Maria Ressa has devoted her entire career to the best of journalism, holding the powerful to account and countering disinformation at every opportunity. She and her media company Rappler have accordingly been vilified and prosecuted unceasingly under Rodrigo Duterte, with little letup under Corazon and Benigno Aquino and Bongbong Marcos, the current President of the Philippines. Her book How to Stand Up to a Dictator: The Fight for Our Future gives a blow-by-blow account of her career, recent Philippine politics including the Ferdinand Marcos dictatorship, and the organizations she worked for and founded. Marcos abolished Freedom of Speech and Freedom of the Press. Ressa was in the Philippines at the end of that period, starting her work as a journalist.
The book ends with a strong plan that we can take as a starting point for future action.
2021 Nobel Peace Prize Laureates Maria Ressa and Dmitri Muratov’s 10-Point Plan to Address the Information Crisis
Presented at the Freedom of Expression Conference,
Nobel Peace Center, Oslo, Norway, on September 2, 2022
We call for a world in which technology is built in service of humanity and where our global public square protects human rights above profits. Those in power must do their part to build a world that puts human rights, dignity, and security first, including by safeguarding scientific and journalistic methods and tested knowledge.
To build that world, we must:
- Bring an end to the surveillance-for-profit business model
- End tech discrimination and treat people everywhere equally
- Rebuild independent journalism as the antidote to tyranny
We all know that that Facebook and Twitter/X have been the worst, with some of the Chinese services not far behind. Google’s domination of Internet advertising, and its algorithms and AI, are also problematic. Then there are the Russians. We will get into all of them in this series, and also look at who is doing any of it right.
We call on all rights-respecting democratic governments to:
1. Require tech companies to carry out independent human rights impact assessments that must be made public as well as demand transparency on all aspects of their business—from content moderation to algorithm impacts to data processing to integrity policies.
2. Protect citizens’ right to privacy with robust data protection laws.
3. Publicly condemn abuses against the free press and journalists globally and commit funding and assistance to independent media and journalists under attack.
We call on the European Union to:
4. Be ambitious in enforcing the Digital Services and Digital Markets Acts so these laws amount to more than just ‘new paperwork’ for the companies and instead force the to make changes to their business model, such as ending algorithmic amplification that threatens fundamental rights and spreads disinformation and hate, including in cases where the risks originate outside EU borders.
5. Urgently propose legislation to ban surveillance advertising, recognizing this practice is fundamentally incompatible with human rights.
6. Properly enforce the EU General Data Protection Regulation so that people’s data rights are finally made reality.
7. Include strong safeguards for journalists’ safety, media sustainability and democratic guarantees in the digital space in the forthcoming European Media Freedom Act.
8. Protect media freedom by cutting off disinformation upstream. This means there should be no special exemptions or carve-outs for any organization or individual in any new technology or media legislation. With global information flows, this would give a blank check to those governments and non-state actors who produce industrial scale disinformation to harm democracies and polarize societies everywhere.
9. Challenge the extraordinary lobbying machinery, the astroturfing campaigns and recruitment revolving door between big tech companies and European government institutions.
We call on the UN to:
10. Create a special envoy of the UN Secretary-General focused on the Safety of Journalists (SESJ) who would challenge the current status quo and finally raise the cost of crimes against journalists.
We have quite substantial data on the malefactors around the world, including nations, companies, techbros, grifters, and more, and will look at many of them, too, in this series. I would add a point 11. Gather data on all of the above, analyze it, and put it in form that the public can contribute to and make use of. This is a thread that runs through Maria Ressa’s entire career, enabling all of her greatest successes, as recounted in this book.
Nobel Prize lecture: Maria Ressa, Nobel Peace Prize 2021
Supreme Court of Philippines appoints IBAHRI as Amicus Curiae in Maria Ressa’s cyber libel case
Wednesday 24 April 2024
The Supreme Court of the Philippines has recently accepted the amicus curiae motion filed by the International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute (IBAHRI) in July 2023 in the case of People of the Philippines v Maria Ressa and Reynaldo Santos Jr. The IBAHRI welcomed the granting of the amicus curiae – friend of the court; an individual or organisation that is not a party to a legal case, but that is permitted to assist a court by offering information, expertise, or insight that has a bearing on the issues in the case.
In June 2020, Maria Ressa – Nobel Peace Prize Laureate of 2021 – was convicted of [an utterly bogus charge of] cyber libel under Republic Act No 10175 by the Regional Trial Court of Manila, a decision which was upheld by the Philippines Court of Appeal in July 2022. Later that year, Ms Ressa filed an appeal before the Supreme Court of the Philippines (the ‘Supreme Court’) and awaits an appeal judgment.
Just as in the US we need maximum efforts from the legal profession and the public to demand that the Philippine government allow judicial independence in this case.
If tyranny means anything to you, please add this book to your shelf, along with Hannah Arendt and Timothy Snyder.
I am going to post about the steps in this plan every Monday for three months. We will look at what is proposed here, what is being done about it, and how to make more of it happen, both in reasonably democratic countries and in authoritarian and even tyrannical countries.
Aristotle wrote in The Politics
Tyranny is the shortest-lived form of government.
That doesn’t happen by itself. It happens because the people of every country want it to happen, and fight against long odds to make it so.
Tell us what you are up to to make it happen, and anything else you want me to cover as we go on.
