Maria Ressa’s conviction, and the Philippines’ dire information climate – Columbia Journalism Review

Evation. Yesterday, authorities in the Philippines used that typo to convict Maria Ressa, the crusading journalist who founded the independent news site Rappler, and her former colleague Reynaldo Santos of cyber-libel charges. The typo appeared in a May 2012 article in which Santos linked Wilfredo Keng, a Filipino businessman, to the human-trafficking and drug trades. The story was published four months before the Philippines introduced the law under which the cyber-libel charges would eventually be brought, placing the story beyond that laws scope. Then, in 2014, Rappler spotted and fixed the typo. Prosecutors argued that the fix amounted to republication of the article, which meant the cyber-libel law applied to it after all. That interpretation, like almost everything else about the case, was a stretchthis morning, Ressa decried it as legal acrobaticsbut that didnt stop a judge handing down a guilty verdict.

Ressa and Santos could now face up to six years in prison. They plan to appeal. Whatever the eventual sentence, the verdict is another sharp blow to press freedom in the Philippines, whose authoritarian president, Rodrigo Duterte, has waged a relentless campaign to silence critics, including Ressa, who have spoken out about atrocities including a war on drugs that has claimed at least twelve thousand Filipino lives to date, many at the hands of the state. The Philippines National Union of Journalists said the verdict against Ressa and Santos basically kills freedom of speech and of the press. Ressas voice cracked as, speaking to reporters outside the courtroom, she said, To the Filipinos watching, this is not just about Rappler or about us. This is about you. Because freedom of the press is the foundation of every single right you have. This morning, Ressa vowed to fight on. She tweeted #HoldTheLinea slogan that has become a rallying cry among Dutertes critics.

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Yesterdays convictions marked an escalation of officials harassment of Ressa and Rappler. Pro-government accounts have repeatedly mobbed Rappler on social media; Duterte banned the sites reporters from the presidential palace and campaign events. In his state of the nation address in 2017, Duterte accused Rappler of being wholly owned by Americans, in violation of media-ownership provisions in the Philippine constitution; later the same year, he spread conspiracy theories about the site deriving funding from the CIA. While Rappler does have foreign backers, including Pierre Omidyar, the billionaire eBay founder whose media investments include The Intercept, it is wholly owned and operated by Filipinosbut that didnt stop the countrys Securities and Exchange Commission from moving, in 2018, to effectively revoke Rapplers license. Ressa and Rappler have subsequently faced charges of tax and securities fraud, which have yet to be resolved. In December 2018, Ressa narrowly avoided arrest on landing at an airport in Manila, the capital of the Philippines. In the first months of 2019, she was arrested on two separate occasions, and has repeatedly had to post bail to secure her freedom.

Last year, Ressa wrote about her arrests for CJR, as well as Dutertes broader campaign of disinformationpatriotic trollingto pound critics into silence. Duterte said around the time of his inauguration, in 2016, that just because youre a journalist, you are not exempted from assassination, if youre a son of a bitch. Since then, he has lobbed allegations of fraud at the owners of the Philippine Daily Inquirer, the countrys biggest English-language title, and ABS-CBN, the countrys biggest broadcast network. The Inquirer was sold to a pro-Duterte businessman. The government threatened to force ABS-CBN off the air; last month, it followed through after ABS-CBNs license, which is granted by the countrys legislature, expired. Pro-Duterte lawmakers stalled efforts to extend the license, and the government refused ABS-CBN special dispensation to continue broadcasting while the issue was resolved.

Dutertes war on the press goes far beyond censorshiphes waged a brazen effort to exert almost total control over the Philippines information ecosystem. Almost all Filipinos with internet access use Facebook, which, thanks in part to subsidies that Facebook itself paid, is cheaper and easier to access than independent news sites; consequently, as Ressa wrote for CJR, Facebook is our internet. As Davey Alba explained in an exhaustive feature for BuzzFeed in 2018, allies of Duterte, who has admitted to deploying trolls during his election campaign, have flooded the platform with pro-government propaganda and crude smear campaignsincluding the weaponization of pornographytargeting critical journalists and politicians. There was no strong loyalty or support for news in the first place, Clarissa David, a professor at the University of the Philippines, told Alba. False news did not have to supplant the legacy brands. People went from no access to news to gaining access only through Facebooks algorithm-driven news feed.

Facebook has ramped up fact-checking programs and other measures in the country, but critics say its approach remains inadequate. Abuse is routine on the platformlast week, Regine Cabato reported, for the Washington Post, that trolls cloned accounts belonging to reporters, including student journalists, in order to harass or incriminate them. The fresh trolling campaign came in the context of draconian new anti-terror legislation the legislature passed last week, which will likely give the government yet another pretext to stifle dissent. Already this year, Duterte signed legislation ostensibly aimed at curbing misinformation around the spread of covid-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus. A few days later, the law was used to charge two journalistsMario Batuigas and Amor Virata, who had reported on a local mayors social media posts about possible cases of the virus in Cavite City, south of Manilawith spreading false information.

Internationally, Ressaa former CNN bureau chief who is a dual US citizenis the most visible victim of Dutertes war on the press, but she is far from alone. From lone typos to major media conglomerates, Duterte and his allies are leading a totalizing war on dissent in the Philippines and, in the process, tipping the country back toward its days of dictatorship. Writing for CJR, Ressa recalled starting out as a journalist in the late eighties, covering Southeast Asias transition from authoritarian rule to democracy. Its bizarre now to think of the euphoria then.

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