By Irene Escudero |
Cartagena, Colombia (EFE) to leaders who are destroying democracy.
The 2021 Nobel Peace Prize laureate laughs, despite the fact that she speaks with complete seriousness, at a panorama in which “young white Americans” feel threatened and the networks reaffirm that feeling seasoned with hatred and fear.
“It is not a coincidence that there is an increase in white supremacist violence on the extreme right and a radicalization of political parties even further to the right,” he says in an interview with EFE in Cartagena de Indias, where he participated in the Hay Festival, and confesses: “It’s terrifying, they are distorting everything.”
I’ll start with a question you asked in your Nobel acceptance speech: what are you willing to sacrifice right now for the truth?
You don’t really know who you are until you have to fight for it and since 2016 I have learned that I am willing to sacrifice a lot for the truth; It makes sense, I’m a journalist! When we started (at Rappler, his medium) to be attacked, in 2016-2017, I didn’t think twice, we had to fight to be able to say what was wrong.
In 2019, when the Philippine government issued ten arrest warrants against me, I saw that I could go to jail for life (…) So I am willing to risk a lot because I believe that this is a crucial battle for the world and an existential one for the democracy.
In that same speech you also said that “online violence is real violence”, what does that mean?
At first I said that online violence leads to real violence, but now I say that online violence is real violence. I started by talking about the radicalization of terrorists; once radicalization occurs online there were attacks in many parts of the world.
It was Russian disinformation that taught the world what can be done on social networks, information warfare is in fact the Russian military doctorate. What they tried in 2014 was to change the meta-narrative for the annexation of Crimea, a narrative that in the end was a lie and is now used for the invasion of Ukraine.
It is no longer necessary to look for information on the Internet to become radicalized, but it comes automatically, right?
Exactly. Let’s talk first about radicalization and then about polarization and I will use the Philippines as an example. Information operations began in 2014 with Russia, which was the first to experiment with how they could exploit social media. So, in 2016 Rodrigo Duterte is elected president and that is where the political dominoes begin because a month later Brexit arrived and the rest of the elections that ended in Donald Trump.
In 2016 we Filipinos did not live different realities and we understood each other, we were in the center. But if you were pro Duterte you turned to the right and if you were anti, to the left, according to the algorithm. 2017, 2018, 2019 arrived and the further they got from each other, the points of view became more extreme because they don’t listen to the other side.
And when they are already polarized, the content distribution algorithms on YouTube, for example, when someone on the right clicks on a conspiracy theory, they will be fed with more extreme conspiracy theories to the point that, as Jonas Kaiser demonstrated at Harvard, in Brazil Jair Bolsonaro’s support base was created by Youtube algorithms and distributed on Facebook.
The networks unite followers of extreme conspiracy theorists who otherwise would never have met in real life. That is what we face with polarization and radicalization.
And so it’s easy and cheap for populists to get to the Presidency, right?
Clear! Not only easy and cheap, but social networks are complicit because they make money with these information operations. Before, Russia would have had to have secret agents in all countries to be able to change public opinion little by little, but social networks have made it very easy to manipulate and change opinion on a large scale. They give governments the power to control our minds and feelings in personalized ways. That is unprecedented, it has never happened! And it is extremely dangerous!
And despite everything, Mark Zuckerberg says that Facebook is not political.
It’s a lie! To say that Facebook is not political is a lie because they have made decisions that have changed the world and destroyed democracies. In Burma, the UN sent a team (…) and Facebook sent its own and both came to the same conclusion: Facebook allowed the genocide (against the Rohingyas). How can they continue to justify the deaths?
It’s time for Zuckerberg to fix Facebook and become a global leader because only he has the power to do it. He has to be safe for people to be on this network.
You say that you have to be aware of how dangerous social networks are. Do you think there is someone in 2023 who does not know? Or is it that we don’t care?
They are addictive! They are designed to be addictive. I think now is when people start to realize the dangers. Also, people (…) believe that they cannot be manipulated, especially in the West. They say: “ah, it’s a matter of illiterate people, only people from the south can be manipulated.”
It’s this rhetoric of “what is Google or Facebook interested in what I do?”
And meanwhile they clone you (…) Your identity, your data privacy, your emotions and your mind are being manipulated by power to shape your world, how you think, how you feel. Do you want to lose your independence like that? Do you want to live in that ‘brave new world’ that Aldous Huxley talks about?
In addition to Zuckerberg there is Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, they all seem to have this same philosophy.
The ignorance of one person should not determine the future of a whole world. And that goes for any of these white billionaires.
After Bolsonaro and the return of Lula came the assault on the Presidential Palace in Brasilia. What has happened in Brazil?
In the last elections, the polls said that Lula would win by more than 30% and he won by 1%. Civil society fought hard for that and then the violence came: January 6 in the US and January 8 in Brazil. It’s not a surprise.
When conspiracy theories are allowed to spread, people believe it, and when you believe it, problems cannot be solved (…) When trust in our communications system is destroyed, what do people trust? The problem with the corruption of the information ecosystem when lies spread faster is that everything collapses.
After this rise of anti-democratic leaders there is a turn. Are we realizing what is happening and acting so that it does not happen again?
Yes, but it’s not enough because the problem that caused the domino effect is still there. Brazilian civil society had to work harder for Lula to barely win by 1%. Imagine if we had laws that controlled technology so that this doesn’t involve so much sacrifice, so that we aren’t manipulated.
Now we are more aware of the problem but it should not be so difficult to recover our will. We live in an upside down world where lies are rewarded.