Maria Ressa: ‘We are no longer living in the same shared reality’
The Nobel laureate on this ‘untenable’ moment
Simon Allison in Johannesburg
Nobel laureate Maria Ressa is watching a video of herself being interviewed on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. On the screen, Ressa says: “Right now my number one source of income is a new automated crypto trading program. It’s the biggest opportunity I see in my entire life to make a big fortune quickly.”
In person, in a boardroom in a Johannesburg hotel, Ressa – the fearless Filipino journalist and 2021 Nobel Peace Prize winner – pauses the playback. “They did a good job, no? It sounds like me!” It is true that Ressa has appeared on The Late Show. But she is not selling any kind of cryptocurrency – and never uttered the words in the clip.
This is a deepfake – her words and images have been manipulated by an artificial intelligence programme. The doctored video suddenly appeared on Facebook last year, and linked to legitimatelooking websites that mimicked CNN and Rappler, the media house that Ressa co-founded.
Rappler is still investigating who created the deepfake, and why. But it almost doesn’t matter. In the big picture, “Maria Ressa the Crypto Bro” is just a minor example of a bigger problem: the battle for facts.
The ubiquity of social media is now supercharged with the advent of generative AI, setting us up for “disinformation at industrial scale,” Ressa says. In many ways, we no longer have a shared reality. “What happens when you have an information ecosystem where you can have your own reality? A house like that, in the past, where people all have their own versions of reality – it’s called an insane asylum.”
In 38 years of being a journalist, Ressa has reported on many threats to society and encountered almost every personal threat imaginable: financial, legal and physical. Her reporting into the alleged “death squad” of former Filipino president Rodrigo Duterte infuriated the country’s most powerful person and made her the target of vicious online hate campaigns and a litany of trumped-up legal charges (she is still fighting several of these).
But she says that the threat journalism and society now face from a disordered information ecosystem is of a different order of magnitude.
Just look at the Philippines where a sophisticated information operation whitewashed the legacy of former president Ferdinand Marcos, paving the way for his son to take power in 2022. “It changed Marcos from a guy who stole $10-billion to the guy who is the greatest leader the Philippines has ever had,” says Ressa. “And this is what Filipinos voted for. It literally changed history before our very eyes.”
Some 72% of the world now lives under authoritarian regimes, the V-Dem Institute at Sweden’s University of Gothenburg reported last year. That figure is up from 60% the year before. It may well be even higher after this year’s flurry of elections around the world, given an information ecosystem that politicians can use to manufacture their own realities and manipulate voters.
“The world is on fire, in a way my generation has never seen, in a way your generation has never seen, in a way that is untenable for rule-of-law driven democracies,” Ressa says.
Abdicating responsibility
Ressa lays the blame for the “corruption of our information ecosystem” squarely at the door of the big technology companies, and their algorithms that determine what information we see online.
“Once big tech became the gatekeepers [of information], they completely abdicated responsibility for protecting the public sphere,” says Ressa. That’s because there is more traction – and therefore more money – in lies.
“In 2018, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said lies spread six times faster [than truth] ... If you lace the lies with fear, anger and hate, they spread even further.”
The devastating impact of that is already happening and goes beyond our political systems. “Our evolution as a species is connected to this. When you are pumping us full of toxic hate, when you are pumping us full of the worst of humanity, which is what these social media companies are doing, you’re changing us. This world, the world that makes a lot of money for big tech, precludes the goodness of human nature. That is not who we are. I’m very angry.”
Ressa is using this anger, along with the considerable clout that comes with winning a Nobel, to do something about it. She’s on the Real Facebook Oversight Board, which is a group of prominent activists, academics and journalists trying to get Meta to make better decisions.
“In 2018, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said lies spread six times faster [than truth] ... If you lace the lies with fear, anger and hate, they spread even further.”
She is producing a documentary series with Al Jazeera on AI in the global south. And, with Rappler, she’s experimenting with how these new technologies can be used ethically and responsibly – to promote civic discourse, rather than destroy it. Her visit to South Africa is in her capacity as chair of the steering committee of the World Movement for Democracy, a global civil society network that will convene in South Africa in November. Figuring out a unified approach to the dangers – and the opportunities – of big tech will be high on the agenda.
“There’s also a great opportunity right now. This is creative destruction. The destruction is already happening. So what are we going to create?”