Reputational damage: Filipino journalist Maria Ressa was the victim of deepfake technology that made her appear to be peddling automated cryptocurrency trading programs.Photo: Ezra Akayan/Getty Images
MAria Ressa watches a video of herself being interviewed on The Stephen Colbert Show. On screen, Ressa says: “Right now, my number one source of income is a new automated cryptocurrency trading program. This is the biggest chance of my life to make a lot of money quickly.”
In a Johannesburg hotel boardroom, Ressa, a fearless Filipino journalist and 2021 Nobel Peace Prize winner, paused playback. “They did a good job, didn’t they? That looks like me!
It's true that Ressa has appeared on The Stephen Colbert Show. However, she does not sell any kind of cryptocurrency. She also never uttered a word in the clip. This was a deepfake in which her words and images were manipulated by an artificial intelligence (AI) program. The doctored video suddenly appeared on Facebook last year, linking to legitimate-looking websites that mimic CNN and Rappler, the media company Ressa co-founded.
Rappler is still investigating who created the deepfakes and why. But that hardly matters. All in all, “Maria Ressa the Crypto Bro” is just one small symptom of a much more dangerous problem. “The fight is about facts,” she says.
We no longer live in the same shared reality thanks to the proliferation of social media, further enhanced by the advent of generative AI, which is primarily used to “create disinformation on an industrial scale.” .
“What would happen if we had an information ecosystem where people could have their own reality? Houses like this used to be called mental hospitals, where people had their own reality.”
Ressa has been working as a journalist for 38 years. During that time, she encountered almost every threat imaginable: financial, legal, and physical. Her reporting to an alleged death squad led by former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte infuriated the country's most powerful figures, making her the target of a vicious online hate campaign and trumped-up lawsuits. (She still struggles with some of them).
Ressa says the threats facing journalism today are orders of magnitude different from those faced in the past. This threat is bigger than any single story or individual, she says. And it's too big for any media company to tackle alone.
Let's look at the Philippines. A sophisticated intelligence operation whitewashed former President Ferdinand Marcos' legacy, paving the way for his son to take power in 2022. “Marcos went from a man who stole $10 billion to the greatest man in Philippine history.” And this is what Filipinos voted for. It literally changed history before our eyes,” Ressa said.
She places the blame for the “corruption of our information ecosystem” squarely on big tech companies and the algorithms that decide what information we see online. They have the power to determine the quality of this information and have consistently chosen not to put in place effective guardrails against fake news and disinformation.
“In the past, when big technology companies were the gatekeepers, [of information]They have completely abdicated their responsibility to protect the public realm,” Ressa said. That's because lies get more attention and therefore more money. “In 2018, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that lies spread six times faster.” [than truth] …When you mix a lie with fear, anger, and hatred, it spreads even further. ”
Ressa worries that it is already having a devastating effect on our political system. “The world is burning in a way my generation has never seen, in a way your generation has never seen, in a way that is unsustainable for a rule-of-law democracy.”
She is referring to last year's report by the V-Dem Institute, which revealed that 72% of the world now lives under dictatorships. This figure is up from 60% a year ago and could be even higher after this year's spate of elections around the world.
But she is even more concerned about the impact that the mainstreaming of lies and disinformation will have on humanity itself.
“Our evolution as a species has to do with this. When you're pumping us full of toxic hatred, when you're pumping us full of the worst of humanity, That's what social media companies are doing, and you're changing us. In this world, a world where big tech makes huge profits, human goodness is being eliminated. And that's what social media companies are doing. Not us. I'm so angry.”
Ressa is using this anger, and the huge influence that comes with winning the Nobel Prize, to do something about it. She is a member of the Real Facebook Oversight Committee. The committee is a group of prominent activists, academics, and journalists working to force meta to make better decisions. She has produced her series of documentaries about AI for Al Jazeera and the Global South. And with Rappler, she is experimenting with how these new technologies can be used ethically and responsibly to foster rather than destroy civil discussion.
Her visit to South Africa is in her capacity as Steering Committee Chair of the World Movement for Democracy, a global civil society network. (Disclaimer: The National Endowment for Democracy, which serves as the secretariat of the global movement, is also a funder of The Continent).
The network will hold a global conference in South Africa in November. Finding a unified approach to the risks and opportunities posed by big technology will be paramount.
“This is also a great opportunity. This is creative destruction. The destruction has already happened. So what are we going to create?”
This article was co-published with continent