Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Yes, absolutely. This is being closely watched in the Philippines, partly because it comes down to systems of accountability. Will anyone be responsible for these drug wars and the violence that continues today? It's taken a bit of a back seat, but I think the most critical par

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  I'll quickly respond to that by saying that the biggest problem we face today is that the laws we have evolved in the physical world don't exist in the virtual world and, in many ways, we have all fallen for this idea that the virtual world is different from the real world, but i

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  These are all symptoms of the same crucial problem, which is this supposed freedom of speech is being used to pound. When you pound something, when you say something a million times, a lie, it becomes a fact in the age of abundance, in the age of social media. I think that's a fu

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  It's beyond a chilling effect. It is glacial. It came about around the same time as Hong Kong's security law. It just meant that you could be arrested without a warrant. This is the impact on people: You could be arrested without a warrant and held in prison for up to 24 days.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Thank you so much for the question. First of all, it's an old argument that isn't true. Again, freedom of speech is upheld as the most sacred right in the west, but right now, think about it, and human rights activists have said this: The right to freedom of speech of a few peop

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Senator de Lima is now campaigning from prison. The charges against her when she was imprisoned in February 2017 were largely brought by convicts in prison who were given some kind of incentive by the government. Many of them have now disappeared. She remains in prison. Part of

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Absolutely. You need to demand greater transparency in those algorithms of amplification. Think about it like this. You do this with drugs. We take that apart. We take it down to its ingredients. It's the same thing with algorithmic amplification. Why does it remain a black box?

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  I can talk about that on two fronts. First, so much of the debate on this is kind of further downstream, so how do we think about it? The very first part of fighting for human rights, or free expression, actually begins with having the facts. Right now, the platforms all want y

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  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