There are two ways to relate to Maria Ressa’s book. One is to read it is a biography — a piece of writing that carries you from her early childhood, her shift to the United States, her pluck and resolution as a journalist back in the Philippines that saw her being awarded with the Nobel Peace Prize for Peace in 2021. It is an extraordinary story. One about a shy child who struggled to transition to the American way of life, got admitted to Princeton, had an enormously successful run as a television journalist covering Southeast Asia, reinvented herself by launching the investigative news website Rappler, and held the line firmly against powerful threats and attempts to derail her journalism.
Nobel Peace Prize-winning journalist Maria Ressa | Photo Credit: Getty Images
The second, and arguably even more interesting way, is to look at How To Stand up to a Dictator as a powerful analysis about how social media is spawning disinformation, seeding hate, manipulating behaviour, and compromising journalism. Such analyses have been around for a while in both academic and semi-academic literature. For instance, Professor Cass Sunstein warned about group polarisation and social media echo chambers as early as 2007 in his persuasive and powerful #Republic: Divided Democracy In The Age of Social Media. Others such as digital sceptic Jaron Lanier and Shoshana Zuboff have exposed how social media giants and their powerful corporate and political clients have aligned to use people by modifying their behaviour for their own uses.
An insider’s account
What marks Ressa’s account is that it is a view of a practising journalist, an account from the inside. Like many others, she started by being positive about social media, seeing it as a platform that democratised opinion-making, gave expression to long-standing grievances and ignited social movements. It was a time when Rappler enjoyed a cosy relationship with Facebook, which was bigger in the Philippines than even the social media giant realised. Ressa admits that she secretly considered working for Facebook, and that the platform was part of the reason why Rappler started outperforming legacy media houses so rapidly. The newssite, which partnered Facebook in some activities, was even showcased at the latter’s annual conference in 2016.
Maria Ressa, Rappler CEO and Executive Editor, being escorted by police after posting bail in Pasig Regional Trial Court in Pasig City, Philippines, in 2019. | Photo Credit: REUTERS
But Ressa’s disillusionment had already set in by then, 2016 being the year that brought the contentious and autocratic Rodrigo Duterte to power. From someone who highlighted social media’s upsides, she went on to believe that “Facebook represents one of the gravest threats to democracies around the world... Tech sucked up our personal experiences and data, organized it with artificial intelligence, manipulated us with it, and created behaviour at a scale that brought out the worst in humanity. The growth of online misinformation, manifest in the growth of bots and account farms, created by a commercialised ‘black ops industry’, coincided with another worrying phenomenon — the strengthening of political power with an attendant increase in political polarisation.”
‘Astroturfing’ and aftermath
Duterte’s online operatives employed “astroturfing” — the use of fake and funded accounts to influence opinion — to promote his policies and smear his opponents, sometimes in the most vicious of ways. Soon enough, his online bot mob came for Rappler, casting doubts on the veracity of its reporting and Ressa’s personal integrity. It didn’t stop with vitriol and physical threats; a string of cases was filed against Ressa, who was arrested more than once.
Digital chat bot provides access to information and data in online network. | Photo Credit: Getty Images/iStockphoto
Left unchecked, Ressa writes that the technology companies could destroy much more than democracy. If there is little in her book about Twitter, Google, Snapchat or Instagram, it is because this is a biography and deals with her experiences as a journalist. Ressa is right in thinking that politicians, many of them from the right, have used astroturfing to stoke irrational fears and maintain their hold on power. She disagrees with the idea that the best way to counter misinformation or offensive speech is to have more speech. She attributes this notion to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis, but it goes even further, to John Stuart Mill, who stressed on the importance of having a “marketplace of ideas” and argued against proscribing speech that fall short of causing or risking physical harm.
It is true that neither Mill nor Brandeis could have foreseen the bot armies and their dangerous democracy-undermining disinformation campaigns. It is also true, as Ressa suggests, that in an unequal information ecosystem, free speech has been used to stifle speech. But what is the solution? Is it censorship? If so, by who and on what grounds? Given that hate speech has defied codification and remains a contentious and subjective term, these are questions that throw up no easy answers. Ressa doesn’t address them head on. But if the tech companies are forced to heed her call for ending the surveillance-for-profit business model, it may be possible to greatly moderate the climate of hate, even if we cannot agree on what the word really means.
How to Stand up to a Dictator; Maria Ressa, WH Allen/PRH, ₹799.
The reviewer teaches philosophy at Krea Univeristy and is the former editor of The Hindu.
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