Awarding Maria Ressa the Nobel Peace Prize came at the right time
ETHAN JOHANSON: In a political climate that has facilitated the rise of authoritarianism and amplified public mistrust of the media, the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Maria Ressa comes at a critical moment.
On December 10, Ressa will receive the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, Norway. Ressa, a Filipino journalist, co-founded Rappler, a digital news organization acclaimed for its coverage of misinformation and President Rodrigo Duterte’s violent anti-drug campaign in the Philippines. Ressa along with Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov were recognized as 2021 Nobel Peace Prize winners “for their efforts to safeguard freedom of expression, which is a precondition for democracy and lasting peace.” Ressa and Muratov are the first journalists to win the Nobel Peace Prize since 1935 when Carl von Ossietzky won the award for exposing Germany’s rearmament program.
A signature facet of Duterte’s agenda as president has been his brutal approach to combating drug crime in the Philippines. Duterte’s law enforcement policies and anti-illegal drugs rhetoric have empowered police forces and civilians to use violence in tracking down suspected drug users. According to a report released by the UN human rights office in 2020, the number of suspected illegal drug users killed by police or unidentified “vigilantes” might be triple the estimated 8,663 deaths indicated by government data. The report details how Command Memorandum Circular No. 16-2016 — issued by Ronald dela Rosa, Chief of the Philippine National Police as part of Duterte’s anti-illegal drugs campaign — uses terms such as “negation” and “neutralization” of “drug personalities,” that paired with high-ranking officials’ verbal encouragement of using lethal force, could be interpreted by police as “permission to kill.”
Duterte’s anti-illegal drug campaign has received support from Filipinos. In a 2019 poll conducted by Social Weather Stations, 82% of 1,200 Filipinos expressed satisfaction with the perceived decrease in drugs and crime that resulted from Duterte’s campaign. However, Rappler, for which Ressa serves as CEO and president, has devoted investigative coverage to expose the inhumane nature of Duterte’s war on drugs.
Duterte, who has exhibited authoritarian tendencies as president, has attempted to suppress media critical of his policies. As a journalist unafraid to carry out reporting independent of Duterte’s interests, Ressa has been a frequent target of Duterte’s media suppression efforts. After unfounded accusations of fraud and tax evasions, Ressa was convicted of cyber libel by a Manila court in June of 2020, even though the law prosecutors used to convict Ressa was passed four months after the article that allegedly constituted libel was published, which Rappler claims Ressa had no role in editing. As a result of Duterte’s government targeting her, Ressa has had to post bail ten times.
The repeated arresting of Ressa exemplifies the renewed threat against press freedom in the Philippines after Duterte took office. In the World Press Freedom Index, the Philippines fell to 138th place in 2021, a year after the pro-Duterte Philippine congress refused to renew ABS-CBN, the country’s biggest TV network, and the practice of red-tagging, or identifying political dissidents as targets for arrest, regained prominence. In his public speaking appearances, Duterte’s rhetoric about critical media, which includes him referring to Rappler as “fake news” and saying that as a journalist, “you are not exempted from assassination,” reflects the deterioration of press freedom in the Philippines.
In addition to exposing Duterte’s inhumane approach to confronting drug crime in the Philippines, Ressa has dedicated herself to combating misinformation and the harmful role of social media in Duterte’s rise to power. Duterte benefited from misleading or false stories that spread on social media throughout the 2016 election inflating his own image and denigrating his opponents. Facebook, which has received criticism for tolerating the spread of misinformation when regulating it conflicts with their financial interests, took down a Philippine network in 2020 found to have ties with the military and police that criticized progressive activist groups in the Philippines.
Ressa has been a frequent target of pro-Duterte troll accounts on Facebook. Social media threats against her have regularly employed sexual, mysoginist and racist insults. In response, Ressa has sought to educate her audience on the role of the internet in spreading false information and defamatory language targeting political opponents. In two 2016 articles she wrote — “Propaganda war: Weaponizing the internet” and “How Facebook algorithms impact democracy” — Ressa broke down how Duterte’s allies have harnessed bots, fake accounts and Facebook algorithms to facilitate his rise to power and discredit his opponents.
The implications of finding an appropriate role for social media in social and political discourse extend beyond the Philippines. Troll farms, or groups on social media that spread propaganda through the manipulation of algorithms and social networks, contributed to the spread of misinformation that took place leading up to the 2020 U.S. election. According to an internal Facebook report, the content produced by troll farms reached 140 million US users per month in the lead-up to the election, many of whom had never followed the accounts responsible for the content. Manipulation of Facebook’s algorithms provides bad actors with a pathway to interfere with information networks, and by extension, U.S. electoral outcomes.
Duterte’s clash with critical media reflects another problem that has emerged in the United States: declining public trust of important institutions. Former President Donald Trump similarly clashed with media outlets he perceived as adversarial and attempted to sow doubt in the legitimacy of their reporting. According to the Edelman Trust Barometer, “fewer than half of all Americans have trust in traditional media” for the first time ever. Although the extent to which Trump’s “fake news” rhetoric has contributed to the decline in trust is difficult to identify, the pandemic illustrated how the consequences of decreased trust in traditional institutions can be devastating. The Trump administration’s defiance of public health institutions, epitomized in Trump’s support of hydroxychloroquine as a coronavirus treatment, along with politicized news coverage of the pandemic, left Americans with contradictory advice about pandemic safety measures. Restoring public trust in governing and media institutions requires leadership that offers sound guidance of which sources of information to trust.
Americans and Filipinos face important decisions in differentiating between false and legitimate information they encounter online on a daily basis. For Filipinos who are uncertain of who to trust, hopefully the awarding of Ressa with the Nobel Peace Prize will lend her case validity against Duterte.
Ethan Johanson is a sophomore in the College from Portland, Oregon planning to major in American Studies and minor in Journalism.