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
A new investigation by @thenerve_news has found Palantir has recruited more than 30 senior officials from UK govt, a strategy transparency experts say poses an ‘acute risk’ of corruption. 1/
Link ⬇️
Palantir recruited the two most senior AI strategists from the Ministry of Defence & NHS…& won multimillion £ contracts with both, a pattern repeated across the UK govt. 2/
NEW: I’ve found an opaque financial vehicle owns a large chunk of the Observer. And neither it or the Guardian will say who it is. Why?
Well there is a clue. Which goes by way of Saudi Arabia… 1/
The capture of US media orgs is accelerating. And the UK is next in line. The BBC has fallen to an AI hype guy. And my old newspaper, the Observer, is publishing Palantir puff pieces.
Distracted by the slaughter of children in Iran & Lebanon? Me too! But what better time could there be for govt to quietly relaunch its Digital ID plan?
Missed it? Me too! But look who’s celebrating…
The director of ‘govt innovation’ at the Tony Blair Institute! 1/
The govt noisily scrapped Digital ID after huge pushback when nobody bought its ‘it’ll solve immigration’ bollocks. But as markets tanked last week - kudos to the comms team! - it was discreetly re-launched with all-new messaging: a ‘common sense solution to everyday probs’
2/
Darren Jones, Cabinet Office secretary, put out a press release claiming the govt will be holding a ‘consultation’.
NOT: ‘Do you want the govt & unknown tech companies to have all your data?’
BUT: (I kid you not): ‘At what age should you be able to get a digital id?’ 🤔 3/
Congrats to all the news orgs that signed syndication deals with this company. You’ve licensed your journalism to be a core component of Trump’s illegal war machine. Great job everyone 👏
A special shoutout to the editor-in-chief & CEO of the Guardian, Kath Viner & Anna Bateson. The deal with OpenAI was an unforced error which legitimised OpenAI’s illegal scraping of Guardian data & IP. In exchange for a quick buck. The NYTimes, in contrast, chose to sue.
Anthropic stood up to Trump. But OpenAI has capitulated. And now all its ‘partners’ are complicit in the consequences.
That includes Guardian. It will financially benefit from its journalists’ work - inc mine - being used to support Trump’s illegal wars & ICE’s reign of terror.