Maria Ressa i Dmitrij Muratow zostali uhonorowani Pokojową Nagrodą Nobla za „wysiłki na rzecz obrony wolności słowa, która jest warunkiem wstępnym demokracji i trwałego pokoju”.
Robert Socha, dziennikarz, a dziś współpracownik Google New Lab, zwrócił mi uwagę na przemówienie Marii Ressa. Polecam przeczytać pełny tekst – dostępny tu.
Tekst porusza wiele wyzwań na pograniczu: misji dziennikarskiej, technologii, wpływu wielkich korporacji tech oraz nowej cyfrowej dyktatury. Poniżej kilka fragmentów.
…please, ask yourself: What are YOU willing to sacrifice for the truth?
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That coin represents our information ecosystem, which determines everything else about our world. Journalists – that’s one side – the old gatekeepers. The other is technology, with its god-like power, the new gatekeepers. It has allowed a virus of lies to infect each of us, pitting us against each other, bringing out our fears, anger, hate, and setting the stage for the rise of authoritarians and dictators around the world.
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You’ve heard that the last time a working journalist was given this award was in 1936, awarded in 1935. He was supposed to come and get it in 1936; Carl von Ossietzky never made it to Oslo because he languished in a Nazi concentration camp.
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At the core of journalism is a code of honor. And mine is layered on different worlds – from how I grew up, the golden rule, what’s right and wrong; from college, and the honor code I learned there; and my time as a reporter, and the code of standards and ethics I learned and helped write. Add to that the Filipino idea of utang na loob – literally the debt from within – at its best, a system of paying it forward.
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What happens on social media doesn’t stay on social media.
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Social media is a deadly game for power and money, what Shoshana Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism, extracting our private lives for outsized corporate gain. Our personal experiences sucked into a database, organized by AI, then sold to the highest bidder. Highly profitable micro-targeting operations are engineered to structurally undermine human will. I’ve repeatedly called it a behavior modification system in which we are all Pavlov’s dogs, experimented on in real time with disastrous consequences in countries like mine, Myanmar, India, Sri Lanka, and so many more.
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Without facts, you can’t have truth. Without truth, you can’t have trust. Without trust, we have no shared reality, no democracy, and it becomes impossible to deal with the existential problems of our times: climate, coronavirus, now, the battle for truth.
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An invisible atom bomb has exploded in our information ecosystem, and the world must act as it did after Hiroshima. Like that time, we need to create new institutions, like the United Nations, and new codes stating our values, like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to prevent humanity from doing its worse. It’s an arms race in the information ecosystem. To stop that requires a multilateral approach that all of us must be part of. It begins by restoring facts.
Fot.: Twitter, #nobelprize
