Good morning.
First of all, what a privilege it is to be in front of you and to listen to everyone. Take everything that you've heard, especially what Shoshana just said.
I'm living this stuff right now. I've been a journalist for more than 30 years, and in the last 14 months, I've had 11 cases, five against me by the government. I've had to post bail eight times in a little over three months, and I've been arrested twice in five weeks. All of this stuff, bottom up.... I call that astroturfing on social media bottom-up information operations that are going down, and then you have top down, which again was described for you much more fully earlier.
I'm going to keep it short because I'll give you a formal presentation tomorrow. I think that, in the end, it comes down to everything that you have heard. It comes down to the battle for truth, and journalists are on the front line of this, along with activists. We're among the first targeted. The legal cases and the lobbying weaponized against me came after social media was weaponized. So, with regard to this battle for truth, at no other time do we really know that information is power. If you can make people believe lies, then you can control them, and that's aside from the commercial aspects of it. We're talking about information as a means to gain geopolitical power. If you have no facts, then you have no truth. If you have no truth, you have no trust.
We've seen that erosion. We first, at Rappler, were a start-up that really looked at information cascades, social networks, family and friends. Social media are your family and friends on steroids, so we looked at how information cascaded. What I'll show you tomorrow is the data that shows you exactly how quickly a nation, a democracy, can crumble because of information operations. If you say a lie a million times, it is the truth. There is this phrase “patriotic trolling”. It is online state-sponsored hate that targets an individual, an organization or an activist, pounding them to silence, inciting hate. We all know that online hate leads to real world violence.
We're the cautionary tale. I've had as much as 90 hate messages per hour. My nation has moved in three years' time from a very vibrant democracy where social media for social good was really used—we lived it. I believed we were.... My organization was one of the ones that worked very closely with Facebook, and then to see it weaponized at the end of 2015 and 2016.... It wasn't until after President Duterte took office in July 2016, the beginning of the drug war. The first targets were anyone on Facebook who questioned the numbers of killings. The UN now estimates that 27,000 people have been killed since July 2016. It's a huge number.
I'll end by saying that tomorrow I will give you the data that shows it. It is systematic. It is an erosion of truth. It is an erosion of trust. When you have that, then the voice with the loudest megaphone wins. In our case, it's President Duterte. We see the same things being carried out in the United States. Whether it's Trump, Putin or Duterte, it's a very similar methodology.
I'll end with this and just say thank you for bringing us in. I mean, what's so interesting about these types of discussions is that the countries that are most affected are democracies that are most vulnerable, like ours here in Southeast Asia, in the global south. Every day that action is not taken by the American tech platforms, the social media platforms that should have American values.... The irony, of course, is that they have eroded that in our countries.
There is some action that has been taken. I will say that we work closely with Facebook as a fact-checker, and I've seen that they're looking at the impact and that they have been trying to move at it. It has to move much faster.
Here's the last part of this: If they're responding to political situations in the west, that normally leads to neutral responses. Neutral responses mean that, in the global south, people will die and people will get jailed. This is a matter of survival for us.
Thank you.