More than 30 years have passed since the People’s Power Revolution, which brought about democracy in the Philippines. Looking back from 1986 to today – particularly in light of the Duterte administration and the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic – how would you evaluate the state of democracy in the Philippines?
I think that like the state of democracy all around the world, democracy is dying if not dead, and a lot of that is largely because of the shift in our information ecosystem. Journalists and news organizations lost our power to be gatekeepers. We used to protect the public sphere, but we lost that around 2015-2016 to technology and social media platforms. Facebook is now the largest distributor of news, except they’ve largely abdicated responsibility.
We live in a world where facts don’t get as much distribution as lies laced with anger and hate. So what you're seeing in every democracy around the world is that these cheap armies are slowly cutting away at democracy by making facts debatable. I call it death by a thousand cuts. If you don’t have facts, you can't have truth, you can't have trust, and you can't have democracy.
Are there any unique challenges in light of COVID-19?
I think the underlying factor is the enabling of the rise of digital authoritarians. You’re not just talking just about President Duterte in the Philippines, but also Hungarian Prime Minister Orbán, President Bolsonaro of Brazil. We’re seeing what is happening all around the world right now. I think that tech is an enabler and it threw fuel on the fire.
Starting in 2014, there was a nostalgia for simpler times. The world became too complex and people wanted somebody else to make the decisions. We saw this in India with the election of Prime Minister Modi. In Indonesia I was covering the presidential elections that were then between Joko Widodo, who won, versus the son-in-law of Suharto, who had been in power in Indonesia for nearly 32 years. In the Philippines we saw a yearning for the Marcos years. People are saying the world is too complex and they were yearning for a simpler past, but in reality the past isn’t so simple.
You throw on top of that COVID-19, and what we’re seeing is that states are getting more power in a time of a pandemic, and in a country like the Philippines, power consolidates power. I believe the Philippines has had the world’s longest lockdown. Today marks an easing of some of the restrictions, but we still have curfews every night from 8pm to 5am, and to leave your house you need to have a quarantine pass.
There’s a tremendous amounts of money, a tremendous amount of power, and a very security-driven military-driven response to a pandemic. In the Philippines like Brazil, President Duterte like President Bolsonaro appointed retired military generals to head the response to this public health crisis. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that in the Philippines you see the incidence of coronavirus cases still exponentially increasing.
Having said all of that, I think there are three huge things that have happened in the Philippines during these few months. First, President Duterte announced the COVID-19 lockdown on March 12. Unlike other countries where medical doctors were at the forefront, he was surrounded by men in uniform. The lockdown took effect on the Ides of March, March 15. Since then, on May 5, the largest broadcaster in the Philippines ABS-CBN, which employs about 11,000 people, was shut down. A minor regulatory agency gave them a cease and desist order and within a few hours the network went black. The last time that happened was in 1972 when Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law and shut down ABS-CBN, which stayed shut for 14 years until the People’s Power Revolt.
The second event is the passage of the anti-terror law. The bill passed in the House of Representatives in about five days during a pandemic lockdown and President Duterte signed it into law. It essentially gives a small group of cabinet secretaries the power to declare any critic a terrorist. That person — could be a journalist, could be me — could be arrested without a warrant and jailed for up to 24 days.
The last thing I would add to that is the conviction that happened to me during the lockdown on June 15. Judge Montesa in the regional trial court in Manila found me and a former colleague guilty of cyber libel. The story we published in 2012 that was the subject of this trail was published before this law had even been enacted, but the legal acrobatics used to bring the criminal charges — I have eight arrest warrants against me — show you where we are today. In order to convict me and my former colleague, the government had to change the statute of limitations for libel from one year to twelve years, and after we filed a motion for partial reconsideration, the judge denied us and extended the limit to fifteen years. So this moving target is – laughable isn’t the right word. Maybe Kafka-esque is a better word.
By next year, I’ll have been a journalist for 35 years and it will be 35 years since People Power, since 1986. It's shocking to me where we are today, but while we continue to see these draconian responses to the coronavirus and the pandemic, we’re also seeing countries like Belarus and Thailand where it seems that when power holds or pounds too strongly, the people will rise up. At the same time, you also have cases like Hong Kong and the security law with China. It’s a strange world of creative destruction when it comes to democracy today.
Rappler is a social news network that seeks to provide high quality investigative journalism to inspire community engagement and promote action for social change. What is Rappler’s strategy to reach across different segments of the population to inspire these kinds of broad social movements within the Philippines?
When we were creating Rappler in 2012, the elevator pitch was one sentence: we build communities of action, and the food we feed our communities is investigative journalism. We envisioned the classic Venn Diagram of investigative journalism overlapping with technology and community. Our first community was around climate change. We believed climate and good governance go hand in hand.
When we started Rappler, instead of having a marketing budget, we began a civic engagement arm to build communities first in the physical world, and then virtually in social media, and those communities are still there. We had as many as 35-38 partners including NGOs when super typhoon Haiyan came in 2013. Government was a partner of the civic engagement arm. It was called "Move."
We saw that technology has an ability to jump start development, and we had yearly events like the Social Good Summit, where we tried to use technology and social media for social good. We even started something called hack society. How do you use technology to solve some of these longstanding problems? How can you use technology for the Sustainable Development Goals? The beginning of Rappler was fascinating and fun and mind-blowing, because you could imagine a better world.
Social media changed the way that people consumed news. In 2012, I could only see the positives, because I felt that this could convert new younger audiences, and it did. Rappler’s largest audience is 18-34 years old, and that’s part of the reason why we’re powerful and we’re growing with our audience.
2016 was when the dominoes began to fall. Social media companies began to prioritize growth over the protection of the users, and growth over facts. I can peg it to one decision that all social media platforms use, which is how they recommend content. They use friends of friends, which actually builds into these platforms polarity, division, and a feeling of “us against them.” This builds filter bubbles. This came to its logical conclusion in 2016 with the election of President Duterte in the Philippines, a month later was Brexit, and you go all the way through the election of Donald Trump, the Catalan elections, and so on.
How do organizations like Rappler strategically engage with and inspire the public in the face of these challenges, while trying to bring together this effort toward broader social change?
You stick to the facts. You hold the line. Technology was the enabler for the rise of digital authoritarians all around the world. Once they were democratically elected, they then used the tools of democracy to crumble democracy from within. How do you build community? You enshrine the facts. I know who I am. I know why we do what we do. I know why we set up Rappler. So when the government came to attack us, it was very easy for us to push back. We have to hold the line.
What we’re seeing in many countries around the world is that it’s like a bulldozer is trying to take away your rights, and you as a citizen, you’re going to have to hold the line and you’re going to have to interlock with other citizens. It’s crucial for every person in a democracy to ask themselves what they are willing to sacrifice for the truth, because that is what’s at stake.
The Sasakawa Peace Foundation as a foundation in Asia is committed to building networks in the region. This includes an ongoing initiative to strengthen cooperation between journalists in Southeast Asia, a project in which Rappler has participated. What is the significance of building these kinds of collaborative networks among civil societies in countries in Southeast Asia as well as with partners like Japan?
I think it’s crucial to build these networks. We are fighting against a network of networks, and in order to fight that, a physical network of networks is the first way to do it. The second way is to also understand how digital networks behave. I think the problem is in the last few years is that the people, governments, and regulatory agencies that have power have never had to deal with technology, so they basically left it alone.
The journalists and human rights activists on the frontlines, we're the ones who feel the impact of decisions made in Silicon Valley. The networks you put together have got to fight back far more significantly than we’ve been doing.
When there have been different news organizations that have come together in the past, I think we have never dealt with an information ecosystem quite like it is today. In the past, countries each had their vertical silos of news organizations, but the social media platforms cut across the world horizontally. A lie told in Tokyo is instantaneously in Manila and instantaneously in New York. This is why those Silicon Valley decisions have had the worst impact in developing economies and emerging democracies like we have in Southeast Asia.
If people don't know what the facts are, what is right and wrong, what the truth is — and these are blurry things already — but if the facts aren't there, if they don't know who to trust, that's the first goal of influence operations. It's not to actually make you believe one thing. It’s to make you doubt everything. If you don’t know what to believe, they can tear apart the institutions you used to believe in and make you distrust everybody. In a situation like that, the voice with the loudest megaphone wins. That’s the world we live in today. If we don’t move to restore the integrity of facts, then we will be manipulated. It’s quite insidious, and we will lose our democracy.