police and the military, that's dangerous, and for the Armed Forces to defend it is even more dangerous.

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@mariaressa Ressa: The Chinese influence operations, which they pointed out was using AI generated photos to create fake accounts accounts, and was also creating fake accounts for the US elections.

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@mariaressa Ressa: Have they done enough? No, absolutely not. This is the reason why I joined the Real Facebook Oversight.

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@mariaressa Ressa: Internet fraud is an industry in the Philippines so it isn't a surprise that we're a testing ground.

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@mariaressa Ressa: Our position is that when it's a battle for facts, journalism is activism. But in the States, they're still able to say that ‘we want to be in the center.’ It will evolve if Facebook doesn't do more, but how can you have a center when it's already been ripped apart?

@mariaressa Ressa: I felt like at one point, the government really made it a point to scare people and the people who were working in the advertising industry.

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@mariaressa Ressa: I think it's great to get their voice, but they're the foot soldiers. I think you have to hold the masterminds to account.

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@mariaressa Ressa: We look at these three things: technology, journalism, and civic engagement. And we will look at it globally.

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@mariaressa Ressa: Second, we have to help journalists survive the next few years. And the pandemic is really killing advertising, the social media platforms, kind of killing advertising for news.

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@mariaressa Ressa: This means that the business of journalism, of news is, unless you're the New York Times, or or the Washington Post, it's the smaller groups are going to have a hard time to survive.

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@mariaressa Ressa: The third is civil society, civic engagement. Every generation gets the democracy it deserves, and our old ideas that we can take democracy for granted, throw that out the door, out, throw it out the window, because civil society is critical here.

@mariaressa Ressa: I think this is the time when you think through the way you think the world should, because the good part of having a destroyed world is you're going to have to rebuild. And that's part of what keeps me excited.

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@mariaressa Ressa: That's the mindset we should be in. I hope your generation will do better. And so far, you know, from what I see in Rappler, our younger generation, they are idealistic, they are passionate.

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@mariaressa Ressa: You got to build a better world than the one we're living leaving behind.

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@mariaressa Ressa: We have never lived through a moment like this. It's a once-in-a-century moment with a pandemic, with everything, with the information ecosystem upside down, with the pace of how we are being manipulated.

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@mariaressa Ressa: Absorb it and then say, “All right, what am I going to do about it?” Then if all of us do something about it, that is the essence of democracy.

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