Thank you so much for inviting me to speak to you today.
I'd like to share three points. The first is what we're living through in the Philippines as journalists and human rights defenders. The second is how technology for profit has become an insidious tool for tyranny globally. The third is what we're doing to help safeguard our election, which is happening in exactly 42 days in the Philippines right now—it's 41 days. They're just waking up. I would call this an “Avengers, assemble” moment in our nation's battle for facts.
I've been a journalist for more than 36 years. In 2016, we came under intense online attack, because we exposed the brutal drug war and the propaganda machine that was attacking journalists, news organizations, human rights defenders and opposition politicians. The weaponization of social media was followed by lawfare, twisting the law to breaking points to target those same groups. In 2018, the Philippine government tried to revoke Rappler's licence to operate. While we continue to fight it legally, within four months, we lost 49% of our advertising revenue.
In less than two years, my government filed 10 arrest warrants against me. In order to travel, I have to ask permission from the courts. Sometimes I get it, sometimes I don't. One of the times my travel was denied at the last minute was when my aging parents, who were both ill, had asked me to come to the United States because my mom was having an operation.
In past three months, we've had 22 new complaints—potential new legal cases—filed against us. Last Friday, we received eight in one day. Eight subpoenas is a record for us. We must be doing something right, because not only did a sitting cabinet secretary sue seven news organizations, including Rappler, but there is a petition at the Supreme Court by the solicitor general alleging unfounded conspiracy theories against us. The majority of these complaints are connected to President Duterte's pastor, Apollo Quiboloy, who is wanted by the FBI. His company is leading the attack against journalists and human rights activists and was recently awarded a television franchise. Last week, I testified in court in a case where the alleged tax we owed—200,000 pesos—was far less than the 1.2 million pesos I had already posted in that court in bail and bonds to stay free and working.
All told, I could go to jail for the rest of my life because I refuse to stop doing my job as a journalist. However, I'm lucky. Remember Senator Leila de Lima, former justice secretary and head of the Commission on Human Rights? Last month, she began her sixth year in prison. Amnesty International calls her “a prisoner of conscience”.
Remember young journalist, Frenchie Mae Cumpio? She spent her last two birthdays in prison.
Remember former colleague, Jess Malabanan? He was killed by a bullet to the head. He worked on the Reuters' drug wars series that won a Pulitzer Prize.
Remember ABS-CBN, the largest broadcaster in the Philippines? It was a newsroom I headed for six years. In 2020, it lost its franchise to operate. The last time that happened was when Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law in 1972.
For the people who defend us, there are also costs. More lawyers have been killed than journalists under the Duterte administration, and the toll for human rights activists as of August last year hit over 420 dead. Last year, on March 7, nine trade union leaders and human rights activists were killed in simultaneous morning police raids, which we now call “Bloody Sunday”. The numbers of those killed in our brutal drug war are from the thousands to tens of thousands. That's the first casualty in my nation's battle for facts.
That brings us to my second point, of how technology has degraded facts and broken our societies. Like the age of industrialization, there's a new economic model that brought new harms, a model Shoshana Zuboff called “surveillance capitalism”. This is when our atomized personal experiences are collected by machine learning and organized by artificial intelligence extracting our lives for outsized corporate gain. Highly profitable microtargeting operations are engineered to structurally undermine human will, creating a behaviour modification system in which we are Pavlov's dogs, experimented on in real time with disastrous consequences.
This is happening to you and to all of us around the world. These engagement-based metrics of American tech companies mean that the incentive structure of the algorithms, which is really just their opinion in code, implemented at a scale we could never have imagined is insidiously shaping our future by encouraging the worst of human behaviour.
Studies have shown that lies laced with anger and hate spread faster and further than facts. The next few sentences I have said in every speech in the last six years.
Without facts, you can't have truth. Without truth, you can't have trust. Without these, we have no shared reality, no rule of law and no democracy.
What are we going to do?
We can't solve the global existential problems if we don't win the battle for facts, and we cannot have integrity of elections if we don't have integrity of facts.
In 42 days, the Philippines will vote, in an existential moment for our democracy. The front-runner for president is Ferdinand Marcos, Junior. His family was ousted by a people-powered revolt 36 years ago. He's back partly because history was revised in plain view with networks of disinformation, which we at Rappler exposed, releasing the data publicly.
How do we find a solution to deal with the viral speed of lies and the preferential distribution of anger and hate?
We created a four-layer pyramid: what we call #FactsFirstPH. I submitted a copy for you who are listening today. It begins with our communities, with individuals reporting lies to our tip lines. That's the data layer that unites the pyramid. For the first time, at least 16 news groups are working together in that foundational layer.
Once the fact checks are done, it moves to the mesh layer: civil society groups, NGOs, schools, business groups, the church and religious groups joining together to mount their own campaigns for facts, creating a mesh of distribution.
That data then travels to the third layer—the disinformation research groups, finally working together—which releases weekly research to tell Filipinos exactly how we're being manipulated and by whom.
Finally, the fourth layer, that has long been needed, is the law. Legal groups across the spectrum focus on filing tactical and strategic litigation. As news groups in the Philippines now face renewed and expanded DDoS attacks against our site, meant to take us down, these exponential lies are like DDoS attacks on our brains, attacking our biology, leaving us defenceless. The platforms and the autocrats that exploit them must be held accountable and governments doing this must move at a faster pace.
In that sense, Russia's invasion of Ukraine has brought nations together and may bring solutions for the continued impunity of platforms for countries like the Philippines—consider the Magnitsky sanctions.
Democratic nations must stand together for democratic values. The solution is three-pronged and remains the core pillars of Rappler: technology, journalism and community.
First, put guardrails around the tech and build better tech. Second, strengthen journalism and help fund independent news, which is part of the reason why I agreed to co-chair the International Fund for Public Interest Media. Third, build communities of action that stand by these democratic values.
I could go to jail for the rest of my life just because I'm a journalist, but what I do now will determine whether that will happen, so I pledge to hold the line. These times demand more, and journalists have met and will meet those demands.
Now it's up to you.
Thank you.
