[music] I'm Alexander Heffner, your host on The Open Mind.

I'm delighted to welcome you to a special recording of The Open Mind in Munich, Germany, at the One Young World Summit.

I'm excited and honored to interview our guest today, Maria Ressa.

She is a Nobel Prize winning author, journalist, news media executive.

Maria, such a pleasure to meet you today.

Thanks for having me, Alexander.

Great to meet you.

Your remarks were inspirational for the young generation.

-Not too long?

-No, no.

I love your trio.

The three's.

It's such an effective strategy you use.

But the big question, I think, is how you address the institutionalized corruption that is -these social media platforms.

-Yes.

And it's a big question, but you tackled it beautifully.

Where do you start?

The first is that I've been dealing with it for over a decade.

Right?

We understood it.

So when you are the target of attack, right.

In 2016, I was getting an average of 90, nine zero, hate messages per hour.

Hate messages per hour.

Right.

And when I brought it to Facebook, Facebook said, Maria, you're a public figure, so just report it to us.

And I was like, I timed how much time it took to report one hate message.

I said, I don't have enough hours in the day to report 90 hate messages per hour.

That to me was the first thing that their response to it.

But the second thing I realized is that it is both a blessing and a curse, because the attacks are, you know, it is meant to change the way you feel.

It's, free speech used to pound you to silence when you're targeted.

The way we were, the way I was.

And then I thought, oh my gosh, wait.

If you're targeted with 90 hate messages per hour, I'm going to take them all.

I'm going to get the data.

I don't have to ask anyone for the data, any company, it's all coming my way.

And that allowed us to analyze it to understand how it works.

We took apart clusters of messaging with the distribution networks that put out these messages.

I used to travel for CNN, my beat was counterterrorism, right, to look at terrorist networks.

And I began to look at these virtual world networks like terrorist networks and their recidivist networks.

These companies know them.

But the more they work, the more money they make.

Right?

And then it became in the Philippines and now in many other countries around the world, including in the United States.

Then it became state sponsored or state enabled.

When your President, when President Duterte in the Philippines was the one attacking me, the government apparatus worked hand-in-hand with the recidivist networks of disinformation.

And that's how you began to spread fear.

That's how you, again, what do they do, right?

Social media at that point, hacked our biology.

It changes the way we feel about the world, changes the way we see the world, the way we act, the way we vote.

And what we saw was that, you know, MIT said this in 2018, but I could see it from our data in 2016.

Lies spread six times faster.

That's 2018.

You add exponentially.

It grew exponentially after generative AI came in and now Cory Doctorow uses the phrase the "En*****ification."

That's our public information ecosystem.

It's massively corrupted.

It's insidious manipulation.

And I'd say the same thing that's happening in the physical world that's causing all the wars.

Impunity is the exact same tactics used in the virtual world by the CEOs of these tech companies.

So your question, in How to Stand Up to a Dictator, the question I ask is, you know, who's a bigger dictator, Duterte or Mark Zuckerberg.

I mean, in my country it's Mark Zuckerberg.

It was a parasitic relationship.

Parasitic is a great word.

But the way I describe big tech today, because it is the least regulated industry globally, right, is predatory.

It's predatory and extractive and it takes our data.

It takes our humanity and runs it through a machine to be able to insidiously manipulate us for profit.

And looking at this now, the monetization of that vicious cycle.

Where have you seen effective suspensions of that monetization of the hate and, monetization of that vicious cycle that you're describing?

It's gotten worse from 2016 until now.

Right.

And, you can see it.

I mean, look at just let's just talk.

Right.

I always say there's three things.

And I've said this sentence over and over.

2016 in Silicon Valley.

I said, without facts, you can't have truth.

Without truth, you can't have trust.

Without these three, you have no shared reality.

In 2016, in the Philippines, one algorithm of Facebook and it's used by every social media platform.

This friends of friends algorithm, it's an algorithm for growth.

They A/B tested this right.

So they know that if they recommend a friend of your friend, you're more prone to click it to grow your network and grow their platform.

In 2016, if you're pro Dutertes, so we didn't debate reality at that point, but if you're pro Duterte, you move further right.

If you're anti Duterte, you move further left and replace Duterte with Orban, with Trump, with any other polarizing leader.

And over time this is what you get, right?

Surgeon general of the United States wrote about the epidemic of loneliness.

So people are fragmented.

They have no community.

Community was used, so it enable the worst to incite fear, anger, and hate.

So this is, I mean, predatory and extractive are the two words I use.

And I use the word institutionalized, -I, ya.

-because you have the richest people in the world controlling the public policy levers that would ever regulate this.

Yes, Silicon Valley, and China, the US, and China, actually.

Musk and X and you mentioned Zuckerberg.

But if you were to have more activist leadership, in the United States or elsewhere or leaders around the world like the Spanish prime minister, for example, or the Australian prime minister who've taken steps in that direction, what would that template look like?

Because they have done some effective things in Australia.

They have, but we don't know yet whether it's effective because it's addressing the impact, not the design.

So I think about the public information ecosystem like a polluted river.

And there is a factory of lies that's polluting this river.

And what the tech companies do is they say, you know, well do content moderation.

They deny, deflect.

Right.

So, you take a glass, you clean it up and you throw it back into this polluted river.

The only way to really begin to clean it up is to close the factory of lies.

Right.

That means they have to change their design.

Australia has, you know, banned, 16 years old and below, you can't be on social media.

But there are many things.

While, that addresses an impact problem.

The design of social media is still there, and the problem for any leader around the world is that you cannot lead in this without a shared reality.

You cannot lead.

It is insidious manipulation and the type of leader that wins in an environment like this is a predatory leader, someone who deconstructs reality.

Someone who gets rid of checks and balances.

Here's an interesting one, right?

I used it for Duterte, but our study at Columbia University, now that we're about to release this month, shows you that, you know, in the first hundred days of President Trump, narrative warfare and the breakdown of reality, it was 143 executive orders used as content triggers.

And what does that do?

It weakens and destroys checks and balances.

And where does it go?

To the bottom of the funnel.

You have to look at the corruption and the creation of kleptocracies.

And that goes global, right?

They do not stay in their own countries.

President Duterte, within two months went to China, and he declared that the Philippines was going to leave behind the United States and ally with China and Russia.

Russia didn't actually.

This was like completely out of the blue.

But certainly that's where the tail wags the dog, where the public information ecosystem determines the reality we live in.

And I think this is, I don't know about you, you know, but I became a journalist because I knew information is power, and that power is now in the hands of these big tech companies that now have gone beyond social media.

Right.

They're now involved in a very speculative, generative AI, race for energy and funding.

And it's one that I worry about because, you know, what we've seen in the last few days, too big to fail.

And what we've seen in the data is that the generative AI, you try certain things, especially the ones in the public information ecosystem, the error rates.

And they don't call them error rates, they call them hallucinations.

You see the flattening of meaning, but the error rates are at best 16%.

And at worst 79%.

That's the public information ecosystem.

If you're wrong, 79% of the time you would get 79 lawsuits, -right?

-Yeah.

I mean, this is insane.

Sorry, let me calm down.

No no no no it is.

And what's so vicious pernicious, unstoppable about the cycle is the incest with the electeds that you allude to.

The fact that that is so foundational to public leadership now that as you describe, the people being elected either they're connected at the hip to the oligarchy or they are themselves this institutionalized corruption.

Well, so let me also just point out, right, as journalists, we kept the business away from the editorial.

So that the person who would deal with the President actually would not be giving favors for a favor.

Right?

But what we're seeing here is that big tech in general has no, separation.

They don't value the public sphere, information integrity has disappeared.

Right?

Part of the reason 72% of the world today is under authoritarian rule is because the decisions Big Tech has made for the growth of their own businesses.

So what we've seen, and this is shocking to the entire world, because it's an about phase for American tech companies in particular.

Right?

But of course, TikTok has joined the fray in America.

And to see them at the inauguration of President Trump, at the front row ahead of any of the policies.

This is where, you know, I'll quote Carole Cadwalladr, this is a "Broligarchy."

But, here's the other part on the Democratic side, right.

Why did President Biden wait until he, until one of his last speeches to talk about a tech oligarchy?

Why didn't he begin his presidency with destroying a tech oligarchy, or putting in place the guardrails that would prevent this type of corruption?

Because, technically, that's what we're seeing, isn't it?

My friend Thomas Frank writes eloquently about this.

He calls the Democrats that have thrived on this politics of inequity, too.

The "innocrats," you know, people who've been at the hip with -the Silicon Valley moguls, too.

-With tech.

Let me ask you this, Maria.

I'm also concerned... Sorry, just to go back to that.

There's a difference between the time when the Democrats used it.

-Obama, -Right.

versus now.

Right.

Sheryl Sandberg was once called Typhoid Mary because she took that predatory nature of advertising revenue from Google, brought it to Facebook, which had the relationship data that Google never had.

Right.

When you put that together, this is far more predatory than anything that was around during the Clinton, Obama years, which is when we were all.

I mean, look, we even talked about the Arab Spring while Ghonim from Google automatically, that was the Arab Spring was 2011.

And then by 2013 or 2014, he was calling it the Arab Winter because this is manipulation.

And if you allow manipulation, governments and others with more power can do this far better than civil society.

And there was the promise of reform.

The Zuckerberg mea culpa, the testimonies of the social media councils who committed felonies when they lied, the FEC in the United States requires you to be a person if you're donating.

And there were anonymous funders of campaigns during that election cycle.

But we went in the opposite direction.

And I want to ask you about the fourth estate and journalism itself.

I think the trend to abolish the ombudsman and, the public editor, this happened at the Washington Post, The New York Times.

And what you've seen with the aggressive legal pursuit of action by President Trump, unprecedented in the United States.

But, not unprecedented in the world, the idea that you're going to sue media companies into oblivion.

Well, look at me.

You survived.

Barely, yeah a decade of it, right?

Sorry go ahead.

No, this is where we are.

We're at a place where the modus operandi of authoritarian wannabe leaders or authoritarian leaders is to try to, if they're not, arresting, as you were, journalists, they are attempting to kill them by lawsuit.

Yeah.

What are we doing about this?

What do you think ought to be done about this?

Yeah.

So this is all very familiar.

And I joke that, you know, I have both PTSD and deja vu living through this in America.

I've lived through it twice in the Philippines, 1986, the Duterte years and then now in America.

And what we're seeing is, obeying in advance, to quote Tim Snyder.

I thought when I was living through this in the Philippines, corporate media and the Filipino public, the tycoons who I thought would stand up.

I was like, why aren't we standing up?

But fear is real.

And President Duterte had launched a brutal drug war where deaths, bodies were being dumped on the sidewalks, right?

So, fear is real.

I understand this the same way that I understand this in America.

But the difference here is that, you know, and I'll say four levels of capture, right?

The first is, state capture.

State capture is your very last one.

Media capture, NGO capture, academic capture, state capture.

The Philippines, Brazil would know this, right?

Journalists exposed this.

Brazil, South Africa.

Many other countries around the world.

There's so many thoughts.

But let me say one thing.

If you don't fight for your rights at the beginning, you will lose them.

It's like death by a thousand cuts.

This is what happened.

And when you try to claw them back later, it will be impossible, because you would have lost your power.

The same thing happened in the Philippines, that I'm seeing happen in the United States.

And the Philippines has a constitution patterned after the United States, three co-equal branches of government.

The way it's supposed to work is a very powerful executive, is supposed to have a check and balance in the legislature and then the judiciary.

Duterte within six months collapsed the legislature because patronage politics see the corruption, right?

Patronage, politics and fear.

In 2019, in just a little over a year, I had 11 arrest warrant, 11 criminal charges filed against me that would have, you know, cumulatively, that's 103 years in prison.

So the fear is real weaponization of social media, weaponization of the law.

And then fear does the rest.

But here's the problem in America, it looks like your legislature collapsed within the first 100 days, and then you judiciary will catch up, and the jury is out, literally on what will happen.

But what you have lost in this time period, there's no guarantee you will get them back.

Right.

And I'll point to on the media end, I will point to ABS-CBN, the largest network in the Philippines.

I used to manage this news group.

A thousand people, 21 different bureaus, six overseas bureaus.

It was the largest and yet, Duterte took away its franchise, license is the American equivalent.

So it couldn't operate broadcasting wise.

And even after he's gone, arrested, charged with crimes against humanity and is waiting trial in The Hague.

ABS-CBN never got its franchise back.

So that's, to me, the hardest thing, right?

The question.

And here I see Americans trying to figure this out.

I wrote a book in 2022 called How to Stand Up to a Dictator.

And every chapter is the macro, the subtitle is the lesson I've learned in the macro.

Right?

Things like embrace your fear because if you embrace your fear and hold it and plan it.

Like for me it was to shut down Rappler among them.

If you can do that, then you can act.

Because if you don't conquer your own fear.

Inaction is a choice.

Then you can't do anything right.

So here's the last part.

I know Americans are looking because, it's in the top ten of the New York Times bestseller list.

It's number three.

How the heck and what's the one right in front of it, On Tyranny by Tim Snyder.

This is the time to act.

It's the time to act.

And news organizations, we were speaking about the convergence of influencers and news people as we understood it.

And I was telling you that in public media, you cannot apply for a grant from a big foundation without demonstrating growth on social media.

That's what the name of the game is.

And most people will follow someone on Instagram as opposed to a news person.

That doesn't seem like acknowledging the fear, owning the fear that you're describing.

It's accepting the culture.

It's totally different than it was.

It's like taking Soma, you know, in a Brave New World, the drug that they take in order to have this brave new world is Soma.

Social media is like a drug, right?

By saying journalists should be like influencers, it's Snyder's again, it's obeying in advance.

What should happen is legislation should protect the public the same way that like, you know, it's a public safety issue.

And what the tech lobby has done very well is to present it as a free speech issue.

It's a safety issue, right?

The same way that this building will not fall down around us because they had codes in place.

They had the law in place.

We don't have any of that in the virtual world.

Right.

Everything in the physical world is going to be, is moving to the virtual world.

And yet that virtual world is in the hands of private companies running for profit, running the virtual world for profit.

That's the corruption of our public information ecosystem.

And actually, it's not just big tech that gave up on public safety for profit.

It's also democratic governments, starting with the United States, that enabled Silicon Valley.

I had hoped after January 2021 that after Silicon Valley since came home to roost on Capitol Hill, that America would have learned.

But no, you know, governments, democratic governments abdicated responsibility by not building a public interest tech stack.

A tech stack in the virtual world that allows real people to talk to real people without insidiously manipulating us.

It's the same way that, you know, broadcasters in the past, we were independent from government, but there were laws in place that if we, for example, lied repeatedly we would be held accountable for it.

None of that is happening in the virtual world.

Sorry, I can talk about this forever because it's frustrating!

Talk to me about prescriptive.

You said the corruption has accelerated, the disinformation has accelerated.

What do you think is most important to do.

-Now.

-Prescriptively.

Yeah, yeah, yeah several.

I've been asked this many times, you know, and that's part of what I said at One New World.

Yeah.

I can say.

I think the question at the end, the question I've asked and it was first the Filipinos and then, frankly, in the book, I was worried about America.

I was worried about Western democracies.

And so the question is, what are you willing to sacrifice for the truth?

This is, we are living through an information Armageddon.

This is a battle for facts.

And if we lose that battle we lose everything.

That's climate, health, right?

Every single other, you know, when you talk about disinformation, there are different groups that are lining up, right?

Climate disinformation, health misinformation, Covid, at that time, use the disinformation networks.

Right.

But if you cannot solve information integrity, we lose it.

So last question, when do you think a majority of people, are going to see this as a civil rights issue, as a human rights issue, not because they are threatened imprisonment, Yes.

but because they are subject to that manipulation.

They, but, not many people see it that way yet.

So, let me say I have hope.

So, number one, finally countries around the world are talking about digital sovereignty.

And that starts I mean, Germany, we're in Germany.

Germany and France, all of their government websites are on the matrix protocol.

That's open source decentralized end-to-end encrypted.

It's where we built our matrix chat app, precisely because we want to escape the insidious manipulation of big tech.

And in the Philippines, we created a federation of news organizations where real people can have real conversations.

I think that's one, governments are starting to realize, in Paris last week, I was at the International Fund for Public Interest Media.

I co-chair this, and we had a high level meeting where governments all around the world, every single government, including, I mean, you won't be surprised about this.

Moldova's president, Maia Sandu, France's Emmanuel Macron, they spoke emotionally and convincingly because they have lived through the disinformation.

Moldova, Maia Sandu is a woman who ran for president and was bombarded with Russian disinformation.

Right.

And France is going through this.

Every single democracy around the world, every single Democratic leader is standing on wood, with termites eating it, and it will collapse under them if they do not put legislation in place, if they do not demand accountability.

But I see movement multilaterally, right?

I opened the UN, on the first day.

And one of the most interesting things is a true global South, global North, alliance.

The global North has always had resources, but it's not as resilient in these matters as we in the global South.

Brazil, Chile, Spain, they started something called Democracia Sempre.

Latin American countries leading this, but Australia was there.

20 countries at the UN pushing forward information integrity.

40 plus Nobel laureates signed on to support them.

I was one of them.

So was the Dalai Lama.

But I didn't mention him at the UN because I didn't want China going crazy.

Having said that, at IFPIM in Paris last week, 30 countries signed on, on information integrity.

So, we need at the government level, multilateral initiatives that put these redlines in place.

We need civic engagement.

Americans wake up.

Because if you don't, so here's our fear from our part of the world, to you, to America.

You've lived a life of privilege compared to the rest of the world.

Right?

Will you have the courage to protect your rights, to stand up for your rights?

Because it will mean having to deal with sacrifice.

What are you willing to sacrifice?

I think the last part is, where America goes the world will go, and America has turned the world upside down.

Words are words.

I mean, Safiya Noble talked about the flattening of meaning, but we know the world is being transformed as we speak.

Last word for journalists in America.

If I was running a news group, I would focus on two things, because these are the editorial indicators of the state of democracy.

One would be, the level of corruption, the growth of kleptocracy, because you can see this in every single one in a way that we've never seen before.

The second would be, you know, I worked with CNN for 20 years.

The second would be the protests.

At CNN, when I was there, we only covered protests if they were huge or violent.

I would do a TikTok on this because the protests are an indication of America's temperature, and this is an indication of America's health.

When you get rid of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, and you send a signal that America is open for corruption, it changes everything about the world.

And all of this comes together.

A leader in one country that controls the power, doesn't stay in his own country, especially in the world's most powerful nation.

They ally.

And that is what's changing our world.

Maria, what an honor to listen to you today.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

I'm so sorry.

I could talk forever.

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