SARAJEVO, Bosnia and Herzegovina — Nobel Peace Prize laureate Maria Ressa had a sharp message on Wednesday for tech companies who were the biggest sponsors of the international fact-checking conference she was addressing.

“Thank you, Meta, TikTok, for funding fact-checking, but I mean, frankly, you just wanted distance from actually doing the work yourself,” Ressa said, followed by applause from the attendees at GlobalFact 11, the world’s largest annual fact-checking summit.

More than 500 fact-checkers, misinformation researchers, academics, platforms and other fact-checking stakeholders are attending the conference in Sarajevo this week, hosted by the International Fact-Checking Network at the Poynter Institute and Zašto ne of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Apart from Meta and TikTok, Google and YouTube are also sponsoring the event.

In her keynote conversation with AFP Global News Director Phil Chetwynd, Ressa talked about the role of fact-checkers in protecting the truth at a time when misinformers are rewarded, and falsehoods and facts in information ecosystems are indistinguishable. But she also kept circling back to the tech giants flashing on the big screen as sponsors.

In her 2022 memoir, “How to Stand Up to a Dictator,” Ressa said she talks about two dictators: former Philippine strongman president Rodrigo Duterte, and Facebook founder and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. “Frankly, Rodrigo Duterte is out of office, but the bigger dictator is Mark Zuckerberg, and part of it is because he’s not an elected official.”

She then talked about challenging X owner Elon Musk’s vision of news and facts stemming from the “wisdom of crowds.” That would require trust, she said. “What you’re seeing on social media is a mob, and a mob creates a chilling effect. A mob changes reality.” (X is not a sponsor of GlobalFact.)

She continued saying to the sponsors that she would appeal to them the way some countries appealed to dictators: “I really hope you look at the world today and look at constructive engagement. You are the only ones with the power and the money to literally do something right now to protect democracy, to prevent genocide.”

Ressa talked about Myanmar in 2018, when the U.N. found that Facebook had “enabled genocide.” Investigators said Facebook played a role in spreading hate speech and messages that incited violence. Rohingya refugee groups have since made remediation requests from Meta.

“Why has nothing been done? Every day of inaction causes harm. You don’t have to take responsibility for it. We will. Because we want it to change,” she said.

‘Outrage economy’

When Ressa co-founded the Philippine digital news organization Rappler in 2012, she saw social media platforms Facebook and Twitter (now X) as “enablers of democracy.” But then the business model shifted. People and content began to be commoditized when Sheryl Sandberg joined Facebook, she said.

In 2013, Rappler made use of Twitter’s geotagging feature to aid rescue efforts during natural disasters, Ressa said, “but that was before all the crap came in.” 

By 2018, according to an MIT study, false news on Twitter was spreading six times faster than the truth. 

“They figured out through AB testing that you can keep people scrolling longer if you feed them lies, and then, if you incite fear, anger and hate — this is data we found in the Philippines in 2017 — if you push fear, anger and hate i.e. the worst of humanity, then it spreads even faster,” she said. “That’s the outrage economy that we are all living in today.”

Ressa told fact-checkers that despite people downplaying the impact of fact checks, “facts are the only anchor in our shared reality.”

‘Little measures’

Ressa said the tech platforms have the power to make things better, citing  “little measures” Facebook  put in place in 2020, such as turning the news ecosystem quality “towards facts.” She also mentioned stopping mass invitations to Facebook groups, requiring people joining a group to be admitted by an administrator. Removing that measure, she said, helped the growth of Stop the Steal, a movement of people who believed the false claims that Donald Trump won the 2020 election. 

Ressa said she stepped away from Rappler’s editorial arm and does not handle Rappler’s partnership with Meta and its fact-checking program. Rappler has been a signatory of the IFCN Code of Principles since 2017.

She also talked about YouTube and TikTok’s influence on the information ecosystem. “YouTube was fantastic on Ukraine, right? They pivoted very quickly and took down the lies,” she said. “Are they as good on Gaza?”

Nobel Peace Prize winner and journalist Maria Ressa speaks during the GlobalFact 11 international fact-checking conference in Sarajevo on Wednesday. Credit: Vanja Čerimagić

Ressa mentioned an instance during the 2022 Philippine election, when Rappler alerted both TikTok and YouTube to thousands of misinformers “creating disinformation networks” and video. Ressa said TikTok took 98% of them down in 36 hours, while YouTube took longer to do the same.

“There is no room to duck,” she said. Getting emotional, she continued, “This is gonna be the moment where, a decade from now, you’re gonna wanna look back and know you did everything you could. Everything. Because the world will be transformed.”

Defending a shared reality

Ressa mentioned how tech companies have become so adept at personalization that everyone can have their own “personalized reality,” with one’s belief systems and cognitive biases “kicked in,” making it more difficult to access the facts. 

“You know, a world where all of us have our own personalized reality in this room? This room would be called an insane asylum,” she said. “Without facts, you can’t have truth. Without truth, you can’t have trust. Without these three, we have no shared reality. You can’t begin to solve any problem. We cannot have journalism or democracy, or solve, oh yeah that big thing that we’re all facing, climate change. It’s existential.”

She reminded fact-checkers experiencing harassment that they are not alone, and that in times of fear, “collaboration becomes critical.”

“We’re not punching bags. Please, no learned helplessness,” she said. “Understand that as the tech companies are redoing, rebuilding the world, we can, too.”

Near the end of her keynote, Ressa reiterated three big points from a 2022 10-point action plan for addressing the information crisis, which she co-presented with fellow Nobel Peace Prize laureate Dmitry Muratov: stop surveillance-for-profit, stop coded bias, and rebuild journalism as an antidote to tyranny.

Finally, Ressa talked about Rappler Communities, a decentralized chat system that Rappler developed and rolled out in 2023. She said, “I’m making the bet that the ‘enshittification’ of the internet is gonna be so bad that people who want information for their vote, who want information about where the flooding is happening, who want information, are gonna come to our app in the Philippines.”

Discussing the app in a briefing after her keynote address, Ressa said that after eight years, she got tired of “begging tech to change.” The goal of the app is a “federated news system,” she said, where algorithms won’t manipulate users’ emotions.

You may find more information about the “Rappler Communities” app here.