It’s a hair-on-the-back-of your neck moment. Listen to @mariaressa & Dmitry Muratov. They are the canaries in the coal mine.
If freedom of the press is in trouble, democracy is in trouble, we are all in trouble.
And that’s exactly what this Nobel is signalling.
And if you want to look at the specific historic parallels, then this is even more chilling. Carl Von Ossietzky won the prize in 1935 for exposing Germany’s secret re-armament.
And as Muratov points out here Russia’s aggressive military & expansionist plans are in plain sight
This Fri, the Nobel will draw attention to a profound existential problem: facts no longer work.
We’re in a tech-induced dystopia. That is accelerating authoritarianism.
It’s Ressa who understands Silicon Valley’s role in this. And it’s Muratov who’s living in what increasingly looks like a dictatorship.
There’s another sickening irony in play. The Russian org set up by another Nobel prize winner - Andrei Sakharov - is fighting for its life
Read this by @guardian’s Moscow correspondent @Andrew__Roth to understand how devastating the Kremlin’s assault on Memorial - & therefore on fundamental human rights - is.
What I didn’t manage to say is that Muratov, Ressa & us are points on a continuum.
In UK & US, social media undermined our elections’ integrity. In the Philippines, an authoritarian wants to jail journalists. And in Russia, a dictator has murdered them.
Finally. This is highly recommended. Muratov was in New York to support this new doc about journalists at Russia’s pioneering @tvrain & their struggle to survive Kremlin’s attempts to crush them. Called ‘Fuck This Job’, it’s by @krichevskaya & coming to @bbcstoryville in new year
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I wish I could tell you this is ironic. But earlier today, irony passed away after a massive cardiac event from which it did not recover
The whole presentation is worth watching in full for the complete mindfuck experience.
But @nickclegg is always a highlight. Here he is allaying fears that the metaverse might destroy democracy or launch nuclear missiles from your toaster which of course it can’t
‘So basically what you’re saying is that you’re going to be able to send a text message just by thinking about moving your fingers.’
Facebook is a malignant global empire destroying democracy.
Given I’m still paying a very very high personal cost for this talk (2+ years of the head-fuck & time-sink that is litigation), I hope you’ll forgive me for posting this again today of all days
Huge kudos to @FrancesHaugen & amazing work by dozens of journalists at 17 news orgs to report out these docs.
And today remember also the many many victims of Facebook, one of which is us, the British people. We still have *no idea* of what happened on its platform in EUref
Facebook is a black hole. It swallows the past. It’s a crime scene. And it refuses time & again to hand over the evidence.
What happened in Myanmar was an abomination. Yet *even last week* it was fighting legal attempts to uncover the truth
And the dam has burst. The embargo has lifted & 17 news organisations are dropping their Facebook scoops into news cycle already flooded with Facebook scoops.