#MARIA RESSA HOW TO#

The first is antitrust: There’s three antitrust bills that are pending at the U.S. We look at them as separate problems, but they’re identical. Surveillance capitalism pulls together four things.

Read: What Facebook did to American democracy Without these, we have no shared space and democracy is a dream. Do you wonder why we have no shared space? I say this over and over. He said the greatest crisis we face is our Paleolithic emotions, our medieval institutions, and our godlike technology. So think about emergent behavior in humans. Wilson, who passed away in December, studied emergent behavior in ants. The tech platforms that now distribute the news are actually biased against facts, and they’re biased against journalists. Today we live in a behavior-modification system. That’s like if you had a polluted river and were only looking at a test tube of water instead of where the pollutant is coming from. Surveillance capitalism, which Shoshana Zuboff has described in great detail, is what powers this entire thing. Go further upstream to where our personal data has been pulled together by machine learning to make a model of you that knows you better than you know yourself, and then all of that is pulled together by artificial intelligence.Īnd that’s the mother lode. And that’s not even where the problem is. That’s where one editor’s decision is multiplied millions and millions of times. That’s the operating system that’s where the micro-targeting is. Move further upstream to algorithmic amplification. All of our debate starts with content moderation. Read: The grim conclusions of the largest-ever study of fake news Hard to capture your amygdala the way lies do. But when we’re up against lies, we just can’t win, because facts are really boring.

#MARIA RESSA HOW TO#

I spent that entire time learning how to tell stories that will make you care. And by 2018, MIT writes a paper that says that lies laced with anger and hate spread faster and further than facts. So what happened? Content creation was separated from distribution, and then the distribution had completely new rules that no one knew about. I wish we still had the gatekeeping powers, but we don’t. I peg it to when journalists lost the gatekeeping powers. This is what I said in the Nobel lecture: An atom bomb has exploded in our information ecosystem. The same thing has happened in our information ecosystem, but it is silent and it is insidious. I’ve said this over and over, that, really, this is like when 140,000 people died instantly in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And guess what? Your elections are coming up too. I call it an “Avengers assemble” moment in the Philippines. So here’s what I’m going to talk about today, really just three things: What happened? How did it change us? And what can we do about it? These are critical for me. And the question that goes through my head is, if in 2014, eight years ago, we did something about it, would we be where we are today? No, we wouldn’t be. And of course, I’ve had to revise it once Russia invaded Ukraine. The prologue for the book-which I pushed in at the end of last year-started with Crimea and the annexation in 2014, because that’s when you began to see the splintering of reality that had geopolitical impact. And the question I really want to ask you is the question we had to confront: What are you willing to sacrifice for the truth? Because these are the times we live in. I put all of this stuff together in a book, and this is part of the reason you’ll see these ideas over and over. And how do you have integrity of elections if you don’t have integrity of facts? That’s a reality that we’re living with. Filipinos are going to the poll and we are choosing 18,000 posts, including the president and vice president.

In the Philippines, we’re 33 days before our presidential elections. Editor’s Note: This piece was adapted from Ressa’s remarks at Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy, a conference hosted by The Atlantic and the University of Chicago, on April 6, 2022.

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