How to Stand Up to a Dictator

by Maria Ressa

there are, today, more autocracies in the world than there are democracies.

Without facts, you can’t have truth. Without truth, you can’t have trust. Without all three, we have no shared reality, and democracy as we know it—and all meaningful human endeavors—are dead.

The ability to discern and question, which is crucial to both journalism and democracy, is also determined by education. Journalists and news organizations are a reflection of the people’s power to hold its leaders accountable. That means that ultimately the quality of a democracy can also be seen in the quality of its journalists.

Today, I’m beyond disillusioned. I believe that Facebook represents one of the gravest threats to democracies around the world, and I am amazed that we have allowed our freedoms to be taken away by technology companies’ greed for growth and revenues. Tech sucked up our personal experiences and data, organized it with artificial intelligence, manipulated us with it, and created behavior at a scale that brought out the worst in humanity.

The dangers of “more” and “faster” have led us to dystopia: the suffocation of our minds by junk, a loss of clarity of thought and a lack of concentration, and the empowerment of individual over collective thinking.

Our ability to slow down, though, is limited because over time, Facebook knowingly created a disastrous and extremely harmful feedback loop: the more time you spend on Facebook, the more data the company gets to trick you into spending more time on Facebook. Your emotions, triggered by hormones and neurotransmitters like dopamine, are elevated; you feel as though you’re doing something, but in the end, it becomes a time suck, siphoning your energy away from real-world action and accomplishments.

Facebook, and the politicians benefiting from it, know full well the harms they are unleashing on the public. Facebook is the world’s largest distributor of news, yet studies have shown that on social media, lies laced with anger and hatred spread faster and farther than facts.57 The very platforms that now deliver the news to you are biased against facts, biased against journalists. They are, by design, dividing us and radicalizing us—because spreading anger and hatred is better for Facebook’s business.