"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." --- Maria Ressa, Nobel Laureate
The two journalists awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, Maria Ressa and Dmitri A. Muratov, used their acceptance speeches on Friday to express alarm about the threats to democracies and call for greater accountability for social media companies that Ms. Ressa said are dividing and radicalizing societies.
The speeches by the two journalists contained dire warnings that the world is headed toward more violence and misery without a renewed commitment to democracy and the values connected to it: truth, peace and human rights.
Ms. Ressa, 58, the first Nobel laureate from the Philippines, is the chief executive of Rappler, a digital news organization that is known for its investigations into President Rodrigo Duterte’s brutal five-year war on drugs. In her speech, she said social media companies still operated with impunity.
“Silicon Valley’s sins came home to roost in the United States on Jan. 6 with mob violence on Capitol Hill,” she said.
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| The Curious Brain |
I helped create a startup, Rappler, turning 10 years old in January –
we’re getting old – our attempt to put together two sides of the same
coin that shows everything wrong with our world today: the absence of
law and democratic vision for the 21st century. 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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