Maria Ressa is the executive director for Rappler Media. This is the transcript of an interview with FRONTLINE’s James Jacoby conducted on April 19, 2018. It has been edited in parts for clarity and length.
…Let’s start in 2012. What had you been doing up until the time you started Rappler, and then tell me what Rappler is and what it was.
I was a television journalist, broadcast journalist almost my entire career, up until the last six years. I ran the Manila bureau of CNN and then the Jakarta bureau [of] CNN almost 20 years, a decade in each country. …I decided I’d been reporting what other people had been doing, and I hadn’t really built anything, so I decided to look for [a] home. I chose the Philippines. I decided to come home. …
Rappler existed at that point or didn’t exist?
No, no, no, no, no, no. ABS-CBN, which is the largest network in the Philippines, I ran this for six years, and one of the angles of that was really to start to incorporate mobile phone technology. But when you have television ratings to deal with, it is so difficult to pivot a thousand people who are tuned in to your prime-time newscasts.
This is the largest network, right? That’s where we made most of our money. I was running that, and I realized that we’re going to miss the digital revolution. At the end of 2010, I left ABS-CBN. I wrote a book. It’s called From bin Laden to Facebook, and that was really where I explored the focus of the last decade of my time with CNN, which was the spread of terrorism. After 9/11, that was what I did. …
So tell me how the nascency of the idea of Rappler comes about. How does that happen?
One of the things that happened [was] when I was head of ABS-CBN was in 2008. I had three journalists kidnapped …by the Abu Sayyaf. It’s an Al Qaeda-linked group that has been kidnapping since the 1980s, kidnap for ransom. It’s a home-grown cottage industry in that part of the Philippines. We got them out in 10 days, but I’d always wanted to write a book about it, so that’s what I did. How did we get them out? We got them out because we bypassed national government, because if we did go through national government, they’d still be there a year and a half later, which is what happened to the Red Cross folks after us. We went to the local officials and got them out in 10 days.
The book I wrote in 2011 is called From bin Laden to Facebook. and I was already looking at how the Abu Sayyaf had shifted onto Facebook. These guys – young kids, right, who were holding their AK-47s and smiling, and they’re recruiting out – one of the Australian hostages, the negotiations began on Facebook, right?
I was looking at this shift, and when I started looking at social network analysis, I realized that the things that I was figuring out that the terrorists were using could also be used the other way; it could be used for good. And that was when we thought, all right, what can we do with this? The seed idea for Rappler really is looking at information cascades. If you think about it, the end goal – when I was raising money for Rappler, I didn’t talk about investigative journalism, even though that’s our core. Investigative journalism is never mass-based; it’s very focused, and you want people who are passionate about it to take it. And if you’re lucky, it can spread, right?
But from that, investigative journalism, you combine it with technology, and then the last chunk is what technology enables you to do, which is to build your community, right? That was in 2012. The end goal of Rappler is to build communities of action.
It got me so excited, because I’d worked in Southeast Asia for at that point like, gosh, almost 30 years, and one of the things that always killed journalism is the fact that the problems keep coming up because institutions are so weak. Now technology gives you a chance to help organize. You don’t have to wait for either the inefficiency or the corruption. You don’t have to wait for government. You can actually self-organize and build institutions bottom up.
Such an idealistic view, but we were able to do it from 2012, I’d say till 2016 – till 2015, the end of 2015, and we were able to do things. Rappler began with 12 people. There were four or five of us above 40, and then we hired the smartest 20-somethings I could find. It took us six months to build the platform, and then we took what we knew of television and then found digital ways of doing it.
When I used to run ABS-CBN, a news-gathering budget would be – this is in pesos, so I don’t know what you can do, but you could spend 12 million pesos just to gather news. With Rappler, the entire budget that we had, the year’s budget – sorry, one month’s budget can be a year’s budget. It’s incredible, both hardware and software. So it was very exciting. And the idea of Rappler was let’s harness this technology; let’s harness our mobile phones. The internet penetration rate when we started with Rappler was about 35 to 38 percent. Today you’re talking about, my gosh, 69, 70 percent.
Help me explain in the most basic terms what Rappler is and what was the initial idea.
…The idea was to take journalism and put it in your pocket, to take television and put it in your pocket. But beyond that, if you’ve been doing journalism as long as I have, and you live in countries where the corruption still remains endemic, how can you actually build communities of action to push change bottom up? That’s the end goal of it, right? But the journalism is like the food you feed the communities, and then you build these communities of action that will take that and have impact. So what’s the end goal? Impact, change.
I’m not a politician; I’m a journalist. But the technology allowed us to do that, and we were able to do that from – we grew 100 percent year on year, 100 to 300 percent in the first four years. That’s in both reach and revenue, right? So it was like he was finding this new world that you can take the discipline of journalism, and yet you could also create these communities of action that – it’s not citizen journalism alone, because we train them. There’s this hybrid balance, and when we first started talking about it, my friends who are traditional journalists would say: “Wait, wait, wait. How can you move into civic engagement? Well, you can still draw these Chinese walls, right?” So the investigative journalists are still there. I had a different unit that would do civic engagement. That helped train our campus journalists; that helped train NGOs that would then take the technology and do what they wanted to do with it, right? Our tech guides would help empower this community. In a nutshell – long way of getting to it – it’s taking our journalism and having an impact to our world far more concretely than television did.
…We were the ones recruiting in the schools. We were going to schools. Our big thing is social media for social good. Before we launched Rappler in the end of 2011, I used to have the largest news group, right, so we walked into schools and taught students how they can use social media for social good, and we really meant it. Social media was already this huge – it had huge potential at that point, but no one was harnessing it, so that was what we did.
We started building these communities just around the potential of social media, letting people know what they can do. The dangers weren’t there yet at that point. Then I worked with the U.N. Foundation +SocialGood. I was one of the first five people who pushed, again, “social media for social good” at the Social [Good] Summit in New York. So we connected. In 2012 Rappler was the one that did “social media for social good,” partnered with the U.N. Foundation. We always had this developmental aspect of how we can use this. In most recent years [we] became Hack Society: then it became “technology for social good.” It’s trying – it’s using this to try to leapfrog development.
Facebook In The Philippines
What was the scene like in terms of Facebook at that point in time and how Rappler and Facebook were interacting in the early years?
Rappler was the biggest advocate for both Facebook and Twitter, because our kids – what’s the Philippines, 100 million people? Median age is 22 to 23 years old. Very young. And we could see – we had all migrated to Facebook. We were there. People were on Twitter. At that point Twitter was still rising, and Facebook was also still moving up.
We would go to universities and say: “This is how we can take charge of our areas of influence. We can organize ourselves. You can take a look at what’s important to you and build your own communities.” We would open their Twitter and Facebook accounts for them. We were huge advocates of social media and continued to do that all the way up until 20 – I’m still an advocate of it. I think where it changed is 2015, and at that point, because we were so close to the platforms, we saw the change happen, and it was dramatic. They just didn’t listen.
…There’s some extraordinary statistics about how powerful Facebook has become in terms of being the main site for the Philippines, right? Just give me a sense as to as to how influential it is.
Facebook is the internet. Facebook is our public space in the Philippines now. It’s taken over the role of what news is. How powerful is it? Gosh, where do I begin? Almost 97 percent of Filipinos on the internet or on social [media] are on Facebook specifically. You’re talking about almost 60 million Filipinos. That public space defines our reality. What we’ve seen is, as we’ve moved in, and as Facebook has become more aggressive in pulling newsgroups onto the platform, we’ve seen a battering down of democracy in our country.
When you say “pulling newsgroups onto the platform,” what does that mean for a layperson? Bring me into that moment even as it pertains to Rappler and your own story. So around 2015, right?
At first you have to understand Rappler. We couldn’t be the company that we are without Facebook, because our growth accelerated because Facebook and Twitter were there, right, Facebook far more than Twitter was. That was the dramatic growth that we saw from 2012 to 2015. I think there was a dramatic change in the country, though, and it was global. In 2015, when Facebook decided to implement Instant Articles to actively court newsgroups and bring them in, and this is when they said – they looked at Twitter, and that’s where journalists were, and they were saying, “Let’s bring them in,” and they did. When they did Instant Articles, we all went in.
Rappler acted like we were an alpha partner of Facebook. We were one of four news groups they invited to come in, and while many newsrooms kind of fluctuated, they would say, “Let’s only try a little bit,” with Rappler I decided to go all in.
If Instant Articles worked the way it was supposed to work, then this would be very good for Rappler. We went all in the end of December, the end of November, and I took it all out by February, because it didn’t do that. Let me pull out of Rappler. I think Instant Articles made Facebook the world’s largest distributor of news. That’s your facts. But it did not change the algorithms that distributed the news, right? So all of a sudden, facts were commoditized and became mob rule. When that happened to splinter reality – and that’s exactly what we saw. By November of 2017, Freedom House, that org comes out with a report saying that in 65 countries that they studied, democracy rolled back in 30 of those. And again, that goes back, right? When you can’t agree on what the facts are, what’s democratic discourse like? How can you debate anything?
First of all, what did it mean to put Rappler onto Facebook? I mean, for those who might not understand Instant Articles, bring me through very elementary steps of what that meant.
For every new newsgroup, whether PBS or Rappler, Instant Articles – like Google app, like Apple, these are just platforms. They are platforms of distribution, and Instant Articles offer you quick loading times on a platform which already had more than 2.3 billion people. So if you want in, you can decide which of your articles you’re going to include on the Instant Articles.
Some newsgroups chose to, say, put 20 percent of their of their articles in. Rappler, we decided to put 100 percent, because you’re creating a new world, right, so I wanted to have a baseline. Here’s before, pre-Instant Articles; here’s after. Then you can look at that delta, and that determines how effective Instant Articles is. The end goal of that should be growth, both for the newsgroup and for Facebook. That’s why it’s giving it to you for free. In the end I realized that it was growth for Facebook, but it wasn’t growth for Rappler, so I pulled it out within a few months.
But by putting Rappler’s content on Facebook, were you legitimizing Facebook as the news source, …meaning, you’re describing this massive shift, and I want you to explain it, like the shift of where Facebook around 2015 becomes the predominant source of information, globally, certainly in the Philippines, and by Rappler being a part of that ecosystem, did it – and putting articles on Instant Articles, …is that legitimizing Facebook as a news source?
No. I think you have to look at the entire landscape before that, right? Moving into that, before Instant Articles, I would say Facebook probably contributed anywhere from – and this is, let’s say, in the United States first. …The stats will show you that they contributed anywhere from 30 to 70 percent of the traffic of the online news sites. In the Philippines, when Rappler was starting, we could go up to 70 percent, 75 percent; The New York Times at that point, maybe 15 to 20 percent. From 2012 moving forward, every newsgroup around the world went on Facebook. You have all of these other groups like – well, BuzzFeed was one, right, that pushed growth, but Upworthy, newsgroups that would actually be able to figure out the algorithm but then out of a flick of a finger, Facebook could choose to depress it, right? That’s their power. We were all there. Every credible newsgroup that you can think of needed to go on this platform because that’s where 2.3 billion people are, right?
By 2014, I think it was BuzzFeed came out with this: Go out and don’t expect the audience to come to you; go to where they are. And where they are is Facebook. So it wasn’t legitimizing Facebook; it was trying to keep abreast of each of the changes in our ecosystem as media people, right? And here’s something that I think is fundamental: the difference between the old world of traditional journalism and this new world that is on steroids powered by social media and technology.
In the old world, we would take five years before you change an operating system. I remember CNN changing Basis, our system. Then we changed to Avid. In this new world, five years is like – this new world changes every three months minimum. And if in our first year in Rappler, by a year and a half we changed, we completely overhauled the platform. It moves too fast. It moves really fast. So what was moving it to Instant Articles? It was keeping up with all of the changes that’s happening.
…I think that the biggest thing is that as all of this is happening, right, as we’re doing the news, the distribution of the news is changing exponentially, and the comprehension of people who are watching or reading the news on these platforms, they’re shrinking in the amount of time and the comprehension that they have. So it’s this horrible movement to Armageddon for news.
Facebook And News Organizations
…What was the deal that Rappler had with Facebook?
I think what Facebook offered all newsgroups is the ability to reach their audience, to load fast – that was it; speed was of the essence in the technology – and then distribute to this fenced-in, this walled garden that they had in exchange [for what] they offered.
It was an experiment, presented that way. Then in exchange they would offer a wider reach and potential revenues. But it was only potential revenues. The first newsgroups that tried to [take advantage of this] were here in the United States, early 2015, by spring of 2015, and then they moved out to other parts of the world. In the Philippines, they came in fall, November of 2015.
Were you wary of the deal?
Not wary, because right before that, the rollout of videos [was] very good for Rappler. We have a television background, so we were the first to move live video and then multi-camera setups on Facebook. F8 announced it; within a few hours we were up with it.
That meant, when you put that video on the platform on Facebook itself, you take it away from your own platform. But when you put it on Facebook, you get seven times more than you would if you were on your own platform. If Instant Articles would give me seven times, then that’s worth it. I can give Facebook the article. I lose a page view on Rappler; I would gain hopefully more on Facebook. In the end, it turned out not to be that way. It was a one–to-one exchange. I would lose a page view on Rappler, but I only gain one page on Facebook, so it wasn’t – I pulled out within a few months.
But at the time, even though you pulled out, there was an imperative to be where the audience was, which is on Facebook, especially in the Philippines. Is that correct?
As a founder of Rappler, I was aware that the world was moving at this incredible pace, and it’s a pace set by ideas of people in the West and execution of the platforms. I would look at other companies. I actually looked at New York Times and BuzzFeed and where they were headed and tried to figure out how we triangulate – how can we move ahead. It’s like a thirst to be where the cliff is so that you, because if you’re there first, that means you grow your community.
And you did grow your community. I mean, you are one of the largest sites, if not one of the most important sites, in the Philippines, right?
In a year and a half, we went from zero to the third largest online news site in terms of the audience – a year and a half. …Now, even after all of this, we’re, according to Alexa ranking, we’re number four. How does this small little group compete against a thousand journalists of the largest newsgroups? That’s impossible in the old days.
So I know its benefits. I’m still in love with the potential of this empowerment that it can give people who have ideas but don’t have the money. But I know this personally: The dangers that these algorithms and the lax regulation internally that Facebook has, I know the dangers that that brings.
Warning Signs In The Philippines
What were the first moments where you started to recognize the dangers?
So where we’re going, 2012, 2013 –
Right.
– all of it is growth, growth, and we’re in front. We tended to be ahead of American companies because we were small, and we were fast. The dangers happened in 2016, during the campaign. I always say that the Philippines is six months ahead of the United States. Our president, [Rodrigo] Duterte, was elected six months ahead of President Trump. We’re a cautionary tale for the states at a certain point, but no one listened. In 2016, January of 2016 was the first time I began seeing this anger unleashed for then-Mayor Rody Duterte, focused on the anger of the gap between the rich and poor, of the have-nots, inflaming them. That was his base, and he won the elections with that. But there were these danger signals.
In April of 2016, a student in the university asks Mayor Duterte a question. This was being Livestreamed on Rappler. And the question had to do with the extrajudicial killings in Davao City, his drug war in Davao City. And that student was bashed brutally online. We did an editorial pointing it out. There was a Facebook page that was targeting him for murder – you know, kill this person, right? I reported it to Facebook. They took it down within 12 hours. We reported the online hate that happened against these kids and gave it to the campaign manager. So that happened on a Friday. By Sunday night, they came out with a statement asking people to calm down. That was the first time we saw this kind of behavior.
After President Duterte won – he’s already president by May. May 16 was our elections. In July, that was when I really worried, because in July, when President Duterte decided to boycott traditional media, we saw the social media campaign machinery pivot and become weaponized. It was targeting anyone who questioned the drug war, anyone who questioned then alleged extrajudicial killings, because at that point, by July, the drug war was kicking into full gear, and our reporters going out at night, they would see around eight dead bodies a night on the pavement. Imagine every night going out, seeing eight dead bodies. This is being reported.
Anyone on Facebook who questioned that would get brutally bashed. This is the first time we saw these types of attacks – rape, murder. You know, it’s because you’re elitist. Drugs are – again, I can’t even – I’ll show you all of those. But we never saw anything like this, and what happened was by August, it began this spiral of silence. People started pulling out, and the numbers showed this.
Facebook went from number one in January of 2016 to number eight by January, number eight in Alexa ranking by January of [2017.] [EDITOR’S NOTE: The transcript has been updated to show the correct date: 2017.] People started pulling out. We started seeing the spiral of silence from August 2016, and it lasted until August 2017. Again, what triggered people’s anger here, why they started speaking up, was the deaths of three teenage boys caught on camera. Anyway, so what happened, the first part in July was targeting anyone who criticized the drug war. The next targets were journalists, news organizations. The woman who would become the head of social media for the presidential palace, she was the anchor account in this campaign machinery and became the anchor when it was weaponized. She coined the term that hit all the mainstream newsgroups. She called us “presstitutes,” press-titues, right?
Then we began collecting the data. By August, Rappler began a hashtag campaign called #NoPlaceForHate, because it was the first time we were seeing hate being directed to silence any view, to silence [views] of people [you] didn’t like. By August we had gathered enough data that really alarmed me. I gave that data to Facebook because I was hoping that they would share data with us, they would fix it, and then we could do the story with this fixed, because it was extremely alarming.
Let’s move back for a second. What was your suspicion at the time as to all of this hateful content and all this angry content? Who is producing all of that?
Primarily it was, again, that campaign machinery, all of these Facebook accounts that had been created for the campaign. So in the campaign period, Rody Duterte’s team created four different groups. Let’s talk about content and distribution, right?
They had a central content team that would give out the message of the day to the distribution arm, and the distribution arm was broken down into geographic segments: Luzon, which is the largest island, so Luzon, Visayas, Mindanao and the Overseas Filipino Workers. Four different groups. They ran like cells. One central messaging gives them all these different groups. The message of the day – each one of them would take that message and then create their own and distribute. So it was both top down and bottom up, really, really nicely done. About 500 different volunteer groups who would come in, and they created this network, right?
So the distribution network that was used for the campaign gained tremendous power. I always thought after he won that, oh, well, it will go dormant the way other campaigns have done. But this did not go dormant. This became even more active and became weaponized, because they did use it in governance, right? Imagine again, by the by, now the algorithms, these pages have gained tremendous power, and the main anchor accounts in this, the content creators, were ultimately employed by government. What it was was spewing hate and demonizing alternative views, alternative facts. It was controlling and stifling other views, so think about how strange this is. It was like they were using online state-sponsored hate to stifle dissent, to stifle narratives they didn’t like, to stifle criticism. That includes journalists. That included me.
Let’s take it piece by piece, and I want to go back to the campaign, because there’s a really pivotal moment in 2015 where you host a forum, right, and one person shows up. Can you tell me the story of that day and – ?
That was January of 2016.
OK.
Rappler – we’ve always held forums. What was interesting about this one is that it was televised; it was on radio; and we it was a Livestream on social media. We invited all the presidential candidates and their vice presidents to come. Up until the last day everyone was – they were hemming and hawing, and they wanted to come, but they were afraid if you were a front-runner, you don’t really want to take the risk, because Rappler will ask tough questions. Only one campaign team came. I’d stopped him, and actually I asked him to go at one of these events, and he promised he would go, and he came. Of course he needed it the most. Rody Duterte and his vice presidential candidate Alan Cayetano came. They were the only candidates. They took the entire four hours. And what we saw on social media was that essentially kicked them into Luzon, into the largest island, into Manila, and it was a – I, too, I enjoyed it.
At that point in time, were there any danger signs that you or anyone else was picking up on in terms of misinformation or disinformation during the presidential campaigns?
No, no, not during the campaigns. Again, if you think about it, what was so refreshing about Duterte is that he spoke his mind. He was walking into a landscape where the front-runners were very cautious. They were experienced politicians, and, like Trump in the United States, this kind of you never know what will come out of his mouth worked, for him. This authenticity worked on social media. And I think to his credit, the difference between Trump and Duterte is that Duterte been a mayor since 1988. He knows how to run the city of Davao. But a mayor to president is a huge job.
Facebook And Political Campaigns
To your knowledge, what sort of help was being offered to the presidential candidates by Facebook at the time?
Facebook came in very aggressively, because we were at that point where the social media capital – again, the statistics show that the Philippines is number one in terms of its citizens’ use of Facebook and social media. So we saw Facebook aggressively coming in and helping politicians with their campaigns. I saw them, and they were very open about it. We were working with them, with Facebook, for our coverage, and they would tell me, “Oh, well, we just saw this person; we just saw this person.”
What would they tell you more specifically? What sort of help was Facebook offering to Duterte and the other candidates?
I think they were promoting Facebook. They were showing them they were opening accounts for them, showing them how they could use it. They didn’t know enough about the political landscape, right? I assumed that they would show them all equally whether they did or not. You have to check, but, again, I think Duterte had the upper hand when it came to social media, because he’s very confident in who he is; he wasn’t guarded. And at that point in time, with the political games and the campaigns, the candidates thought it was still the old world, and what Facebook did with Duterte was kick it into this completely new landscape.
…You had a relationship with Facebook, and Facebook is fostering a relationship with a presidential candidate. Now, you had mentioned that they didn’t necessarily understand the sensitivities or the nuances. What did that mean in terms of not being able to understand the nuances of what they were getting involved in?
Well, I think you’re seeing the fallout of this right now, right? They walked into the Philippines, into politics, and assumed that distribution is – I don’t know how to say this. I’m being very careful.
You’re being careful, but this wouldn’t be something that would be – were they hip to the sensitivities of walking into a society that doesn’t have the strongest of institutions or – ?
No, no, no. I guess – let me say the thing that I didn’t like. I think that Facebook walked in [to the Philippines], and they were focused on growth and politics. Elections is a time of growth, and you will see that in the numbers that Facebook showed during that time period. But I think what they didn’t realize is that countries like the Philippines, like Myanmar, like Vietnam, like Indonesia – countries where institutions are weak, where corruption is rampant – these countries don’t have the safeguards.
And what happens when you bring everyone onto a platform and do not exercise any kind of rules? If you don’t implement those rules beforehand, you’re going to create chaos here, and that will translate into the real world. I think that’s what they’re dealing with now. They expected the world to be like the United States, and it isn’t. …
But you don’t think that the company thought through the ramifications of what happens once that person’s elected?
I’m of three minds here, because the reason why I gave Facebook a year before I started speaking actively, when you’re building something, you don’t know what it’s going to be. I’ll cut them some slack on this, because in the end, everyone thought it would end with elections. The weaponization that happened afterward took me by surprise.
…Could Facebook have prevented it? I don’t know. I truly am putting myself in their shoes to try to understand what could they have done better. I think the first would have been to have very stringent rules about hate, being accountable for truth, right, because Facebook has tried very hard to not define the truth. But in the end, journalists define what the truth is. News gets distributed on that platform, and when you treat a fact the same way you treat a lie, then you’ve made a choice.
A very consequential choice.
Then you’ve torn apart society, and that’s, I guess, where I get frustrated is, not doing anything is doing something. When Facebook brought news in and treated it the way, like when The New York Times is the same as a “Trump for President” blog or what you ate for dinner, and this becomes more popular than the facts – facts are never popular. Gosh, if we wanted to be popular, we wouldn’t be journalists. For me, not defining that clearly, a kind of wishful thinking that this could be OK, that’s what led to the world of 2016.
So he gets elected in May of 2016, right? Before I do that, I just would love to know the partnership of Rappler and Internet.org. Can you just explain that for me, how that came about and what Internet.org was, because it is something that doesn’t exist here. It existed abroad.
There are two names that will be used for that. Internet.org was to give internet on your phone. You would get it free. We would call it different things, but it’s also called Free Basics. Rappler was one of the things that was included in Free Basics. One of the things we did, which is disaster risk reduction – the Philippines has an average of 20 typhoons every year, and what we wanted to do as our civic engagement arm, work with government to bring death toll down. So we built a platform. It’s called Aguilar’s. That platform is top down and bottom up.
The government, the Office of Civil Defense, would have clusters in managing the disaster, the potential – the flood. And then starting in 2013, we began to use hashtags in a systematic way. We systematized it with other newsgroups and government, and we would use #rescueph. If you’re stuck in the storm and you need to be rescued, when you tweet that or if you put that on Facebook, that would automatically go onto the platform, and that would alert the cluster group that would send a rescue team. Because we put it out publicly, even the NGOs, anyone who sees that, who sees that you need help, can come and help you. The Red Cross is one of our partners.
This is what we put on the Internet.org. I loved that idea, and we embraced it. I looked at India, which railed against it and really pushed back against it. I didn’t understand it because I was looking at the positives. Well, what happened, though, is in countries like the Philippines, Indonesia, Myanmar, when you get your cellphone, Facebook is automatically a default. That is your internet because it’s free. So what happened in 2016 after the propaganda machine is fully formed is that they can so easily manipulate the people who are on Free Basics because all they see is the headline, and they can add anything on top of that headline. And when you click it, you have to pay, so Filipinos won’t click it. They can’t afford to. That then made it even easier to spread this information – forget it – to spread lies.
So essentially the trade-off was there were good aspects to Free Basics, but it was essentially a way in which Facebook became the internet in the Philippines.
Yeah, absolutely. Not just in the Philippines, in a lot of countries in South and East Asia, and a lot of countries in the global south, where the dangers are far greater than in the West because, in our countries, people are dying.
Misinformation And A Bombing
…Let’s talk about the seminal moments. One major wakeup moment was the bombing, correct?
For us.
For you. OK, so let’s talk about that.
Well, before that, we were monitoring certain accounts, and we had already started looking at the spread of what the campaign team and the anchor account was [unintelligible – McComb’s?] what they had started doing, which is to tear down people. We were looking at the tearing down of journalists, the tearing down of a critic, of a senator who is now in jail – has been in jail for more than a year. Sen. Leila de Lima is the former head of the Commission on Human Rights, former justice secretary. She is probably the fiercest critic of President Duterte, and we watched her at the end of 2016 get systematically torn apart on social media.
How are you watching this? …Bring me inside Rappler. Describe the scene.
In July we started gathering data, and we started looking at accounts. We started looking at bots and fake accounts. By end of July, we had identified 26 fake accounts. Over three months, we were able to actually manually figure out the spread. When you have a sock puppet network – these 26 fake accounts followed each other, so they gamed the algorithm, right? And if you have 26 fake accounts working together, how many will they influence? We counted it manually. They influenced almost 3 million others.
That was the first part of that exponential spread. So you have contacts, right? Twenty-six fake accounts in the French elections. Facebook took down 30,000 fake accounts. So a million, 3 million, right? You can do the math. It’s incredible the reach of disinformation if you’re going to use that. So we started doing that. We started gathering. We started monitoring, because I wanted to understand the data.
But what prompted you to actually want to understand that? I mean, why in the first place are you in Rappler looking into fake accounts on Facebook?
We live on Facebook. It’s like, if you’re walking down your street, you see things because you walk down those streets. Part of the reason we saw it first is because we only live there, right? I don’t have a television network. This is our environment, and starting in July, it became polluted. It changed, and we chronicled those changes. I was cautious enough that we started gathering the data, but we didn’t publish it till the end of September, the beginning of October.
But by September we pulled out the first disinformation network. And that was September. The beginning of September was the Davao City bombing, and that one was so interesting because we found a March article. So it’s September, and here’s this March article trending at number one on Rappler for days. When we took this apart it was alarming, because the bomb explodes on a Friday night. Going into Saturday morning, a March article gets posted on websites. They weren’t sophisticated enough yet. They included a link back to Rappler, which is why we caught it in our analytics, right? It’s number one. Why would a March article be number one?
The article from March talked about how a bomber in Davao had a large bomb, and then it was seeded in websites and spread by campaign pages of the Duterte campaign machine. …By Sunday we came out with a story that told people this was happening, because it was misleading that – by Saturday morning it was trending number one, and by 11:00 a.m., the government declared a state of lawlessness. So this was paving the way for government action, right?
By Sunday, when we had when we exposed it, we were told that there was an emergency meeting Monday to look. And I was like, “Well, this is really crude right.” But then we began to look at the network that spread it. The website number one I still remember news Trending.ph. Website number two, within a month or so we started counting – 15 websites that spread to 300 websites that were being spread by this, the campaign machine, the distribution network on social media. So that’s a lie that is meant to deceive. It’s not blatantly in your face; it is meant to manipulate.
Let’s try to make this as clear as possible, because it’s unbelievable, right? Bring me through piece by piece. So there’s a bombing and an article in September and an article from March. Bring me through piece by piece as to what happened in real time.
All right. So a bomb explodes in the hometown of President Duterte, Davao City. That happens Friday night in a public market. Later, many hours later, a March article of Rappler is seeded in a website. And they made the mistake of linking it back, so we were able to monitor the traffic that was generated, because that website was distributed by the campaign machinery, by the Facebook accounts that helped President Duterte win. Just by doing that, they were able to – that March article was number one for days. It became alarming to me after the government declared a state of lawlessness. Number one, it was an overreaction. Number two, this disinformation paved the way for government action. And number three, it was manipulation.
Why that article? What was their attempt to – ?
It made the government look good, because you would think, if you read it now, you think that the government took immediate action and arrested a bomber. That was it. To me, that’s almost diabolical that you would seed this in the middle of a crisis instead of dealing with a crisis; that the information machinery is one, misleading, and two, ceding victory when there isn’t any yet.
And you were able to trace this to Duterte?
Campaign pages, because they leave digital exhaust, right? They left a trail. We just followed the trail, and what we did, that became the foundation of the data gathering we did on Facebook. We began to look at these accounts. They just tipped us off. And we were able to pull the websites and which accounts are spreading them, and we developed a methodology that then began to track this propaganda machine. That’s what I started calling it. By August I had a lot of data already. End of August I handed that data to Facebook, and I said: “You have to look at this. This is alarming.” At that point I wasn’t yet getting the attacks. The attacks happened after we published the reports. And the attacks were exponential.
…What exactly were they trying to accomplish by seeding this old article?
If you saw that article, that March article, the day after the bombing you would, one, be reassured, because you would think that the government already found the bomber; number two, you would look away after the government declares a state of lawlessness because you would think it worked. That’s the end. …
Weaponization Of Information
…I do actually want to ask you one thing before we go. His inauguration, right, there was something significant about his inauguration.
Oh, gosh.
Can you tell me that story briefly of – the press was not covering it, right, or it was only Facebook?
We were kicked out.
OK, so tell me the story.
Oh, gosh. I forgot that part already. There’s so much that’s happened. After President Duterte won, Facebook came back in and made headway. They did the Livestream. They worked directly with government on this. The difference, though, the big problem was that traditional media was excluded, so we deal with it, right? But it was the first danger sign of what the next year and a half would be.
In what way? How was that a danger sign to you?
Again, I waited a year before I started to publicly talk because we’re partners of Facebook, and we continued to collaborate with Facebook now in a fact-checking role. What’s the danger sign? Lots.
Well, let’s just talk about the inauguration specifically. If you look back on that, what does that suggest to you about the mainstream media being kicked out and Facebook being the only conduit?
What we’re seeing, what we’ve seen since then is that the government essentially created its own – the government began to replace journalists with its own propaganda machine on social media, on Facebook at the same time that the traditional journalists and newsgroups were being attacked, and we would go to Facebook to take down these attacks, [but] Facebook allowed the attacks to continue. It’s death by a thousand cuts. You have to look at journalists in the Philippines. Newsgroups in the Philippines had tremendous credibility, unlike, say, the United States, where public perception had been diminishing. In the Philippines, because our institutions were so weak – and I saw this in every survey – because our institutions were so weak, Filipinos went to media for help, so our credibility ratings were far higher in our society than they were in other parts of the Western world. To see this really whittled down and flipped on Facebook – it’s heartbreaking.
And it was a result of attacks?
Systematic attacks. And this is what I call the propaganda machine. This is when it became weaponized, and one of the main targets were newsgroups. This was a concerted campaign that was initially carried out by the content creators of that propaganda machine, the anchor account who now works for the president’s communications office, and the president himself, because the very first attacks that came out on social media are amplified months later when they come out of the leader of the nation. So Rappler – the first attack was, “You’re CIA?,” in a question mark. Well, we hear it months later come from the president’s mouth, and when the president says it, then the attacks have new meaning, because you have the power of the state behind it.
Essentially the Philippine government can bypass journalism because they will seed on their own Facebook network, and they will use state media working hand-in-hand with that to jump into traditional media. So this is an information ecosystem that just turns democracy upside down.
And where lies are prevalent?
Where lies are truth.
So that bombing happens. We’re in September, and you start doing research. …You bring it to Facebook, right, with a plea. Bring me through that stretch of the story. So after the bombing –
Well, before the bombing, starting in July, we started taking data, because we could feel it changing. I mean, I live on social media; I can sense – that sounds so New-Agey, right, but I can see it on my own feed when I look at my feed. I then ask Rappler, “Are you getting the same thing?” We sense it right away because we look at it, so we started gathering the data July, August, September.
The end of August I gave the data to Facebook. I told them: “This is very alarming. We’re under attack. You have to look at this because you have elections coming up in the United States.” And then I cracked a joke. I said, “If you don’t do something, Trump could win.” And we all laughed.
Then in November, after Trump won, they came back and asked me for the data again. What I would have hoped was that – it’s a strange quandary, because I was the journalist; I was a reporter working on the beginning of the three-part series, and I was also the owner. I was also a shareholder in Rappler. I go to Facebook, our partner, and I say, “Hey, here, look at this.” And I had asked for data back. Never got any data. And at that point, I think they just decided to ignore it. By the end of September, I decided we’re publishing, and at that point we were publishing a three-part series.
The first was “[Propaganda war:] Weaponizing the internet.” The second is “How Facebook’s algorithms impact democracy,” because we could see this already. And the third was the spread of – this is the 26 fake accounts – how you manufacture reality [“Fake accounts, manufactured reality on social media”]. I waited two months, a month and a half at least, before we published it.
Then when we published the story, that’s when the attacks began. The three-part series, we put it out in a week’s time. Friday was the “Manufactured reality,” and that Friday night I got attacked per hour from Friday going into the weekend. I was getting an average of 90 hate messages per hour. Per hour! That’s insane! I was sitting there at the beginning. I was online, and I was trying to respond, and I realized this is like banging your head against a brick wall. They weren’t listening. They weren’t listening.
Who wasn’t listening?
These accounts that were attacking. It was attack mode. That’s when I realized, when you live through something like this, it’s like you’re in an alternate reality. I was living in the alternate reality. That’s when I began to think these fake accounts are set up – I began to formulate different theories which we then began to check over data that we were getting later on.
And what was your suspicion at the time?
I didn’t think we were wrong. The first is, as a journalist, you check where you wrong. I went back over the data that night. I stayed up all night to look it over, and everything checked out. We were so thorough.
…What does that mean, “the data”? What data about what?
The data that we took, we scraped from Facebook. So we have our own data. We started creating a database that took public posts and then tried to match the spread. We started calling it the “shark tank.” This is the network that was spreading hate, that was stifling any kind of questioning, critical questioning. They were pro-Duterte supporters. When I wrote the piece, I precisely really showed this is where it’s coming from. It had scaled because it was built off of the Facebook accounts that were created from the elections from the campaigns.
Let’s go back, though. You asked Facebook for their data at a certain point. This is before you published?
Yes.
…In terms of your sharing with Facebook, tell me the story of that in some detail.
We’re partners, right? I’d written some emails. But in this particular one, I didn’t want to do this on email. I was in Singapore. I met with three people who I began to build a relationship of trust with these guys, because I gave them the data when we were sitting down, and I think they were shocked. I showed them. I gave them Excel sheets. I told them my suspicions. I told them where it could lead. I think it was so shocking that we had to laugh, because the part that I was hoping they would kick into action when I mentioned that you have U.S. elections coming up; this is happening; this is extremely alarming. And then as a joke, I said, “If you don’t do something, Trump could win.” And we all laughed. This was end of August 2016.
And the main point of your trip was to show them what? I mean, what exactly was it?
I wanted them to do something about it. I wanted them to be aware in case they weren’t aware, right, because again, because Rappler lives on Facebook, because we’re so focused on this, we see it oftentimes before Facebook does. We see algorithm changes. We feel it immediately. I look at the numbers. And what I would have wanted – and I asked for this. I said: “Look, this is the way we did this. This is how we got this data. I’d love it if you can share data.” And I was told immediately, “No, we normally don’t do that.” I said: “Then fine. Please just fix it. Tell me what you did, and then we’ll put it in the story,” because more important for me than getting this story was getting it fixed.
…And all of these things that you’re pointing out to them are being done by a president that they helped to elect.
I don’t think it’s Duterte himself. He’s kind of a Luddite. He doesn’t really do social media, but the team that got him elected, they changed after he was elected. And it’s funny, because for a period of time, I was surprised when one of the Cabinet secretaries said that they would continue to use social media, because I couldn’t figure out how could they continue to use it. Well, this is a scorched-earth policy, right? If you use the campaign machinery to foment hate, to sow discord, to hit the fracture lines of society, then what kind of democracy are you building?
Facebook’s Reaction To Warnings
When you met with the Facebook representatives in Singapore and laid this out for them, all of these real-world problems playing out on their platform, what is their response?
I think shock, maybe disbelief, because I was also talking to people whose main jobs are really to grow Facebook. I tried to explain it. They’re my first stop. …At least one person got it. But then I ran a bureau in Southeast Asia. You know, there’s a big gap when you’re on the fringes of a Western organization, and you will have to jump up and down really loudly and have to have connections within your own organization to get it looked at. The fact that they asked for the data again after Trump won showed nothing was done.
Did they say they’d follow up with you? Did they say that they’d try their best to fix it? I mean, besides being shocked and alarmed, what did they promise to do, if anything?
They didn’t really promise anything. But I continued pushing, and we did meet several – I mean, in a year I probably met with more than 50 different officials, high-ranking officials, including Mark Zuckerberg, before I really started speaking about this. I wrote the stories, right? But the attacks that I got – I head Rappler. These things have not just impact as a journalist. My credibility is something I’ve built over the last three decades, and to see that getting torn apart with impunity makes me very angry. And this platform allowed that. Aside from that is the attacks on Rappler. When you allow this kind of mud to get thrown, whether true or not, some of it sticks. So I knew all of this. But where do you get justice?
Was that meeting in Singapore frustrating to you?
No! The succeeding meetings were more frustrating. I mean, the lack of action is frustrating, the, again –
Were you given an explanation in succeeding meetings as to why they weren’t acting?
Again, maybe I’m very patient, but no, no.
And Rappler being a partner of Facebook, would you have expected them to protect you?
…They built this. They built this. It’s theirs, and then they invited a lot of people in. And then it seemed like they just said – they gave everyone the guns, and they said whoever gets the most people and kills the most people wins. There were no rules. What I was after there is their community, the moderation.
I have so many emails complaining about this. The old-world notion of accountability was out the window because these community moderation rules, I don’t think they even really looked at it, not in real-world context of what could happen. Did I expect them to protect me? I never asked for it. I did expect them to be like, “We are as publishers accountable.” That’s not there. And the sidestep is because we’re not publishers. Well, who is accountable for these attacks that happen with impunity? Somebody’s got to do it, and I think if Facebook doesn’t do it, then legislation will happen, and I think that could be even worse.
Misinformation Campaigns Against Individuals
Let’s talk about the attacks. Situate me back to the night that you published. You said it was a Friday night, and you’re getting 90 or so hateful messages an hour, right? Bring me into that. I know it’s painful, but tell me some of the things that started to happen in terms of the nature of the attacks and the content of the attacks. So you published this thing, and then what happened?
…The first step always is to question credibility and impugn corruption, always. We’ve seen that in every single one. “They’re not good. They’re corrupt. Who’s paying for them?” Then the second step is sexual in nature. It would be, you know, “She should get raped; she’s not getting laid; she’s not -” you know, really crass sexual attacks. In the case of [Leila de Lima] there were photos and videos, some of them doctored. I can’t tell what’s real and what’s not real, but they’re really crass, and this woman’s dignity was stripped.
When that step two happens, that denigration as a sexual object, what credibility do you have? It’s a total tearing apart. And then, finally, the last step in her case was #arrestleiladelima. This propaganda machine trended that shortly before she was arrested.
I got worried in May 2017 when one of the content creators in the propaganda machine tried to trend #arrestmariaressa. I did look at it. It didn’t trend very far. And that’s when I realized I’m going to have to speak up. There’s no way I’m not going to speak up. And I think this is where journalists are at a disadvantage, because we tend to take ourselves out of it. We overcompensate to be fair, to be balanced, but at a certain point I just realize that Facebook wasn’t doing enough. And maybe it shouldn’t be protecting. Look, the argument they always used was, “But you’re a public figure; you’re a well-known journalist.”
The Constitution protects journalists. There are actually extra protections for journalists precisely because we speak truth to power. Facebook stripped them from journalists. That’s when I started to speak, and, having said that – again, I continue to work with Facebook because I need them to get better. We can’t go back to world post, and what does this new world look like? That’s what we need to create, and they can’t do it without the journalist.
Tell me about how you were attacked.
I was completely unprepared for these attacks because they came at such a fast rate. And they weren’t questions about stories. As a reporter you think, I can answer any question that you ask me about a story. They weren’t questions about stories. They were attacks on me. There were attacks in the way I look, the way I sounded, that I should be raped, that I should be killed, that I must be an elitist, because – they were just ad hominem hammering. …
Were you frightened?
I think the first two weeks I was trying to figure out what was real and what wasn’t, and then I began to think more strategically, which is when are these threats – can they jump from the virtual world to the real world? Then I began to think, how do I protect my team, because I have young reporters. And then I began asking our team, “Who is getting attacked?” That’s when we realized when we pulled together that we were all being attacked. Then I talked to our social media team, and we needed to get counseling for people.
…For me, the first was questioning myself over and over and over again, which is exactly what they wanted to do. They were able to stop me from writing more stories, because at that point my managers also said: “You’re both the reporter and the head of the company. We need to protect you.” I hate that thought, right? At a certain point, after I figured out the facts are right, we’re doing the right thing, then I began looking up, “So what does this mean, and what do we need to do? What are the action points we need to take?” This is not part of your job when you report, right?
What about security? What about physical security? What did you do?
I came out with a list of things that we needed to do, because you don’t know when threats become real, and in an environment where violence is happening every night, I need to protect our folks. It’s finding this balance, because it’s like dealing with terrorism, right? You can’t let the threat intimidate you to the point that you change who you are, but you can’t be foolish enough not to actually put in some safeguards in case the threat is real.
Facebook’s Responsibility
What could Facebook have done to stop this? What were you asking them to do?
Exactly what every newsgroup does, which is take control and be responsible for what you create. They needed to put the laws in. They built the city, but then they didn’t put any traffic lights in, so the cars kept crashing into each other, except it’s not even that generic. Journalists were being attacked, anyone who pointed out, who had a critical viewpoint. And then at one point I was specifically being attacked because we were discovering and actually exposing these things.
…Just give me the context for the attacks. …Where are they happening, and how are they – ?
The attacks are all on Facebook. The 90 hate messages per hour, that’s on Facebook. Now, if you imagine one post can spread. I keep going back to this. These 26 fake accounts can influence 3 million. That’s the spread. And how do you – it’s like playing whack-a-mole. You don’t want to respond to every single one of these, because then your whole time and your being is consumed by someone else’s agenda. So dealing with it is a whole new world. And we tried and continue to try. In a way, President Duterte’s frontal attack when he attacked Rappler in his second State of the Nation address, it was easier than dealing with the exponential propaganda against Rappler. That’s the president; I can respond to the president.
You can’t respond to a viral message on Facebook –
– who you don’t know who wrote it, who’s tearing you down, who’s calling you ugly or a dog or a snake. How do you respond to that? It’s like name calling in elementary school or kindergarten. Do you respond to that? And then when people believe it, how do you respond to that? What should Facebook have done? My gosh, they should have taken this stuff down. Freedom of speech was used to stifle freedom of speech. That’s what Facebook enabled.
…Are you able to describe some of those subsequent meetings that you had and who you were meeting with then, and the degree of alarm that you’re sounding saying, ”Look, there’s got to be something you can do here, right?” I mean, take me in.
I respect confidences and off–the-record statements, and Facebook in general was very wary of me and Rappler, because we had the data to show, right? The power is all on Facebook’s side in this one. Like I said, when I counted I think almost 50 different people, some of them former colleagues of mine at CNN, and when the gravity of the attacks increased, I asked for help.
Nothing really happened. Nothing happened. It took me a year to decide, I have no recourse but to go talk about it publicly. At least there’s something that happens, right? At the very least even I can personally feel some relief, because my experience is not my experience alone; it’s happening to many other women journalists, and not just in the Philippines but in other parts of the world.
The other thing that helped was when we were part of this academic study that looked at something we defined as patriotic trolling – we gave it a name, “patriotic trolling,” online state-sponsored hate that is meant to silence, meant to intimidate. This is what we’re living through, and there’s nothing like it before.
…What were the sorts of responses that you were hearing from them, from the 50–some-odd people that you met with at Facebook before you went public?
The beginning was denial. Then, when you come up with data, it’s a little bit of a delay – denial, delay. The delay happened for a very long time. And I would say even until now, we work together, but I don’t really feel like any real action has been taken. They will sit me down and say, ”Look, we’ve done this and this and this and this,” and I would say 90 percent of that is public relations.
This meaning what specifically?
Media literacy. We work with Facebook on media literacy campaigns. Media literacy campaigns are at best a medium-term solution. The immediate solution, the immediate actor, the only one who has any power to change this is Facebook, and that change has to happen in its algorithms. It has to happen in its policies. It should get rid of fake accounts. And if it isn’t aware of its impact, then don’t walk into these countries.
And what about media literacy? It’s one thing I want to go to. They’ve run these programs in the Philippines, right, of media literacy programs, something like that.
I’m opening my eyes because, again, even that idea that it is the users’ responsibility to fix the problem, that’s the wrong idea. It’s Facebook’s responsibility, right? The media literacy, at the beginning I felt, was dumping the problem onto the users. Well, it isn’t the users’ problem. It was a problem of the platform, and it needed to fix that problem. …Media literacy is at best a medium-term solution. It isn’t an immediate solution. The only one with the authority and the power to do anything is Facebook. They need to fix the algorithms if they’re going to keep news on the platform. …
What were you learning over the course of what you’re discovering about the algorithm and how that plays into the problem? Bring me in in the story in the chronology of what you’re discovering, right?
…The way it was working when I first started looking at it was that, if you have an account and I have an account, if I have zero followers and you have 500, if I follow you, I make you stronger, and then if you follow me you make me stronger. I follow you. You get that, right? Because you have 500 followers, and I have nothing, you make me much stronger than I would have been. But now imagine if we network each other. It’s the network effect, right?
If you’re the anchor account, all of these smaller accounts are giving you power at the same time you’re giving them power. That’s the foundation of this second part of the series, which was the way Facebook algorithms will affect reality, democracy. Now what happens? When you network all of these accounts and they grow and they work together in unison, they can game the algorithm.
So what’s happened is, the normal space of Facebook is that it plays to your cognitive biases: Like attracts like. You only talk to people who have the same views that you have when you’re there.
…If you’re against Duterte, you’ll move further away, because no one who’s pro-Duterte will be joining the conversation. At the same time, if you’re pro-Duterte, you’re going to move further away from here, so you’re splitting society even further apart. And this public space where we should all be meeting and listening to each other is completely torn apart. That’s part of why there is no rational critical thinking or discussion of policy in the Philippines today, because we’re on Facebook, and it’s torn us apart. That’s one.
I think the second one is what is the implicit assumption in the algorithms? Remember, you brought news in, right? News and facts. The implicit assumption is that popularity wins. That’s engagement. You have to be the most popular. Facts are not about popularity. In fact, people hate facts – some of those things – but you still have to acknowledge it’s a fact. So facts now are determined by mob rule because these networks can actually act like a mob. …So what does that do? Because it goes against its own interests, and here’s their dilemma, because newsgroups have dealt with this for ever: What happens when what’s good for the public interest is bad for your business? Which do you take?
Drawbacks Of The Engagement Algorithm
Well, in the Philippines, for instance, right? I mean, let’s keep it closer to you. Do you think it would be bad for business for Facebook to make these changes?
Absolutely.
Why is that?
Because who has the greatest engagement? The propaganda machine, right? What spreads fastest on Facebook or online? Anger. What does the propaganda machine use as a tool to hit at the fracture lines of society? Anger. If you actually stifle that, all of a sudden your engagement will go down. Rational discussions, how popular are those?
…What was this process of discovery like for you as you’re learning more and more about the nature of the beast, of what it’s actually doing to what the real-world effects are of this platform?
For me this has been – the cautionary tale was always there, right? Rappler doesn’t do personalization. We don’t do recommendations that are personalized precisely because I don’t want echo chambers. So what we do is related stories, if you do your infinite scroll. That’s a choice that we make because we’re journalists. But I always felt that all of the platforms where they give you more and more of what you want, it’s like a drug addict. I hate that I use that – or like sugar, right? We like it, but in the end there is a choice by whoever built it. I guess the difference with a newsgroup is that we know that what’s most popular isn’t always the best thing. We have something called editorial agenda, right, that there’s something that is good for society that needs to be there. That’s the dilemma I think Facebook will face. The words they say are there, but how much do they really value public interest, and this leads to, really, what policy should be. What is their position on human rights?
And you’re seeing that for real on the frontlines of it in the Philippines.
The Philippines is a cautionary tale because we were a vibrant democracy. From 2016 till now. I am just a journalist, right? …But I will fight these cases, you know, the harassment, the intimidation. We won’t be harassed nor intimidated, and we’ll do our best to hold the line. But why would an American company enable authoritarian tendencies of any kind?
…There are people that are paid that are part of this network – can you just explain that? – in part of the propaganda machine, because I don’t feel like we’ve gotten that yet, and how you know that.
…In our first series, we actually talked to people who had been paid. There’s a whole – most recently another group did a research study on the advertising industry and how they freelance for these call center-type operations that, again, creates cheap armies on social media. This is both automated – there are bots; there are fake accounts that are run by people who are paid – and this is systematic. It’s very focused, and it is supporting the administration’s efforts. I’m sorry, I have to also add what we’ve seen, though, since then, is there are other interest groups that are coming but nowhere near the kind of reach that the social media team, the campaign machinery that’s been weaponized has.
Who is Mocha Uson?
Mocha Uson is a singer/dancer. She’s part of our version of Spice Girls. Mocha has an all-girl female band, risque, sexy, but she was an avid supporter of then-Mayor Duterte. Campaigned for him, and her Facebook account, which was used in the past to kind of do these weekly romp–with-the-girls-type thing, now is focused exclusively on anchoring this propaganda network. She was, as of April 2017, is the head of the social media of the presidential palace. She’s an undersecretary, assistant secretary in the government.
And she is central to what?
Social media. She has great access to the president. She attacks with impunity traditional journalists. Most of us actually just kind of write about what she says, but we actually don’t respond. That’s kind of interesting.
Isn’t what President Duterte and this network of people doing, isn’t it exercising their freedom of speech?
Sure, but I think there’s accountability that needs to happen, and a government normally can be held accountable if it didn’t have an exponential propaganda machine. This is why it’s insidious. Facebook enabled the growth of exponential lies to the point that real people can’t tell the difference between fact and fiction.
In an environment like that, the president, Duterte, has the loudest voice because he is president of our nation. That enabled environment – I guess what Facebook has refused to do is to actually stop this exponential spread of lies, because in the end, …they are exercising free speech. … But what happens when your free speech steps on someone else? There are laws against that. There are libel laws; there’s slander. None of that stuff exists on Facebook. And what we’re seeing, like we’ve seen in other countries around the world, is that this freedom of expression, which borders on inciting to hate or inciting to violence, freedom of expression is being used to stop freedom of expression. So that’s something that needs to be addressed.
Has there been a chilling effect?
There’s definitely been a chilling effect. I call it a spiral of silence. It happened August 2016 to August 2017, and it’s still there. People are afraid. Would you not be afraid with dead bodies on the sidewalks every night, with the government that has tremendous power? This is our most powerful president in decades. He owns the executive. The Securities and Exchange Commission report to the president, to the executive. He has a supermajority in Congress, and he will appoint 13 of 15 Supreme Court justices. This is a very powerful man.
Facebook’s Reaction To Warnings
…Zuckerberg. Tell me about meeting him. Where were you?
Rappler and Facebook are partners, and the F8 in 2017 is a time they had invited me to come and wanted to join a roundtable with Mark Zuckerberg. At that point, they knew I already had these complaints, right, and they were worried enough that I was flanked on both [sides] by Facebook folks. But it was wonderful seeing him shift. There were about 12 of us founders. I was the only media person there, and hearing him shift from artificial intelligence to big data to a women’s group in India, because we were all talking about companies, and he was actually asking us for how Facebook can be better; he was getting feedback.
The feedback I gave him was like truly – I said: “Facebook is our public space. You know, Mark, 97 percent of the Filipinos on the internet are on Facebook.” And then he frowned, and then he looked at me and said, “Maria, where are the other 3 percent?” And we laughed. But I got a chance to tell him, to talk to him a little bit and tell him, “This is alarming.”
…Are you able to characterize what it was that, you know, how – ?
Why don’t I put it like a little bit more generally? I think what’s clear is that at that point in time, Mark was just trying to deal with the fact that – he was accepting it. He had already gone beyond the face of denial that Facebook was doing things, and he was focused on traveling around the United States and understanding what was going on here.
What’s alarming to me is that the impact of Facebook in emerging economies, in developing democracies, is so much more than what’s happening in the West. During his testimony at Congress, he said it would take them five to 10 years to figure this out. We don’t have five to 10 years. Countries in the global south, people are dying because of what Facebook is failing to do, so they need to take action now, or they need to leave our countries.
originally posted on pbs.org
