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)
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:
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
NEW: My piece for the Observer on how I was so deep into my investigation into Cambridge Analytica that I failed to realise that Hannah - my ex's daughter - was facing a human version of it: a stalker who was harvesting her data and weaponising it against her. 1/ theguardian.com/world/2025/mar…
I write about how I finally realised the scale of what was happening to Hannah, how comprehensively the police had failed her & how another woman, from the same class as her at the same school had also had a stalker, Alice Ruggles. Her stalker had murdered her. 2/
Hannah had 9 different characters harassing her, including 'Premium Escorts' purporting to sell her services & folders of evidence. I was overwhelmed by my own trials but I landed on the idea of emailing Georgia Catt, the brilliant producer of a podcast series I'd loved, The Missing Cryptoqueen
3/
Last week, the new owners of the Observer wrote to tell me they would *not* be issuing me with a new contract.
So...I want to say publicly that it was an absolute privilege to speak on behalf of my Observer colleagues during our strike. I don't regret doing so. And I learned so much from it.
1/
It means my 20 years at the Guardian & Observer is drawing to a close 😢. For most of that time, it's been the journalistic job of my dreams. I worked with the best editors, photographers & designers & got to do stories that wouldn't have been possible anywhere else. I know how lucky I've been.
2/
And I'm lucky too, in a way, that this is happening as the world convulses. My beat has been trying to understand the information revolution, it's the crisis beneath the crisis...& now I'm throwing myself into its swirling eddies just as the wave hits the shore.
This is what should be on every front page right now. What's happening in the US right now is an illegal power grab by a private citizen.
IT'S A COUP.
It's a digital coup. It's Musk who's leading it. The consequences are terrifying. And it's coming for us next. 1/
Please read this. I'm far from alone in saying it. The great
@TimothyDSnyder, @RBReich, @ruthbenghiat have all been shouting it.
There's superb reporting happening into every aspect of what's happening. But there's no framing. It's all facts, no story. broligarchy.substack.com/p/it-is-a-coup
This is a digital coup. A data coup. What Musk's cyber troops - mercenaries - have done is take control of the federal government's operating systems. They've downloaded or scraped vast quantities of data. It's a hack on an unprecedented scale. 3/
Britain: we have to understand wtf we’ve done. We’ve allowed one of Trump’s closest allies have access to our entire NHS data systems. This is the CEO of Palantir telling shareholders that ‘when it’s necessary to scare enemies & on occasion kill them’
There is much more I want to say on this but if you’re in the US right now, you need to understand that Silicon Valley is your creepy ex boyfriend. Who’s now conspiring with Donald Trump. They have your data & it can & will be weaponized against you.
Understand: the first use case of all technology is always against woman. A predator(s) used technology to surveille, harass & intimidate Hannah. And this is now what’s coming for journalists, activists, civil servants, lawyers & many more in the USA now.
The technology we use in every day life is powered by what @shoshanazuboff christened ‘surveillance capitalism’. But now we are heading into‘surveillance authoritarianism’. We are already in a coercively controlling relationship with these platforms
NEW: Hannah is my ex-step daughter. And when I was in middle of my Cambridge Analytica investigation, she had a stalker. Stalkers. A whole cast of characters making her life hell. In 2021, I approached the BBC: could we try & nail the perpetrator(s)? 1/
This was Han during those years. You would never know how much she was hiding from the world. Every day brought a new wave of abuse & threats that she dealt with alone. She finally opened up & told me the whole story in the dark winter lockdown of 2021. 2/
It was wildly confusing. But it was also clear where this could end. A young woman from Hannah’s school, with whom she shared a group of friends, was murdered by her stalker. And there was a common thread: the police hadn’t taken the action required 3/