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If you are lucky in life, you get to meet someone as powerful, smart, generous and urgently important as @mariaressa. In a new ep. of the #BigTechPodcast @dskok spoke to her a few days before her grossly unjust conviction. She is awe inspiring. (thread) https://www.cigionline.org/big-tech/maria-ressa-how-social-media-can-destabilize-democracy-and-journalism
Since the interview I have been reflecting on her message, which i have had the chance to watch evolve and build over the past few years. Maria is rightly being championed as a symbol of the free press in face of the autocratic state. And she is unambiguously this.
Autocrats are always threatened by a free press, and so they challenge the legitimacy of the media, support and promote statist journalism, propagate narratives of “fake news,” and prosecute journalists with spurious legal challenges. Her experience epitomizes these threats.
But her message, told with clarity and power over the past 4 years, is about more than autocrats and the media. She also is urging us to look at the core role of technology platforms in this very dynamic. She condemns the nature, design & incentives of our social media ecosystem.
Maria makes 2 arguments about social media, tech & illiberal rule. First, that social media provides a powerful tool for autocrats. She has shown how Duterte was a vanguard in the now common practice of using Facebook to spread propaganda, divide populations, & undermine reality
But her critique runs much deeper. It is not simply the flaws in our digital ecosystem that are being abused by illiberal leaders. It is not just a case of bad users. The argument Ressa makes is that the design and structure of our digital tools are illiberal themselves.
A design optimized for engagement over truth and prioritizing virality over the quality of information will create the very fractured and unstable media ecosystem needed for autocratic rule.
Building a financial model on the unaccountable targeting of human behaviour and based on detailed models of our lives is itself an act of inherently illiberal intent.
And a system that replaces the editorial, funding and distribution systems of the free press with the incentives of the newsfeed algorithm creates the relativistic information environments in which propaganda thrives.
This underlying structural problem - that the very design of our digital public sphere is itself illiberal - both runs counter to the decentralized and democratized ideals of the internet, and helps explain the positionality of tech platforms with governments around the world.
In the Philippines, this acquiescence to state power in the service of market power and growth has meant enabling Duterte's weaponization of social media and, ultimately, his persecution of Ressa herself.
@mariaressa is a symbol of journalistic integrity and of the power and importance of the free press. But she is also sounding an alarm about the core structural failings of our digital public sphere. Here are some reflections on her urgent message: http://cigionline.org/articles/maria-ressa-and-social-medias-illiberal-intent
And here she is, in her own words, from our interview:
