How to Stand Up to a Dictator: The Fight for Our Future

by Maria Ressa

I didn’t tell war stories but instead spoke about something more conceptual: the myth of the “objective journalist.” I distinguished that idea from the principles of journalism, which, through an organizational system of checks and balances, have built a goal of objectivity into the process of reporting. But there is no such thing as an objective journalist; anyone who says otherwise is lying. It was important to define what people meant by “objectivity” because it is the word used to attack journalists for somehow being dishonest or biased. That’s why I react to it as strongly as I do. I always replace “objective” with “good” to describe a journalist.

A good journalist doesn’t look for balance—as when, say, a world leader commits a war crime or outright lies to his or her citizenry—because that would create a false equivalence. When a journalist confronts the powerful, it is easier and safer to write it in a “balanced” way. But that’s a coward’s way out. A good journalist, for example, would not give equal time and space to known climate deniers and climate change scientists. Good journalists lean on the side of evidence, on incontrovertible facts. Good journalism is a professional discipline and judgment exercised by the entire newsroom operating under a strong standards and ethics manual. It means having the courage to report the evidence even if it gets you in trouble with the powers that be. The words impartiality and balance are dangerous when used outside this context, often hijacked by those with vested interests.

What you saw was what we all saw. Everyone read the same articles, watched the same news reports. We agreed on the facts. Though the visual medium was more emotional than print, there were limits to what you could ethically do, unlike the design and algorithms of social media today. The goal was not to win an argument or win a popularity contest; it was to create the more informed citizenry necessary for a democracy to work. Journalists were part of a shared culture of democracy: to listen, debate, and compromise. Aside from legal accountability, there was a sense of moral responsibility—to help create a better future. The understanding of how power works also felt more concrete. We knew that all governments would attempt to co-opt truth tellers and control narratives. In most democracies, journalists were the Fourth Estate, deriving power from the people’s will, their desire for knowledge to form opinions about their lives, their country, their leaders. In exchange for this access to the people’s hearts and minds, the state gave access to journalists. At its best, the relationship is a checks-and-balances system. At its worst, the access becomes contingent on whether a journalist told the stories the state wanted. In most news groups, there was an internal battle between those in charge of the business, which needed to be on the right side of power, and the independent editorial hierarchy, which needed to be responsible to the people. That was another check and balance.

Now remove all that and replace news organizations with technology companies, which have largely abdicated the gatekeeping role of protecting facts, truth, and trust. These companies welcome an alliance with power, which guarantees market access and growth because their incentive system is built around power and money. In the past, the information we all got was protected from vested interests. In the cases of some corporate media firms, that information was only slightly affected by vested interests. Now, under the technology companies, the information you get is directly determined by the corporations’ drive for profit. This is the transition we are living through.

Emotions such as happiness and hope, as well as smoking, sexual diseases, and even obesity, can be traced and spread through social networks.19

Other companies, including Google and Twitter, keep public policy and lobbying efforts separate from the teams that create and implement content rules. Several employees who resigned from Facebook demanded that those teams be separated, but to this day, that hasn’t been done. An internal Facebook memo, “Political Influences on Content Policy,” stated that Kaplan’s group “regularly protects powerful constituencies,” starting with then candidate Donald Trump in 2015.46

There are three assumptions implicit in everything Facebook says and does: first, that more information is better; second, that faster information is better; third, that the bad—lies, hate speech, conspiracy theories, disinformation, targeted attacks, information operations—should be tolerated in service of Facebook’s larger goals. All three ideas are great for Facebook because they mean that the company makes more money, but none of them is better for users and the public sphere.

Lies repeated over and over become facts in this online ecosystem. As a journalist, I know that we are only as good as our last story and any error must be accounted for, fixed, and publicly announced. That’s why we have correction pages. We report the facts

Algorithms serve up content that radicalizes us. If you click on a borderline conspiracy theory, for example, the next content a platform serves you is even more radical because it keeps you scrolling.54 Groups like QAnon spread from the darkest corners of the web onto Twitter and Facebook (and have links to the Philippines), until they were suspended and banned.55 It took years to get to that ban. In the meantime, what happened to the people who were swayed to believe in the conspiracy theories? What about their cognitive bias, which may lead them to see the bans as yet another evidence of a conspiracy?

The late biologist E. O. Wilson called these our “paleolithic emotions.” If you read something that makes you emotional and prone to share or act, slow down; think slow, not fast.

Facebook didn’t only provide a platform for those propagandists’ speech or even only enable them; in fact, it gave them preferential treatment because anger is the contagious currency of Facebook’s profit machine. Only anger, outrage, and fear led to greater numbers of people using Facebook more times a day. Violence has made Facebook rich.

Duterte, like Facebook, benefited from the system of trust that they both destroyed. The weaponization of the internet had evolved into the weaponization of the law.

This is why propaganda networks are so effective in rewriting history: the distribution spread of a lie is so much greater than the fact-check that follows, and by the time the lie is debunked, those who believe it often refuse to change their views, matching social media’s impact on behavior in other parts of the world.26

Vladimir Putin had invaded Crimea in 2014, annexing the territory from Ukraine by using the same two-pronged strategy that would later be used around the world: suppress and repress unfavorable facts, then replace them with the metanarrative you want. In that case the narrative was that Russia’s enemies were anti-Semitic fascists preventing Crimeans and Ukrainians from doing what they wanted: to unite with Russia.

.John T. Cacioppo, James H. Fowler, and Nicholas A. Christakis, “Alone in the Crowd: The Structure and Spread of Loneliness in a Large Social Network,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 97, no. 6 (December 2009): 997–91, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2792572/.

James H. Fowler and Nicholas A. Christakis, “Dynamic Spread of Happiness in a Large Social Network: Longitudinal Analysis over 20 Years in the Framingham Heart Study,” British Medical Journal 337 (2008): a2338, https://www.bmj.com/content/337/bmj.a2338. Smoking: Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler, “The Collective Dynamics of Smoking in a Large Social Network,” New England Journal of Medicine 358 (2008): 2249–58, https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmsa0706154. Sexual diseases: Elizabeth Landau, “Obesity, STDs Flow in Social Networks,” CNN, October 24, 2009, https://edition.cnn.com/2009/TECH/10/24/tech.networks.connected/index.html. Obesity: Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler, “The Spread of Obesity in a Large Social Network over 32 Years,” New England Journal of Medicine 375 (2007): 370–79, https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmsa066082. 20.I discussed this in email exchanges with Nicholas Christakis, who said the thesis should work but that he didn’t have a data set to prove it as definitively as the ones he and James Fowler had used to formulate the Three Degrees of Influence Rule.

There are four books about Facebook that I would recommend: David Kirkpatrick’s The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010) traces the beginning and the development of Mark Zuckerberg. Published in 2010, it came out at a time of wonder. On the business model, Shoshana Zuboff coined the term surveillance capitalism in 2019; see The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: Public Affairs, 2019). Steven Levy’s Facebook: The Inside Story (New York: Blue Rider Press, 2020) chronicled the company’s fall. And finally, Sinan Aral’s The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health—and How We Must Adapt (New York: Currency, 2020) details some of the dangers but remains a favorable view of the giant, providing the possibility of redemption. 43.Naughton, “The Goal Is to Automate Us.” 44.James Bridle, “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff Review—We Are the Pawns,” Guardian, February 2, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/feb/02/age-of-surveillance-capitalism-shoshana-zuboff-review.