'Let's democratically elect illegal leaders!': Maria Ressa's fight against disinformation

"We are democratically electing illegal leaders!" First she laughed, smiled, joked, in a packed margin suddenly full of human warmth in the large halls of the Frankfurt Book Fair, Maria Ressa, Nobel Peace Prize-winning Filipina journalist, author of the book How to resist a dictator. The battle for our future (translated by Alessandra Neve, La nave di Teseo), then her meekness gave way to sentences that do not admit of replication. "The integrity of information is the mother of all battles!" she said, citing a study by MIT in Boston that shows that lies, fake news, spread online six times faster than news.

«Abbiamo bisogno di società trasparenti, dove le democrazie possano lavorare. E invece il “virus” delle bugie ha attaccato anche l’emisfero Nord del pianeta. Ai Paesi occidentali dico: non rinunciate volontariamente ai vostri diritti, riprendeteli!». Come possono vincere le notizie? si chiede Ressa, affermando che «senza i fatti non ci può essere la verità, senza la verità non ci può essere fiducia». E aggiungendo poi che «senza l’integrità dell’informazione non possiamo risolvere nessuno degli altri problemi del mondo, come il surriscaldamento del clima. I dati mostrano molti di noi non hanno più la possibilità di agire, il 72% delle persone vivono sotto regimi autoritari. Le democrazie sono ormai come pezzi di legno completamente mangiati dai tarli, stanno per collassare». La disinformazione, dice, citando una sua amica «è come la cocaina, se la prendi una o due volte non succede niente, ma poi cambi completamente».

"Depending on the social media feeds you receive, in the United States you become anti-Semitic or Islamophobic," continues the former CNN journalist, then founder of the independent Filipino media outlet "Rappler" which in 2021, together with Dmitri Mouratov, director of "Novaïa Gazeta", received the Nobel Peace Prize, and then explains how she said in a meeting at the European Union that laws are needed to make the online space safe "Those of gender and race are the degrees of rifts that are opening up in our societies. And online violence, it's real violence."

The journalist urges to create communities ('it is they, through crowfunding, who have supported my work') to demand that new technologies respect the public interest, to denounce the fact that many small and medium-sized media will die within a year: their business model is over due to the fact that large platforms, such as social media, take all advertising and vampire content, which artificial intelligence is also doing to a great extent, overshadowing the press. 'Don't let it happen!' is Ressa's heartfelt plea, who argues that hope can only come from action and that there are movements in the Global South that are uniting to protect the integrity of information: 'we know we are being manipulated, so we must protect ourselves, protect our communities, protect democracy, which is fragile and must be protected'.

"As governments, we have a responsibility to support independent journalism," says Jens Stoltenberg, former Norwegian prime minister and former Nato secretary general. "The strength of democracy is not to not make mistakes, but to correct them!" he later said.