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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More from @carolecadwalla

8 Oct
OH MY GOD, @mariaressa!!! You’ve only gone & won the Nobel Prize!!!!

This is AMAZING! I am so unbelievably proud to be friends with this amazing woman who has stood up for journalists everywhere. 👏👏👏
Maria is facing prison in the Philippines for the outrageous charge of ‘cyberlibel’ & she has shown such courage in standing up to Duterte. If you’re new to her work, this is an interview I did with her for @observer in April:

theguardian.com/world/2021/apr…
Here’s the citation.

‘For their efforts to safeguard freedom of expression which is a precondition for democracy & lasting peace’

Congrats to Dmitry Muratov also.

A GOOD day for journalism.
Read 4 tweets
6 Oct
This is a totally extraordinary story. A London court finds PM of the UAE to have hacked his ex-wife & her lawyers phones using NSO spyware.

But where my jaw hits the floor is here:

‘Cherie Blair, who works with the Israeli NSO Group’

WHAT?

theguardian.com/world/2021/oct…
Ok. There’s more here.

Cherie Blair is an ‘ethics advisor’ to NSO spyware group.

I just cannot..what the?!?!

Ethics advisor to a company implicated in MURDER?

thetimes.co.uk/article/cherie…
Totally normal for a leading human rights lawyer & ex-Labour PM’s wife to be advising a spyware firm accused of facilitating horrific abuses of human rights.
theguardian.com/politics/2021/…
Read 6 tweets
5 Oct
Hey Andy! Your tweet just got read out & you’ve been invited to testify to Congress under oath! Congrats
Pitching this in as the first question you might like to ask, @MarshaBlackburn @SenBlumenthal
Oh boy. G'luck, @andymstone
Read 4 tweets
4 Oct
Ok. Here’s a thought. Could someone at @facebook tell us what’s happening?
It’s like ‘Here’s a news story we didn’t like, have a 5,000-word blog post from @nickclegg.’ But wipe out half the planet’s ability to communicate &:
Last observed sighting of Mark Zuckerberg yesterday as a whistleblower accused his company of ‘moral bankruptcy’:
Read 4 tweets
4 Oct
Congrats & bravo to the Facebook whistleblower @FrancesHaugen_.

8 complaints to SEC.

Documents handed to 5 state attorney generals

Evidence to Congress on Tuesday

Scheduled to appear before UK parliamentary committee this month
Read @wsj piece by @JeffHorwitz who broke the story.

What’s staggering is that she found these docs on Facebook’s ‘Workplace’ forum accessible to any of its 63k employees.

She methodically & systematically copied them & approached a whistleblowing lawyer
wsj.com/articles/faceb…
‘I believe in truth & reconciliation,’ she says. ‘We need to admit reality. The first step of that is documentation.’

I 💯agree with this.

(It’s why I’ve banged on forever about necessity of getting access to the data from EUref. Facebook simply buried it.)
Read 5 tweets
3 Oct
🚨First interview with @wsj’s Facebook whistleblower tonight on @60Minutes tonight🚨

A BIG deal. The total failure to hold Facebook to account after Cambridge Analytica is coming home to roost.

How many more insurrections have to happen before we do?

Facebook is out running interference ahead of interview. Nick Clegg is on manoeuvres. Because this is serious.

So many civil society groups - including & esp @FBoversight - were involved in strenuous attempts to get FB to take action ahead of US election

nytimes.com/2021/10/02/tec…
The point is that so many academics, experts, civil rights groups were warning of exactly this.

The insurrection wasn’t some sort of black swan event impossible to predict. Facebook’s failure to take essential measures to protect against violence was pointed out *repeatedly*
Read 9 tweets

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