The disinformation tactics at work against the press in the Philippines should be a warning to democratic societies all around the world.
“Our dystopian present is coming to a democracy near you,” said investigative journalist Maria Ressa, CEO of the publication Rappler, who has watched the evolution of attacks on her work over the past four years. She spoke Monday on Zoom at the International Symposium on Online Journalism at the University of Texas, Austin.
The Philippine government is a dictatorship masquerading as a democracy, she said, and it has taken drastic actions to suppress dissent. Its most extreme action came in May this year, when the government of President Rodrigo Duterte ordered the shutdown of ABS-CBN, the country’s major independent television network, which had been critical of the government. Ressa described it as the equivalent of shutting down Britain’s BBC.
Ressa admits that when Duterte and his followers began their attacks against her and Rappler four years ago, she didn’t take them seriously. The message was “Maria Ressa is not a journalist, she is a criminal”, and it was repeated in memes throughout Facebook. “In the Philippines, Facebook IS the internet,” she said. Everyone gets their news there.
But if you repeat a lie millions of times, Ressa said, people start to recall it, remember it, and accept it as true.
Before long, she was getting an average of 90 hate messages an hour, including death threats. And this was at a time when Duterte’s law enforcement authorities were executing 30 suspected drug dealers a day.
“Astroturfing” phony grass-roots campaigns
As Rappler revealed more about these illegal killings, Rappler was squeezed from two directions: from the bottom up and the top down. The astroturfing, or false grass-roots campaigns, orchestrated on Facebook, used hashtags like #arrestMariaRessa. And from the authorities came eight arrest warrants, two arrests in five weeks and numerous other investigations for allegations of tax evasion and other crimes.
In the most serious case, she and a colleague were convicted of “cyber-libel” and she could face six years in jail.
Ressa has impeccable credentials as a journalist and has been honored by many organizations, including the International Center for Journalists.
In spite of all these attacks, Rappler as a business is thriving. It has a team of 100 and is turning a profit. However, the threats against individual journalists and their families and children does affect them.
Ressa, who by nature seems to be jolly and optimistic, tells her staff that they must all, at times, back away from the attacks, and let their colleagues defend them. They have to stick together and help each other and “hold the line”–that is, don’t back down.
The goal: dehumanize journalists
Ressa and her team have done an in-depth study of where the astroturfing campaigns are coming from. There are networks of Duterte supporters, with many of them tracing the source of their messages to one of Duterte’s biggest media supporters famous for feeding disinformation networks, Mocha Uson.
All of this is aided by Facebook, whose business model is built on generating traffic for advertisers. User messages of anger, fear, and hatred provoke more response, more traffic, and more advertising revenue. “Social media is a behavior modification tool,” Ressa said.
One of the tactics has been to dehumanize journalists. Ressa showed images of how a series of Facebook images was designed to make her appear like an ape. Once you dehumanize a person or a group of people, it’s easy to justify exterminating them, she said. This is a formula used over and over again throughout history.
Meanwhile, journalists have to focus on facts and data, which often don’t provoke emotional responses. “Facts don’t spread as far and as fast. It’s hard to get a coalition around facts.”
She called for more regulation of Facebook to make it more responsible for the hate speech and misinformation that its users spread on the platform.
She ended with a call to journalists to become activists in defending the truth. This will come with a cost. It will involve putting themselves on the line. But it is a cost we should be willing to bear.
Related:
The anatomy of a fake news headline
The war on journalists intensifies