“The toughest part is not knowing whether it’s going to be a normal day, or a not normal day,” said Maria Ressa, speaking by telephone from her office in Manila.
A former CNN bureau chief who spent two decades as an investigative reporter, Ressa is the founder of a news Web site that has found itself on the front line of the global disinformation wars.
Since the summer of 2016, her reporters at Rappler have been engaged in a running battle with paid trolls, influencers, bot armies and fake news Web sites run by supporters of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte.
Launched on Facebook in 2012, before emerging as a full-fledged news Web site with a monthly audience of 12 million, Rappler was among the first publications anywhere in the world to shine a light on how a populist leader could harness social media to win power.
Ressa’s commitment to exposing corruption, propaganda and thousands of extrajudicial killings sanctioned by Duterte in his self-proclaimed “war on drugs” has made her some powerful enemies, but her determination to speak has also won her many allies.
In 2018, she was one of a group of journalists named as Time magazine’s Person of the Year. All of the others lauded by the US journal were at that point either dead or in detention.
Ressa lives every day knowing that both of these fates could befall her.
Security measures have been increased six times at Rappler’s offices in the past year and Ressa has protection at home.
A Princeton University graduate raised in the US, she is a dual national. Returning to the US might be the safest option, but for now, it is not on the cards.
“I hate it, but I can’t leave,” Ressa said. “This time matters. It’s why we do what we do.”
PRISON POSSIBLE
On April 3, Ressa is to learn the outcome of a libel trial brought against her. If she loses, the sentence is a maximum of 12 years: In the Philippines, defamation remains a criminal offence.
Other regime-led prosecutions are pending, for allegations ranging from tax offences to foreign ownership. Ressa, who has been arrested and bailed eight times in the past year, has assembled a formidable defense team of 40 lawyers, including the London barrister Amal Clooney.
If found guilty on all counts, she faces up to 83 years in prison.
“I’m preparing to lose every case here,” Ressa said. “They could shut us down tomorrow, but we will fight everything, both in court and by telling stories. Our fame is our only protection.”
Rappler is not alone in feeling the heat. In a sign that the outlook for independent journalism in the Philippines is fast deteriorating, Philippine Solicitor General Jose Calida on Monday filed a complaint against ABS-CBN, which could lead to the broadcaster losing its license.
The online playbook developed by Duterte, 74, while he was still a city mayor has become familiar.
It is being repeated the world over, with populist leaders from US President Donald Trump to Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro adopting its toxic mix of viral disinformation and intimidation of independent media.
In the UK, there are parallels with the tactics leading up to the June 2016 referendum that ended its membership in the EU, and the bullying of the BBC and other media by the team that surrounds British Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
However, Duterte’s campaign preceded the Brexit vote and Trump’s election.
Rappler was discovering the playbook as it was being written. It did so by mapping Duterte’s hidden networks, an effort that eventually led to the creation of a monitoring tool capable of scraping information from across the Internet.
Rappler’s Sharktank database began as a spreadsheet listing 26 suspected fake accounts, but has evolved into a vast information-gathering machine.
As of October last year, it had captured data on posts and comments from 6,000 public Facebook groups and 48,000 public Facebook pages, alongside links posted each day from more than 2,700 separate Web sites.
“I feel like a Cassandra,” Ressa said.
While her personality is sunny, her prophecies are bleak. She believes that the rise of hard-right leaders has been made possible by the failures of those who control the Web’s biggest forums.
“If the social media platforms don’t take the gatekeeping seriously, they will kill the public sphere,” Ressa said. “If we don’t get this right in 2020, you can open a decade or longer of a descent into fascism — and it will be global, because platforms are global.”
As Ressa tells it, Duterte’s foray into social media began in earnest in January 2016, six months before the Philippine presidential election, when executives from Facebook flew in to train presidential campaign teams.
FACEBOOK’S ROLE
For the Philippines, with its population of 105 million, Facebook is the Internet. Everyone who is online has a page. The platform often comes preinstalled on mobile phones.
Into his 70s, Duterte embraced the medium. With a fraction of the campaign spend of previous Philippine presidents, his team used online engagement to dominate the debate.
He at first courted Rappler, but after his election, there was a falling out.
Duterte supporters began using the word “presstitute” to slander reporters critical of his methods.
In August 2016, Ressa traveled to Facebook’s regional headquarters in Singapore with her initial list of 26 suspected fake accounts, all supporting Duterte, which she estimated had in turn influenced 3 million other accounts.
She asked for them to be taken down, but no action was taken.
Days later, a bomb killed 14 people in Duterte’s hometown, Davao City.
Ressa’s team noticed his followers were posting links to the same article, entitled “Man with bomb nabbed at Davao checkpoint.”
The headline gave the impression that the government had acted quickly. It was a false impression: The article was five months old.
Using data and human sources, Rappler uncovered the campaign’s online architecture. Created for the election, it appears to have been maintained after Duterte entered office.
At its core, a volunteer network of more than 400 individuals was organized into four groups, three for the main Philippine islands and another for the country’s diaspora of overseas workers. Each group created its own content, but followed key daily messages issued from the center.
Duterte’s campaign claimed to have used only unpaid volunteers, but Rappler sources said that there were trolls being paid 100,000 pesos (US$5,166 at the current exchange rate) per month, twice the average salary.
Real-world influencers were allegedly the main centers of the attacks, their tweets and posts amplified by armies of fake and genuine accounts. Some of those influencers have since been awarded government posts.
In October 2016, Ressa began to publish her findings. The retaliation was immediate. She was inundated with hate messages, up to 90 per hour, threatening rape, murder and violence against her family.
Over the next year, she spoke to 50 Facebook executives, urging them to rein in the disinformation and verbal attacks. She lunched with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg.
It was all to no avail — the troll pages remained online.
In 2017, Duterte used his State of the Nation address to attack Rappler by name.
In February 2018, Rappler’s correspondent was shut out from government briefings. Its regional reporters were then blocked from attending any Duterte events.
FACEBOOK’S REACTION
Finally, in October 2018, Facebook took action. It announced the removal of a “spam network,” comprising 95 pages and 39 accounts in the Philippines. An additional 200 pages, groups and accounts were removed in March last year.
However, the reason given was not disinformation. The removal was triggered by what Facebook described as “coordinated inauthentic behavior.”
What has become clear is that while Facebook is willing to remove fake accounts, it is not willing to delete lies.
Challenged during a formal hearing before the US Congress in October last year, Zuckerberg defended this stance, saying that voters should be able to “see for themselves” the statements of politicians.
Legislators must find a financial incentive for Facebook to police content, Ressa said.
Libel laws do not tend to apply to social media platforms in the way that they do to newspapers or broadcasters. Facebook is not answerable in court for the false information posted on its pages.
There is a chink of light in Ressa’s story.
After months of verbal attacks, she was arrested for the first time on Feb. 13 last year, spending the night in detention before being able to post bail. Outrage at her treatment gathered momentum and, for the first time, the online tide turned in her favor.
The Sharktank maps showed real Facebook users rallying to her defense against the bots.
“After I got arrested, the Philippine government unshackled me,” Ressa said. “I knew firsthand how they violated my rights and I could speak about that from experience. We have got to tell our story, because no one else is standing up for the facts.”
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