The Nobel Prize Winner Maria Ressa on the Turmoil at Facebook
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
The New Yorker
4.3 • 3.9K Ratings
🗓️ 1 November 2021
⏱️ 16 minutes
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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.”
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| 0:47.9 | I'm Dorothy Wickendid. |
| 0:49.7 | On today's Politics and More podcast, David Remneck talks with the journalist and Nobel Peace Prize |
| 0:55.6 | laureate Maria Ressa. They'll discuss the recent reporting on the inner workings of Facebook. |
| 1:04.8 | The trickle of bad news about Facebook, or as it's just been rebranded, meta, has turned into a |
| 1:10.7 | torrent. |
| 1:11.8 | Weeks ago, we learned that the company knows that Instagram, for example, which it owns, |
| 1:16.2 | causes serious mental distress for many teenagers. |
| 1:19.5 | And the release of thousands of company documents, known as the Facebook papers, |
| 1:23.7 | contains a staggering number of missteps and misdeeds. |
| 1:27.1 | Facebook's indifference to how it accelerates the circulation of toxic and false information, |
| 1:32.1 | its participation in corroding civil and democratic society, |
| 1:35.9 | are now just impossible to ignore. |
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