Veteran
journalist and Rappler CEO Maria Ressa received the Nobel Peace Prize along with Russian
journalist Dmitry Muratov on Friday, December 10, in Oslo, Norway. Ressa,
who has become an international icon for press freedom and democracy, is
the first Filipino to win the award.
Below is
the full text of Ressa’s speech
delivered in Oslo on Friday.
Thank you.
Your
Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Distinguished Members of the Norwegian Nobel
Committee, Your Excellencies, Distinguished Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen.
I stand
before you, a representative of every journalist around the world who is forced
to sacrifice so much to hold the line, to stay true to our values and mission:
to bring you the truth and hold power to account. I remember the brutal
dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi, the assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia
in Malta, my friend, Luz Mely Reyes in Venezuela, Roman Protasevich in Belarus
(whose plane was literally hijacked so he could be arrested), Jimmy Lai
languishing in a Hong Kong prison, Sonny Swe, who after getting out of more
than seven years in jail, started another news group and now is forced to flee
Myanmar. And in my own country, 23-year-old Frenchie Mae Cumpio, still in
prison after nearly two years, and just 36 hours ago, the news that my former
colleague, Jess Malabanan, was killed with a bullet to his head.
There are
so many to thank for keeping us safer and working. The #HoldTheLine Coalition
of more than 80 global groups defending press freedom and the human rights
groups that help us shine the light. There are costs for you as well: more
lawyers have been killed than journalists in the Philippines – at least 63
compared to the 22 journalists murdered after President Rodrigo Duterte took
office in 2016. Since then, Karapatan, a member of our #CourageON human rights
coalition, has had 16 people killed, and Senator Leila de Lima, because she
demanded accountability, is serving her fifth year in jail. Or ABS-CBN, our
largest broadcaster, a newsroom that I once led, which, last year, lost its
franchise to operate.
I helped
create a startup, Rappler, turning 10 years old in January – we’re getting old
– our attempt to put together two sides of the same coin that shows everything
wrong with our world today: the absence of law and democratic vision for the
21st century. That coin represents our information ecosystem, which determines
everything else about our world. Journalists – that’s one side – the old
gatekeepers. The other is technology, with its god-like power, the new
gatekeepers. It has allowed a virus of lies to infect each of us, pitting us
against each other, bringing out our fears, anger, hate, and setting the stage
for the rise of authoritarians and dictators around the world.
Our
greatest need today is to transform that hate and violence, the toxic sludge
that’s coursing through our information ecosystem, prioritized by American
internet companies that make more money by spreading that hate and triggering
the worst in us. Well, that just means we have to work harder. In order to be
the good, we have to believe there is good in the world.
I have
been a journalist for more than 35 years: I’ve worked in conflict zones and war
zones in Asia, reported on hundreds of disasters, and while I have seen so much
bad, I have also documented so much good, when people who have nothing offer
you what they have. Part of how we at Rappler have survived the last five years
of government attacks is because of the kindness of strangers, and the reason
they help – despite the danger – is because they want to, with little
expectation of anything in return. This is the best of who we are, the part of
our humanity that makes miracles happen. This is what we lose in a world of
fear and violence.
You’ve
heard that the last time a working journalist was given this award was in 1936,
awarded in 1935. He was supposed to come and get it in 1936; Carl von Ossietzky
never made it to Oslo because he languished in a Nazi concentration camp. So,
we’re here, hopefully a little bit ahead, because we are both here!
By giving
this to journalists today – thank you – the Nobel committee is signaling a
similar historical moment, another existential point for democracy. Dmitry and
I are lucky because we can speak to you now (Yay for court approvals)! But
there are so many more journalists persecuted in the shadows with neither
exposure nor support, and governments are doubling down with impunity. The accelerant
is technology, when creative destruction takes new meaning.
You’ve
heard from David [Beasley]: we are standing on the rubble of the world
that was, and we must have the foresight and courage to imagine what might
happen if we don’t act now, and instead, please, create the world as it should
be – more compassionate, more equal, more sustainable.
To do
that, please ask yourself the same question we at Rappler had to confront five
years ago: What are you willing to sacrifice for the truth?
I’ll tell
you how I lived my way into the answer in three points: first, my context and
how these attacks shaped me; second, by the problem we all face; and finally,
finding the solution – because we must!
In less
than two years, the Philippine government filed 10 arrest warrants against me.
I’ve had to post bail 10 times just to do my job. Last year, I and a former
colleague were convicted of cyber libel for a story we published eight years
earlier, at a time the law we allegedly violated didn’t even exist. All told,
the charges I face could send me to jail for about 100 years.
But the
more I was attacked for my journalism, the more resolute I became. I had
firsthand evidence of abuse of power. What was meant to intimidate me and
Rappler only strengthened us.
At the
core of journalism is a code of honor. And mine is layered on different worlds
– from how I grew up, the golden rule, what’s right and wrong; from college,
and the honor code I learned there; and my time as a reporter, and the code of
standards and ethics I learned and helped write. Add to that the Filipino idea
of utang na loob – literally the debt from within – at its
best, a system of paying it forward.
Truth and
ethical honor intersected like an arrow into this moment where hate, lies, and divisiveness
thrive. As only the 18th woman to receive this prize, I need to tell you how
gendered disinformation is a new threat and is taking a significant toll on the
mental health and physical safety of women, girls, trans, and LGBTQ+ people all
around the world. Women journalists are at the epicenter of risk. This pandemic
of misogyny and hatred needs to be tackled now. Even there, though, we can find
strength. After all, you don’t really know who you really are until you’re
forced to fight for it.
Now let
me pull out so we’re clear about the problem we all face and how we got
here.
The
attacks against us in Rappler began five years ago when we demanded an end to
impunity on two fronts: Rodrigo Duterte’s drug war and Mark Zuckerberg’s
Facebook. Today, it has only gotten worse – and Silicon Valley’s sins came home
to roost in the United States on January 6 with mob violence on Capitol Hill.
What
happens on social media doesn’t stay on social media.
Online
violence is real world violence.
Social
media is a deadly game for power and money, what Shoshana Zuboff calls
surveillance capitalism, extracting our private lives for outsized corporate
gain. Our personal experiences sucked into a database, organized by AI, then
sold to the highest bidder. Highly profitable micro-targeting operations are
engineered to structurally undermine human will. I’ve repeatedly called it a
behavior modification system in which we are all Pavlov’s dogs, experimented on
in real time with disastrous consequences in countries like mine, Myanmar,
India, Sri Lanka, and so many more. These destructive corporations have
siphoned money away from news organizations and now they pose a foundational
threat to markets and elections.
Facebook
is the world’s largest distributor of news, and yet studies have shown that
lies laced with anger and hate spread faster and further than facts.
These
American companies controlling our global information ecosystem are biased
against facts, biased against journalists. They are, by design, dividing us and
radicalizing us.
I’ve said
this repeatedly over the last five years: without facts, you can’t have truth.
Without truth, you can’t have trust. Without trust, we have no shared reality,
no democracy, and it becomes impossible to deal with the existential problems
of our times: climate, coronavirus, now, the battle for truth.
When I
was first arrested in 2019, the officer said, “Ma’am, trabaho lang po (Ma’am,
I’m only doing my job).” Then he lowered his voice to almost a whisper as he
read my Miranda rights. He was really uncomfortable, and I almost felt sorry
for him. Except he was arresting me because I’m a journalist!
This
officer was a tool of power – and an example of how a good man can turn evil –
and how great atrocities happen. Hannah Arendt wrote about the banality of evil
when describing men who carried out the orders of Hitler, how career-oriented
bureaucrats can act without conscience because they justify what they’re doing
because they’re only following orders.
This is
how a nation – and a world – loses its soul.
You have
to know what values you are fighting for, you have to draw the lines early, but
if you haven’t done so, please, do it now – where this side you’re good, this
side, you’re evil. Some governments may be lost causes, and if you’re working
in tech, I’m talking to you.
How can
you have election integrity if you don’t have integrity of facts?
That’s
the problem facing countries with elections next year: among them, Brazil,
Hungary, France, the United States, and my Philippines – where we are at a do
or die moment with presidential elections on May 9. Thirty-five years after the
People Power Revolt ousted Ferdinand Marcos and forced his family into exile,
his son, Ferdinand Marcos Jr. is the front-runner for president, and he has
built an extensive disinformation network on social media, which Rappler
exposed in 2019. It’s literally changing history in front of our eyes.
To show
how disinformation is both a local and global problem, take the Chinese
information operations taken down by Facebook in September 2020, a year ago: it
was creating fake accounts using AI generated photos for the US elections,
polishing the image of the Marcoses in the Philippines, campaigning for the
daughter of President Duterte, and attacking me and Rappler.
So what
are we gonna do?
An
invisible atom bomb has exploded in our information ecosystem, and the world
must act as it did after Hiroshima. Like that time, we need to create new
institutions, like the United Nations, and new codes stating our values, like
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to prevent humanity from doing its
worse. It’s an arms race in the information ecosystem. To stop that requires a
multilateral approach that all of us must be part of. It begins by restoring
facts.
We need
information ecosystems that live and die by facts. We do this by shifting
social priorities to rebuild journalism for the 21st century while regulating
and outlawing the surveillance economics that profit from hate and lies.
We need
to help independent journalism survive, first by giving greater protection to
journalists and standing up against states which target journalists. Then we
need to address the collapse of the advertising model for journalism. This is
part of the reason that I agreed to co-chair the International Fund for Public
Interest Media, which is trying to raise money from overseas development
assistance funds. Right now, while journalists are under attack on every front,
only 0.3% of ODA funds is spent on journalism. If we nudge that to just 1%, we
can raise $1 billion a year for news organizations. That will be crucial for
the global south.
Journalists
must embrace technology. That’s why, with the help of Google News Initiative,
Rappler rolled out a new platform two weeks ago designed to build communities
of action. It won’t be as viral as what the tech platforms built, but the north
star is not profit alone. It is facts, truth, and trust.
Now for
legislation. Thanks to the EU for taking leadership with its Democracy Action
Plan. For the US, reform or revoke Section 230, the law that treats social
media platforms like utilities. It’s not a comprehensive solution, but it gets
the ball rolling. Because these platforms put their thumbs on the scale of
distribution. So while the public debate is here, down here on content
moderation downstream, the real sleight of hand happens further upstream, where
algorithms of amplification, algorithms of distribution have been programmed by
humans with coded bias. Their editorial agenda is profit-driven, carried out by
machines at scale. The impact is global, with cheap armies on social media
rolling back democracy, tearing it down in at least 81 countries around the
world. That impunity must stop.
Democracy
has become a woman-to-woman, man-to-man defense of our values. We’re at a
sliding door moment, where we can continue down the path we’re on and descend
further into fascism or we can choose to fight for a better world.
To do
that, please, ask yourself: What are YOU willing to sacrifice for the
truth?
I didn’t
know if I was going to be here today. Every day, I live with the real threat of
spending the rest of my life in jail because I’m a journalist. When I go home,
I have no idea what the future holds, but it’s worth the risk.
The
destruction has happened. Now it’s time to build – to create the world we
want.
So
please, with me, just close your eyes for just a moment, and imagine the world
as it should be. A world of peace, trust, and empathy, bringing out the best
that we can be.
Open your
eyes. Now go, we have to make it happen. Please, let’s hold the line together.
Thank you. – Rappler.com