If you care about democracy, you have two minutes left to see to it.
That’s the terrifying warning often repeated by courageous investigative journalist Maria Ressa, Nobel Peace Prize winner, using a metaphor inspired by her time playing basketball.
“If you play basketball, the last two minutes are everything. And we are losing the game. Unless there is a drastic change, 2024 will be the year democracy falls off the cliff,” she said in an interview with the Guardianon the occasion of the forthcoming publication of his memoirs How to Stand Up to a Dictator (How to stand up to a dictator).
Maria Ressa knows exactly what she is talking about, coming from the Philippines, a country she considers “ground zero of the terrible effects that social networks can have on a nation’s institutions, its culture and the spirit of its population”, as she writes in her book, of which The Guardian and The Atlantic have just published very powerful excerpts1, 2.
Criticism of former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, media co-founder Maria Ressa call backwho faces jail time for doing his job, has seen how these technologies have the appalling power to infect a society with the “virus of lies” with impunity.
Before 2021, when Maria Ressa was co-winner of the Nobel Peace Prize at the same time as Russian editor Dmitry Muratov, only one other journalist had already been awarded this prize. It was in 1935. It was Carl von Ossietzky, a German reporter, who had not been able to receive his award because he was being held in a Nazi concentration camp.
Another era, fortunately far behind us? Not that much… By honoring two journalists more than eight decades later, the Norwegian Nobel Committee underlined that the world was at a similar historical moment, existential for democracy, writes Maria Ressa. For her, we are living in the middle of World War III. A war on two fronts. One, more conventional, with the war between Russia and Ukraine. The other, more modern, with this other war waged against each individual on the platforms of the web giants, which detonated “an invisible atomic bomb” in our information ecosystem.
The journalist particularly attacks Facebook, which has done almost nothing to protect civil society against the epidemic of misinformation.
With a business model that rewards lies and devalues facts, the web giants promote the erosion of democracy. And it can go very quickly, she warns.
When Rodrigo Duterte’s regime stormed Facebook with fake news and online intimidation to silence its critics and opponents in the Philippines, Maria Ressa tried unsuccessfully to alert Facebook executives. In 2016, two months before the US presidential election, she even joked to them: “You will soon have elections in the United States. If you’re not careful, Trump could win! “They had a good laugh, she said in an interview with my colleague Isabelle Hachey3.
For several years, Filipinos have been at the top of the list of citizens who spend the most time on the Internet and in social networks. In 2017, 97% of them used Facebook. When Maria Ressa gave this stat to Mark Zuckerberg, he was silent for a moment, before throwing a quip at her. “Wait, Maria… Where is the remaining 3%? »
At the time, she still laughed, she says in her book.
But today, two minutes from the end, she is no longer laughing. Because she knows all too well that the virus of lies that has spread in the Philippines has wreaked havoc elsewhere on the planet. She knows all too well that the absence of the rule of law in the virtual world has serious consequences in the real world. She knows all too well that online impunity leads to offline impunity.
“What I have witnessed and documented over the past decade is the divine power of technology to infect each and every one of us with a virus of lies, pitting us against each other. others, igniting, even creating, our fears, anger and hatred, and accelerating the rise of authoritarians and dictators around the world. »
Said like that, it sounds frightening and discouraging. But Maria Ressa’s message is not necessarily defeatist. Rather, it is a call for urgent action to defend democracy.
His long-term solution? Education.
Medium term ? Laws and policies to rein in the giants of the web and create “a vision of the internet that binds us instead of tearing us apart”.
Short term ? Working together to put civil society and facts at the heart of our information ecosystem.
Because as long as there are two minutes left in the game…