Social media lies jeopardise elections: Nobel laureate

OSLO • Elections worldwide cannot be conducted with integrity as long as social media platforms amplify lies over facts, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Maria Ressa said yesterday, a day before she will collect the award jointly with Russia's Dmitry Muratov.

The two journalists won the award for their efforts to safeguard freedom of expression at a time when free, independent and fact-based journalism is under fire, the Norwegian Nobel Committee said when announcing the prize in October.

Ms Ressa is from the Philippines, which will vote in May next year to choose a successor to President Rodrigo Duterte.

"It is going to be impossible to have integrity of elections if you don't have integrity of facts and right now, that is the case," Ms Ressa told a news conference, referring to elections both in the Philippines and elsewhere. "Because by design, the social media platforms which deliver the news are... amplifying and delivering to your news feeds lies over facts."

Ms Ressa, a co-founder of news website Rappler, has grown prominent through investigative reporting, including into large-scale killings during a police campaign against drugs.

Mr Muratov, who is editor-in-chief of the investigative Novaya Gazeta newspaper, said that authoritarian leaders undermined democratic institutions at the peril of peace. "Lack of belief in democracy means that, with time, people turn their backs on democracy, you will get a dictator, and dictatorship leads to war," he told the news conference.

Ms Ressa and Mr Muratov are the first journalists to receive the prize since Germany's Carl von Ossietzky won the 1935 award for revealing his country's secret post-war rearmament programme.

"I hope (the prize) will make it safer for journalists," Ms Ressa said. "The only weapon is to shine the light and keep doing our jobs."

Ms Ressa, who is under travel restrictions due to a court case in the Philippines, was granted permission by a Manila court to travel to Norway to receive the Nobel Prize.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided that this year's award ceremony will be an in-person event taking place in Oslo City Hall.

Ms Ressa's news website has had its licence suspended and she is embroiled in various legal cases.

Supporters say she is being targeted due to her scrutiny of government policies, including a bloody war on drugs launched by Mr Duterte.

Free on bail as she appeals against a six-year prison sentence handed down last year for a libel conviction, she is facing five tax evasion charges and a corporate case with the regulator.

The Philippines saw its ranking in the 2021 World Press Freedom Index drop two notches to 138 out of 180 countries, and the Committee to Protect Journalists ranks the Philippines seventh in the world in its impunity index, which tracks deaths of media members whose killers go free.

The government denies hounding the media and says any problems that organisations face are legal, not political. It says it believes in free speech.

Mr Muratov co-founded Novaya Gazeta in 1993 with backing from former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

He has dedicated the award to four of his journalists who he said had been killed "defending people's right to freedom of speech", as well as a lawyer and rights activist who had worked with them.

REUTERS, BLOOMBERG