BUZZ
Yet she supports use of ‘fact checkers’ on social media …
The Filipino 2021 Nobel Peace Prize recipient who once compared Israel to Nazi Germany told the Dartmouth College student paper this past week the state of free expression in the U.S. is “horrific.”
Maria Ressa, who was in town to give the keynote speech at Dartmouth’s Division of Institutional Diversity and Equity Social Justice Awards, told The Dartmouth “I think we are living through the Filipinization of America. America has long been the beacon of freedom and democracy that you aspire to.
“It’s horrific to see that change and to see the country that anchored the post-World War II world begin to destroy it. I’m shocked to see Americans afraid to speak out.”
The co-founder of the Filipino news site Rappler and current professor at Columbia University said the present is an “existential moment for journalism,” and “the best and the worst time to be a journalist.”
“If journalism dies, who holds power to account?” Ressa asked. “Who’s crazy enough to go ask a dictator, ‘How corrupt are you?’ That takes courage, and it’s the kind of courage that you don’t get from the incentive structure of social media.”
Ressa has consistently criticized social media; in February of last year she told an Indiana University audience that “false information” gets spread six times faster on social media platforms than actual facts, and that companies like Meta and X should be “accountable” for dis/misinformation.
Her book “How to Stand Up to a Dictator” accuses social media companies of “aiding and abetting” various governments’ “creep towards authoritarianism.” She supports the use of fact checkers either via “media organizations” or by the social media companies themselves.
Ressa told The Dartmouth social media giants also should be accountable not only for actual threats, but for “abuse” by “online trolls” who engage in “misogynistic and racist attacks.”
“They should have been held liable for them,” she said. “When tech companies became the gatekeepers and took it over from traditional media, they got rid of all the standards and ethics of the gatekeeper, and instead they shifted it.”
A month after Hamas attacked Israel in 2023, Ressa wrote on Rappler the latter’s counter-attack was “disproportionate” and indicative of an “all-out war,” and included a reference to Nazi Germany:
“It is a great irony that the [Jewish] race that suffered centuries of oppression, even genocide at the hands of Adolf Hitler, is now [denying] the same aspirations [for] the Palestinians,” she wrote.
“We like to think that our world is more modern, more aware, and more compassionate, compared for example to the time of Adolf Hitler, or the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.”
Ressa later claimed those comments were “inaccurately characterized,” and “forcefully denied” being antisemitic.
MORE: Ressa allegedly uses antisemitic trope during Harvard commencement speech
