Thread by @rapplerdotcom

In a #Time100Talks discussion hosted by Prince Harry, Rappler’s @mariaressa sits down with Stanford Internet Observatory’s Renée DiResta (@noUpside) to discuss the role of technology and online spaces in democracy.

Watch the interview here: rappler.com/world/global-a…

Ressa: On June 15th, in the middle of the lockdown in the Philippines, it’s the longest in the world, and among the strictest…. I was convicted of cyber libel, a crime that didn’t exist when we published the story. #Time100Talks

Ressa: [I was convicted over a story that was published] 8 years ago, that I didn’t write, edit, or supervise, and now I can go to jail for up to 6 years. #Time100Talks

Ressa: Having said all of that, I have 8 arrest warrants, I am fighting each case in court, and the weaponization of the law was actually enabled by the bottom-up attacks on social media. #Time100Talks

Ressa: That began in 2016, and that’s progressed, and we’ve seen the evolution. Having said that, it’s good. Why? Because we just breathe it in like polluted air, and we find a way to fight back. #Time100Talks

Prince Harry: The Manila court found you guilty of cyber libel, a charge that your team argues was meant to silence you for exposing corruption in the Philippines. #Time100Talks

Prince Harry: What changes have you seen in how the news industry sees and carries out its duty to inform all of us? #Time100Talks

Ressa: We have never been under such intense attacks. By next year, I would’ve been a journalist for 35 years. I’ve worked in conflict areas, I’ve led teams in war zones. #Time100Talks

Ressa: At least in those areas, you know if the shooting is coming from here, how to protect yourself… In this environment, it’s far more insidious, and the tactics are the same globally, and it is enabled by technology. #Time100Talks

Ressa: In our case in the Philippines, exponential attacks on social media, bottom-up, a lie told a million times becomes a fact. That began happening in 2016, 4 years ago. #Time100Talks

Ressa: And in 2016, they seeded the narrative, “journalist = criminal.” 2017, you have President Duterte himself saying the same thing, top-down, in his State of the Nation Address. #Time100Talks

Ressa: In 2018, the weaponization of the law happened, 11 cases filed against us. 2019, I had 8 arrest warrants. I was arrested twice in a 5-week period, and 2020, I was convicted in one of the first cases. #Time100Talks

Ressa: “Journalist = criminal,” the world has turned upside down. I guess my main concern is this – I think journalists around the world have done our jobs. We have held the line, we are telling you the facts. #Time100Talks

Ressa: Without facts, you can’t have truth. Without this, you can’t have trust. Without any of these, democracy as we know it is dead, and I have been saying that for 4 years. #Time100Talks

Ressa: With elections coming up in the United States, without facts, how can you have integrity of elections with this kind of insidious manipulation that’s happening online? How can voters choose? How can we know that this is the will of the people? #Time100Talks

Ressa: These are huge issues, right, and I think we need a global collective to try to deal with this. #Time100Talks

Ressa: I became a journalist because I knew information is power, and I wanted to fight for justice. We shine the light, that’s the mission of journalism. This time shows you, more than at any other time, that information really is power. #Time100Talks

Ressa: What triggered it is newsgroups lost our gatekeeping powers to technology, and technology abdicated responsibility for protecting the public sphere. #Time100Talks

Prince Harry: How have online platforms, and by some extension, news outlets, enabled the spread of misinformation or propaganda? #Time100Talks

DiResta: As Maria was describing this bottom-up activism, originally, social platforms were a way for people to connect with each other. #Time100Talks

DiResta: And there was an explosion, extraordinary social movements, that came about as a result of that. We don’t want to imply that democratizing access, the ability to create content, the ability to disseminate it… #Time100Talks

DiResta: ...the ability to bypass gatekeepers, to make your voice heard, particularly if you were a member of a community that didn’t have access to press. This is a global phenomenon that happened on social platforms. #Time100Talks

DiResta: But the downside of that, the unintended consequence, is that when you connect to everybody and when you make it possible for information to spread instantaneously, not everybody who is endowed with that power uses it responsibly. #Time100Talks

DiResta: What you see is fake people begin to participate in the conversation. Fake media properties begin to spring up. As Maria mentioned, this is a tool of power. #Time100Talks

DiResta: If you can control the narrative and if you can dominate the share of voice, then you can achieve real world objectives. #Time100Talks

DiResta: The tools of influence, the democratization of the ability to influence and the democratization of propaganda, meant that ordinary people can have a profound impact in shaping the direction of leadership, policy, and the direction their country is going. #Time100Talks

Prince Harry: Media is a huge responsibility, and it is a huge power, and it’s a privilege. But the moment it gets taken out of responsible hands, then you have sort of uncharted territory, chaos – one might describe it as. #Time100Talks

DiResta: I think that’s accurate, and I think a lot of where we are today is thinking about, we have a brand new information environment. It’s only about 10 years old, the kind of social web. #Time100Talks

DiResta: Whenever there’s a new technological tool for the dissemination of information or propaganda, there’s kind of a period of social upheaval, while society began to understand how to use it, what it is for… #Time100Talks

DiResta: ...and where regulators begin to think about how to address it. I think we’re in that pivotal period right now, trying to understand how to take the good and minimize the chaos… #Time100Talks

DiResta: ....and to achieve an environment where people do have that freedom of expression, that ability to connect, without some of the unintended downstream harms that we’ve seen manifest as a result. #Time100Talks

Prince Harry: What is the real effect of misinformation? What is it actually doing to us? #Time100Talks

Ressa: I’m living through it, and I can compare it over 35 years…. When journalists and news organizations were the gatekeepers, we had standards and ethics, values. We were legally liable. #Time100Talks

Ressa: We protected the facts. But what happened when technology took over is that they took the platforms, and they didn’t realize it, unintended consequences. #Time100Talks

Ressa: But what they did is something journalists have never done, which is to willfully manipulate people, to use neuroscience to build in – it’s called “optimizing” growth and engagement. #Time100Talks

Ressa: What they do is they figure out the way we think, and then just gleefully figure out that, “These are the worst parts of human nature, let’s not just influence, let’s take their data.” #Time100Talks

Ressa: So on every social media platform, we put in our data, it builds a model of each of us. It knows us more intimately than we know ourselves. That model is pulled up by artificial intelligence into this pool where a company or country has a message…. #Time100Talks

Ressa: …and the artificial intelligence will give the most vulnerable moment you have to a message, and to the highest bidder, sell it, and you are nudged. It’s a feedback loop. #Time100Talks

Ressa: When you are nudged, you can take the nudge, or you can not. But whatever action you take goes right back into the machine. #Time100Talks

Ressa: I think the reality now is the world is at a precipice. I am paying the price for Silicon Valley’s decisions, and there has to be accountability. #Time100Talks

Ressa: We are fighting impunity in the Philippines, not just of our government that is killing people. The drug war – our human rights groups say, it’s at least 27,000 people killed since last December. But we’re also challenging the impunity of the platforms. #Time100Talks

Ressa: Facebook in particular, Facebook is our internet. You could say Rodrigo Duterte and Mark Zuckerberg are on the same page as far as the threats to us are concerned. #Time100Talks

Prince Harry: In your experience and with all your connections, who are the leaders in preventing the spread of misinformation? Which people, organizations need a light shone on them right now? #Time100Talks

Ressa: This is what’s happening, as Renée said it, it’s creative destruction. I think we all have to accept that the world as we knew it is dead, and in the same way, this year is the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II. #Time100Talks

Ressa: The 75th anniversary of Hiroshima, Nagasaki. What happened? The entire world came together…. This is another one of those pivotal moments. #Time100Talks

Ressa: Data is not oil, it is plutonium…. If it’s plutonium and an atom bomb went off, what would you do, right? I’m saying we all have a stake in this. #Time100Talks

Ressa: Every American going into elections, you can’t just think voting is enough. You’re going to have to sit and ask yourself the same question I asked myself, which is, “What will you sacrifice for the truth? What will you sacrifice for the facts?” #Time100Talks

Ressa: And in our case, we’re really called on to sacrifice a lot. #Time100Talks

Prince Harry: What I’m hearing you say is, the way that these platforms have almost hijacked media, news privilege, power, all of that, what is that doing to news organizations? #Time100Talks

DiResta: In the States, we’ve seen an extraordinary fragmentation of media. All major media properties have presences on social media as well where they kind of participate in that battle for attention. #Time100Talks

DiResta: You see headlines that are much more sensational than the actual substance of the article, a lot of the time, that’s because they’re competing…. Now, people see what is curated for them. #Time100Talks

DiResta: It’s the combination of how the information is delivered to us, in particular…. A lot of the ways we see information is no longer a holistic view of the world, by looking at the entirety of the coverage of a particular topic. #Time100Talks

DiResta: What we see are the things that are curated for us, which means that the feed, which is algorithmically ranking, hierarchically, what we are most likely to be receptive to, or want to pay attention to. #Time100Talks

DiResta: Based on, again, platforms being roughly in competition with each other for our time and our attention. That dynamic is very real, it is informed by the business model. #Time100Talks

DiResta: I think where we are today with news in particular…. People gather on social platforms, and they’re there because they want to talk to their communities while consuming the news. #Time100Talks

DiResta: This is kind of a marriage of entertainment, social, and information all being in the same place. The net effect of that is they are seeing what is shared by their friends and their communities. #Time100Talks

DiResta: In a lot of cases, you’ll have a narrow, bubble-type view of what’s happening in the world. But more than that, there’s a constant desire for immediacy, knowing the truth instantaneously. #Time100Talks

DiResta: That’s not how news, reputable news, works. There’s that demand…. People expect reputable information instantaneously, and those two things are in tension. #Time100Talks

DiResta: I don’t think we have an effective way to resolve that in our curation or amplification structures at this point. #Time100Talks

Prince Harry to Ressa: As a journalist, that must be incredibly hard, because there’s competition that’s now been created, where you have to get something online first. And if you don’t, then you lose by how many millions of clicks. #Time100Talks

Prince Harry: Eventually, the pressure that’s coming from above to get that story online as quickly as possible, all of a sudden, the importance of facts is sort of pushed to the side. There’s this struggle to try to get the story first. #Time100Talks

Ressa: I would go one step further than that, I think that was the case in 2014, 2015, when we were getting the rush to digitalization, when news was moving online. #Time100Talks

Ressa: Rappler was a start-up, we began online in 2012 and we embraced Facebook. This is the way I’m living through it – meaning has been atomized. #Time100Talks

Ressa: Everything a journalist does is torn apart into bits and pieces, and then it is the algorithm of delivery platforms, of social media, that decides the context for the sentences you write. #Time100Talks

Ressa: We are no longer in charge of context or meaning, and that is the problem, because when you have a democracy and an algorithm that is meant to exploit your weaknesses, to keep you on the platform… #Time100Talks

Ressa: When that is what determines the context of the messages you live, the messages that give meaning to your world, you’re really reduced to meaninglessness. #Time100Talks

Ressa: And aside from that, the designs of the platforms themselves actually encourage us against them. In the Philippines, if you’re pro-Duterte, in 2016, in order to grow the social media platforms, they recommend friends of friends. #Time100Talks

Ressa: If you do that, in 2016, the pro-Duterte people grew and they moved further right. The anti-Duterte people grew their platforms and they moved further left. #Time100Talks

Ressa: What’s being torn apart here is the public sphere, that’s why we have no shared facts. What does that mean? No meaning, no context. #Time100Talks

Ressa: Or the context that is provided by an algorithm that is opaque at best, we have no idea how it’s manipulating us. #Time100Talks

Prince Harry: Context stripped away right, on social media… Of course it’s going to anger people. Of course it’s going to cause divisiveness. #Time100Talks

Prince Harry: Because what should be a story of context about this long, gets shrunk down into 1 sentence or 3 sentences, and it enrages people, because they’re making opinions or decisions based on that instant hit. #Time100Talks

Prince Harry: As opposed to what the younger generations seem to be doing, which is, “I’ve seen something somewhere, I’m going to fact check that. I’m going to go somewhere else.” #Time100Talks

Prince Harry: If you have 2 or 3 different areas to compare it with, then great. But if you’re just on one social media platform and you are unaware of your habits being learned by the device, you’re creating your own echo chamber. #Time100Talks

Prince Harry: Therefore, you’re creating your own reality. Once again, it is impossible to be able to have an argument or a discussion with somebody else, because you are adamant that you are right. #Time100Talks

Prince Harry: Because you’ve seen it on all of your news feeds, but those news feeds have been created for you. #Time100Talks

Ressa: It feeds into your cognitive bias. The platforms actually spread lies laced with anger and hate, faster and further than really boring facts. #Time100Talks

Ressa: Journalists spend lifetimes learning how to tell stories so that you care. But we don’t stand a chance in these delivery platforms. This is the problem, anger and hate is part of it. The manipulation of our emotions is part of it. #Time100Talks

Ressa: What you talked about is a thinking slow process. Journalism is a thinking slow process that is trying to be distributed on a thinking fast platform. We are going to lose. #Time100Talks

Prince Harry: These are global platforms that have the ability or have connected people all around the world. Presumably, handled the right way or managed the right way…. #Time100Talks

Prince Harry: This idea [that] it can’t be changed or it’s now completely out of control, one would hope is, it’s actually false. Something can be done about this, and we have a world that is connected for all the right reasons. #Time100Talks

DiResta: I think that Maria’s actually right, there is [no] accountability in the way we need it to be, it’s just not there yet. In the US in particular, the very idea of a fact check is partisan now. It is perceived as censorship. #Time100Talks

DiResta: If somebody tells you what you’ve said is wrong, that is censoring your opinion. That is where we are. #Time100Talks

DiResta: I think that one of the things that we’ve tried to do is we do try to work with the platforms where we make constructive suggestions so that in the near term, we have a little bit more in the way of positive outcomes. #Time100Talks

DiResta: I think on the optimism front, we are also seeing so much awareness from the public, which is demanding accountability, but more than that, which is recognizing that they also have some agency. #Time100Talks

DiResta: Not a ton, as much as they need, but enough at this point where we’re starting to see media literacy and efforts as you mentioned from the younger generation where they’re doing that lateral searching. #Time100Talks

DiResta: I think that as we continue to develop those programs and the younger generation continues to take over, we’re headed in the right direction. #Time100Talks

Ressa: Rappler started in 2012 and we had 3 pillars – technology, journalism, community…. That is where the global battles should begin – tech, demand accountability, demand regulations, demand enlightened self-interest. #Time100Talks

Ressa: Second is journalism, we keep doing our jobs. Facts are incredibly important, and for the international community, help newsgroups survive this time period. #Time100Talks

Ressa: The third is community. Civil society has to come together, and we have to feed them facts. These are all connected. This is the reason why I liked joining the real Facebook oversight board. #Time100Talks

Ressa: There are very strong civil rights activists there, they’re very strong academics and journalists. Our battle is combined – we are the tripods of democracy. #Time100Talks