Former CNN reporter Maria Ressa was awarded the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize for her “efforts to safeguard freedom of expression.” On Wednesday, she traveled over to CBS and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert to claim that freedom of speech on social media is responsible for the raise in authoritarianism around the world.
During their interview, Colbert asked, “You don't just talk about how to stand up to a dictator, you also talk about how standing up to social media companies is important too. So how are those two connected, authoritarians or dictators and social media companies. How are they connected in ways that perhaps we don't often think about?”
Ressa claimed that “One enabled the other. You know, there’s a reason why 60% of the world today is now under authoritarian rule, the numbers of democracies globally has been rolled back to 1989 levels.”
To back up her absurd claim she claimed that Rodrigo Duterte would never have been elected president of The Philippines, her native country, if it wasn’t for Facebook.
Throughout the interview, Ressa would also cite academic studies to give her argument more validity, but this cherry-picking of evidence ignores that countries that were dictatorships prior to 1989 and ones like Russia and Venezuela that did not relapse because of social media and that those regimes hate social media and freedom of speech and that Duterte is no longer president of The Philippines.
After also blaming social media for January 6, Ressa added, “Three sentences have I said repeatedly since 2016, if you don't have facts, you can't have truth. Without truth you can't have trust. Without these three we have no shared reality. We can't solve any problems. We have no democracy. That’s what social media has done. It has come in, and used free speech to stifle free speech, right?”
Does this lamentation over not having a shared reality include revulsion at the idea that men can become pregnant or was the previous Twitter leadership right to label that hate speech?
Colbert did not ask that obvious question, instead asking, “Elon Musk has made a big noise about how he believes in free speech. Do you have a message for either one of those CEOs or men like them about how they can do the right thing with their social media as opposed to perhaps the most profitable or expedient thing?”
Ressa didn’t offer any solutions, instead just condemning “surveillance capitalism” and the negative psychological and sociological impacts of social media, which is a fine conversation to have, but is unrelated to free speech on the internet and the rise of dictatorships.
After her interview with Colbert, Ressa journeyed over to Wednesday's CNN This Morning to claim that free speech is the answer to bad ideas "doesn't work today. Not in the age of exponential lies." This was uttered during a segment on China cracking down on anti-lockdown and anti-Xi protestors.
This segment was sponsored by Volkswagen.
Here is a transcript for the November-29 show:
CBS The Late Show with Stephen Colbert
11/30/2022
12:29 AM ET
STEPHEN COLBERT: You don't just talk about how to stand up to a dictator, you also talk about how standing up to social media companies is important too.
MARIA RESSA: Oh yeah.
COLBERT: So how are those two connected, authoritarians or dictators and social media companies. How are they connected in ways that perhaps we don't often think about?
RESSA: One enabled the other. You know, there’s a reason why 60% of the world today is now under authoritarian rule, the numbers of democracies globally has been rolled back to 1989 levels. In 2016 I stood up and I said—we demanded an end to impunity on two fronts: Rodrigo Duterte, our president in the Philippines, his brutal drug war and the second is Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook because in the end, what happened in the Philippines would not have happened if Facebook wasn't there. A hundred percent of the Filipinos on the internet are on Facebook. Facebook is our internet.
And, you know, I guess this is the other part, in 2016 I said "America, look at us. What is happening to us is coming for you.” And I, when I saw January 6th happen, violence on Capitol Hill, something you have never seen before, but the same methodology, bottom up, social media, lies, a fact, you know, comes a lie or a lie said a million times becomes a fact, so you can't distinguish.
Then it comes top down from the government, from the president himself, same methodology, and then you have no idea where truth lies, right. So in our case what we saw is all of a sudden society was splintering. And how do you react to this? I think the other part is that because this is where I am going to be like [unintelligible] combined.
Three sentences have I said repeatedly since 2016, if you don't have facts, you can't have truth. Without truth you can't have trust. Without these three we have no shared reality.
We can't solve any problems. We have no democracy. That’s what social media has done. It has come in, and used free speech to stifle free speech, right?
COLBERT: Well, there’s a lot of talk—in talking about regulation, or at least editorial control of social media like Facebook or Twitter in this case, Elon Musk has made a big noise about—
RESSA: Yeah.
COLBERT: -- how he believes in free speech. Do you have a message for either one of those CEOs or men like them about how they can do the right thing with their social media as opposed to perhaps the most profitable or expedient thing?
RESSA: Well, that's the biggest problem is that all of a sudden our public sphere is governed by an economic system we didn't even have a name for. Now in 2019 it was named by a Shoshana Zuboff, a Harvard emeritus professor, she called it surveillance capitalism, right?
So think about, oh, I don't have my phone. So think about-- you pull out your phone, right, what is--this is social media is mildly addictive, right? You’re supposed to scroll. And all of that is actually-- what keeps you scrolling. Lies. This is an MIT study from 2018, lies spread faster and further than facts.
What else keeps you scrolling, fear, anger, hatred, us against them. Multiply that, right, so more money comes in, as you become more afraid, as you become more hateful and it impacts us on many levels, personally, right? Psychologically, sociologically, the second one, we behave differently in groups and then finally that last part which we rarely talk about is emergent human behavior. What kind of species behavior are we encouraging with this information ecosystem? It is the worst of who we are. This is what I saw in the Nobel lecture, it’s what I said there but it is backed by facts and evidence, the data doesn't lie.
