I read an article about Rappler CEO Maria Ressa on the Australian Financial Review where she is quoted appealing to Facebook to help hold Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte to account. She said “the only people who can actually do something to level the playing field in the short-term are the social media platforms”.
Huh? Facebook and other socmed sites did level the playing field as I recall.
Ressa is being inconsistent. She can’t make up her mind about Facebook. One moment she praises it, the next she condemns it. Her opinion of Facebook seems to depend on her mood. Facebook already made Rappler a “fact-checker” but she is still not satisfied with that privilege!
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This is why journalists like Maria Ressa lost their celebrity status. Ordinary citizens were given a platform to voice their dissent and hold journalists who publish untruths to account. Ressa is just bitter that most people in the Philippines don’t see her as a “thought leader” anymore.
Still, she is adamant. Ressa insists that Duterte is “weaponising the law”.
“How do you know when an online attack to kill you, burn you, rape you, shoot you or bomb you shifts from words to the time it becomes real,” she said.
“This is the biggest danger. It’s a psychological war. It’s made to silence and intimidate. And you couple that with a government that also weaponises the law. As far as I’m concerned, all of these charges are political harassment and it’s to stop us doing our job.”
That’s the dumbest thing coming out of her mouth. The law doesn’t pick and choose. The law applies to everyone. It’s there to protect innocent people from libelous articles.
The only thing consistent about Ressa is the script she uses to feed the international news media community – that Duterte is trying to “silence” her. She contradicts that by showing she is completely free to go on numerous junkets where she delivers her non-stop media blitzes that only provide her side of the story. No one from the foreign media even checks if any of what she says is true.
In life, things are not always what they seem.