The Nobel Prize Winner Maria Ressa on the Turmoil at Facebook

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 29 October 2021

⏱️ 31 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The roughly ten thousand company documents that make up the Facebook Papers show a company in turmoil—and one that prioritizes its economic interests over known harms to public interest. Among other things, they catalogue the company’s persistent failure to control disinformation and hate speech. David Remnick spoke with Maria Ressa, an investigative journalist, in the Philippines, who runs the news organization Rappler. She has been the target of hate campaigns by supporters of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, and in October Ressa (along with the Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov) received the Nobel Peace Prize for working to protect freedom of expression. Ressa is also a co-founder of what’s called the Real Facebook Oversight Board, a group of expert observers and critics who are not affiliated with Facebook’s own quasi-independent Oversight Board. She doesn’t see easy tweaks to ameliorate the damage; the fundamental approach of steering content to users to maximize engagement, she feels, is inherently destructive. “We’ve adapted this hook, line, and sinker: ‘personalization is better,’ ” Ressa points out. “It does make the company more money, but is that the right thing? Personalization also tears apart a shared reality.” Plus, a disinformation researcher says that, to understand dangerous conspiracy stories like QAnon, you have to look at the online horror genre known as creepypasta.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:09.8	Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.
0:13.3	The trickle of bad news about Facebook, or as it's just been rebranded, meta, has turned into a torrent.
0:19.9	Weeks ago, we learned that the company knows that Instagram, for example, which it owns,
0:24.3	causes serious mental distress for many teenagers.
0:27.5	And the release of thousands of company documents, known as the Facebook papers,
0:31.7	contains a staggering number of missteps and misdeeds.
0:35.1	Facebook's indifference to how it accelerates the circulation of toxic and
0:38.7	false information, its participation in corroding civil and democratic society, are now just
0:45.0	impossible to ignore. The journalist Maria Ressa shared a Nobel Peace Prize in October for her work
0:50.9	to protect freedom of expression. Hi. There we are.
0:54.5	Maria, how are you?
0:55.4	Oh, good.
0:56.3	It's one of those days of, like, cascading meetings.
0:59.6	Ressa runs the digital news organization, Rappler, which is based in the Philippines.
1:04.3	And she's been the target of hate campaigns by supporters of President Rodrigo Duterte
1:09.6	over and over again.
1:12.0	At first, Resa Belede Facebook would be critical to the success of her enterprise and journalism in general,
1:17.2	but she soon became one of Facebook's most vocal and informed critics.
1:23.5	I want to read to you something that you've said, and I want to expand on it. You said this.
1:30.0	I think that the rollback of democracy globally and the tearing apart of shared reality has been
1:36.1	because of tech. It's because news organizations lost our gatekeeping powers to technology.
	...

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