[ADRN 인터뷰] 정치적 양극화 및 가짜뉴스 확산 조장하는 SNS 알고리즘과 민주주의 국가들의 대응

YouTube 링크 : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZXHNN9JYNI

동아시아연구원(East Asia Institute: EAI)은 아시아민주주의네트워크 프로젝트의 일환으로 2021년 노벨평화상 수상자인 마리아 레사(Maria Ressa) 래플러(Rappler) CEO를 초청하여 필리핀을 포함한 역내 국가들의 언론자유 현황과 SNS발 가짜뉴스의 확산을 막기 위한 대처 방안에 대해 논의합니다. 레사 대표는 빅테크 회사들이 구축하고 있는 정보 생태계가 특정 편향의 뉴스와 정보만을 선택적으로 재생산하는 현상을 비판하고, 허위정보를 빠르게 확산시키는 소셜미디어의 알고리즘이 극우세력의 득세를 조장하여 민주주의를 와해한다고 경고합니다. 아울러 소셜미디어의 언론통제와 정치의 양극화에 대한 해법으로 레사 대표는 교육, 법제화, 그리고 인식 제고를 제안합니다.

■ Sook Jong Lee: Hello everyone, it is a great opportunity to have Maria Ressa with us today. She is a well-known journalist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, who is working very actively not only inside the Philippines but also internationally. Maria, thank you very much for your time.

■ Maria Ressa: I'm so glad that it worked. It's good to be here. Thank you for having me.

I. Level of Media Freedom in the Philippines After the Duterte Government

■ Sook Jong Lee: You faced 10 times of arrest warrant during the Duterte government. Since the Philippines has a new president now, Bongbong Marcos, the son of the former president, I would like to ask if media freedom has improved.

■ Maria Ressa: I've been asked this a lot, and I will say immediately, “Yes.”

This January, I had four tax evasion charges that could have put me in prison for 34 years. Rappler was also charged with ridiculous criminal tax evasion. After four years and two months, three justices of the Court of Tax Appeals threw it out, and we were acquitted. And when you read the verdict, you actually realize, “How did these even make their way to the court?” The independent judiciary is slowly coming up, which means that the checks and balances are slowly kicking back in. So that's a first step. The last administration used a tactic of harassment and intimidation to make journalists voluntarily give up their rights, which many have called it the “chilling effect.” I would call it “Siberia.” We lived in “Siberia” during that time period and there were costs for standing up to power.

It is still pretty early, but President Bongbong Marcos, the only son and the namesake of Ferdinand Marcos who was accused of stealing 10 billion US Dollars in 1986, has spent more of his first 100 days traveling outside the Philippines. He cares what the rest of the world thinks, and he also seeks to vindicate his family name. I hope that he listens and continues to focus on the economy like his father did. This is a difficult time for the post-COVID world. While the Philippines growth rate is significantly better than the West, whether or not this translates into real policies helping our people is a challenge ahead.

We were so low in the past that everything is in a slight improvement.

II. Duterte’s Legacy of Media Repression and the Philippine’s Way Forward

■ Sook Jong Lee: Friends in the Philippines were talking about the possible backlash under the new President, since he may try to legitimize his father's legacy and the authoritarian period of your country. What is your opinion on this view?

■ Maria Ressa: This is happening in almost every country around the world. We are testing history.

With the rise of the far right and with lies spreading faster than facts through social media, it makes every part of history debatable. The facts are debatable.

Everything that we see on social media has two algorithms working: the first is Facebook’s “friends of friends” algorithm, which essentially polarized us. We saw this happen in the Philippines in 2016 when Duterte was elected. If you were pro-Duterte, you moved further right. If you're anti-Duterte, you moved further left. This is what happened in the United States, in Hungary, and in Brazil.

[The second algorithm is] the recommendation engine in YouTube and Facebook, where if you click on a video on SNS, the recommendation engine brings something more extremist. So there's a polarization and downward radicalization. [Both] are embedded in our society, and civil society groups used tactics like name and shame to determine what “right” is. But when lies are rewarded, the world turns upside down and this becomes debatable.

Your question becomes more complicated for Marcos in this information ecosystem. In terms of actions, because the bar was set so low by the previous administration, we now see a little bit of a professional governance from the new President. He shows up and he doesn't curse. Policy is clearer and the appointments are clearer. This administration does listen to the public backlash for bad policy; however, despite the fact that we've suffered from the weaponization of the law, I'm also of the same mind that we need to be fair and look at the actions today and not necessarily the past. Was he a tax evader? Did he fail to pay his taxes? It's ironic because he now encourages Filipinos to pay their taxes.

So, it's very confusing – where is the moral high ground? At the same time, this is where I become slightly pragmatic. As a journalist in Rappler, my task is to hold power to account. We will give you the context of this. Both India's Prime Minister Modi and the Philippines President Marcos could not travel to the United States. But when they were democratically elected by their people, they could travel. A lot of these things go away. And they were overwhelmingly elected. So we need to stay vigilant and we need to keep doing the stories.

Rappler and I still have three criminal cases against us. There's a 5th tax evasion charge, cyber libel case, and securities case connected to foreign control. We have to be optimistic; otherwise, it can be debilitating.

III. Solutions to Political Polarization Caused by SNS Disinformation

■ Sook Jong Lee: You mentioned about many different perspectives about the history, and it is happening in Korea too about its colonial, the authoritarian period. It is dividing our civil society, not to mention our politicians. We also have not only newspapers, but also YouTube and social media that make us difficult to see whether there is truth or if the divided society can compromise or come up with a consensus about historical interpretations. In this kind of environment, what will be a good advice to control information and encourage the divided politics to come up with a more constructive common ground?

■ Maria Ressa: First of all, I always felt that Korea was in a better place. When we go back to Milan Kundera's quote, “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”

The design of social media today turns a lie into a fact—a lie told a million times becomes a fact. As I said in the Nobel lecture, this has now become an individual battle for integrity, for facts, and for values.

This is why it's great that Korea not only just held the regional meeting of the Second Summit for Democracy, but also will be holding the next Summit. It is good that the Third Summit for Democracy is coming to Asia-Pacific where, according to the latest V-Dem report, it has seen the worst decline of the quality of our democracies globally. The rest of the world has gone back to 1986 levels. In Asia-Pacific, we're at 1978 levels.

So, what's the solution? First, because of the culture of Korea, traditional news organizations still have significant power. They're losing business control and their business model is dying quickly. It's interesting that in Korea, Google is not number one, and Naver is. But Korean news organizations have given up too much power and relationships to Naver. We should not be fighting downstream; we have to fight upstream. So the long-term solution is education.

The medium-term solution is legislation, and short-term is the awareness that we are being insidiously manipulated by social media. Our biology, our emotions are being used against us. And on social media, according to an MIT study from 2018, lies spread at least 6 times faster than facts. The fact that [these lies] incite hate, fear, and tribalism, is part of the reason we're so polarized. They appeal to the worst of human nature, of society, and the impact is not just at the individual level, but sociologically at the group level.

We behave differently in groups. In my book, I talked about the Milgram Shock Experiment, in which there were test subjects behind the screen and participants were told to keep giving longer and longer electric shocks to the subjects and watch as they more and more. With authority, the participants continued to give electric shocks. When we're in groups and when authority gives us permission to be our worst selves, we do it. This is where, some of the warnings from Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny, such as “Don't follow the group,” come into play. That’s the second level.

The third level is emergent human behavior of our evolution as a species. This is addictive. Our young generation have higher levels of depression and sleeplessness. One of Meta’s own internal reports, which was one of the 10,000+ documents released by the whistleblower, Frances Haugen, actually showed that young teenager girls on Instagram have increased levels of eating disorders. The impacts and harm [of social media] are very clear aside from killing democracy—more than that is the rise of fascism.

IV. Freedom of Speech vs. Gatekeeping?

■ Sook Jong Lee: Today, we have ongoing debates about social media and its horrible disinformation effect. But as a journalist, when you face the conflicting principles, namely freedom of expression and protection of privacy and human dignity, how do you reconcile these?

■ Maria Ressa: It is false to say that they collide because this is not a freedom of speech issue. It is actually a “gatekeeping” issue. News organizations were supposed to be the gatekeepers to the public sphere, and readers were able to hold [the media] accountable. If they distributed or echoed a lie, they could be sued.

Right now, the tech companies make more money in surveillance for profit. We didn't even have a name for that business model until 2019, when Shoshana Zuboff wrote The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. This book goes into how these tech companies use machine learning to create models that know us better than we know ourselves. Those models are then scooped up by AI and become the motherload database that is used for microtargeting.

Microtargeting is not the old advertising strategy we know. It knows your weakest moment to a message and sells it. This advertising marketing model is now what is exploited by geopolitical powers. We have seen experiments before, but that exploitation really began in 2014 when Russian disinformation began to target Crimea, America, and even Korea. As they succeeded, they were replicated in different countries around the world. This is a part of the reason that we are seeing illiberal leaders being elected democratically, because if you don't have integrity of facts, you cannot have integrity of elections.

V. Social Media’s Impact on the Global Information Ecosystem

■ Sook Jong Lee: If we extend this debate to North Korea, where it not only has an illiberal leader but also a totally closed society with people indoctrinated, what would be a good way for the democracies to intervene in the psyche of North Koreans about the freedom and democracy issues? Have you thought about the North Koreans?

■ Maria Ressa: If you look at the world today, we have several cases. When Russia invaded Ukraine, the world came together, reacted on it, and the ICC came up with an arrest warrant. That's the quickest the world has acted since the World War II. Syria, for example, was very disjointed.

People thought that democracy doesn't really need to get nurtured and that it will survive all of these “death by a thousand cuts.” You also have Taiwan, which is engulfed by information operations by mainland China. You have the Koreas, and you see them as different stages of it.

What I'm worried about is that if we don't do anything significant with our information ecosystem, we will wind up like North Korea. When you say North Korea indoctrinates, I say social media is a behavior modification system.

On January 6, 2021, we saw violence on Capitol Hill for the first time. On January 8 of this year, we saw violence in Brazil. One of the aspects that has not been sufficiently researched yet is the role of YouTube, for example, in Brazil, in the United States, in the Philippines, and in South Korea. In a research by the Harvard Belfer Institute, they clustered the algorithms of YouTube on Zika virus, COVID, and also on Jair Bolsonaro. Their results showed that Bolsonaro, a far right figure, was able to be elected because of Youtube algorithms. The contents recommended by the algorithms clustered together the far rights who would never have been able to find each other in the real world. They were too far fringe, but they had common terrorist idea that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. This is what happened—the clustering algorithm of recommendation engines provided a support base.

Did the same clustering algorithm create the violence on January 6, 2021? I go back to Yuri Andropov, a former KGB chairman, who talked about disinformation in a way that democratic countries take seriously. He said, “disinformation is like cocaine—sniff once or twice, it may not change your life. If you use it every day, though, it will make you an addict—a different man.” This is where we are in 2023 after algorithms have exploited us and used our data to change the way we think and the way we act through our emotions.

■ Sook Jong Lee: Thank you. Do you have any comments for the Asia Democracy Research Network?

■ Maria Ressa: One last thing I would like to add on the ADRN is that our research will be inadequate unless we get access to big data. The big tech companies have those data over us, and they are frankly the only way we can hold them accountable. It is almost like we are in the dark, tossing spaghetti against the wall when they have the resources and we don’t.

Thank you very much for having me.

■ Maria Ressa is the founder, CEO, and executive editor of Rappler, the top digital-only news site that is leading the fight for press freedom in the Philippines. In October 2021, Maria was one of two journalists awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of her “efforts to safeguard freedom of expression, which is a precondition for democracy and lasting peace.” Among many other awards for her principled stance, she received the prestigious Golden Pen of Freedom Award, the Knight International Journalism Award, the Gwen Ifill Press Freedom Award, the Shorenstein Journalism Award, the Columbia Journalism Award, and the Sergei Magnitsky Award. Ressa has been a journalist in Asia for more than 30 years, most of them as CNN’s bureau chief in Manila, then Jakarta. In 2005, she took the helm of ABS-CBN News and Current Affairs, and for six years managed more than 1,000 journalists for the largest multi-platform news operation in the Philippines.

■ 담당 및 편집 박지수, EAI 연구보조원

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영상 스크립트

foreign the audience of East Asia Institute today I'm you know it's a very great opportunity to have Maria Lessa the well-known journalist and the lower Peace Prize winner of 2021 and Maria has fought very actively not only inside the Philippine also internationally so I'd like to ask basically several questions to Maria Maria thank you very much for taking time to have a talk with me for the EI audience no I'm so glad that we could it worked yeah it is it's good to be here thank you for having me I'm curious

because you had to face 10 times of the arrest warrant during the duterte government after you have a new government a son of the former president Marcos and Junior we call Bongo Marcos right is the situation of media freedom is improved under the new government that's my first question yeah I think you know strange I've been asked this a lot and I will say almost immediately yes and you know I point to um just January this year I had four tax evasion charges criminal charges that could have put me in prison for 34 years

and rappler was also charged a ridiculous criminal tax evasion charges and after four years and two months three justices of the court of tax appeals threw it out we were acquitted and when you read the verdict you actually realize you know so how did this make it to court um I think I think that justices are slowly you're seeing the independent Judiciary come up which means that um the checks and balances are slowly kicking back in so I think that's the first step you know uh in the past under the last Administration

it was a tactic of harassment and intimidation to make journalists voluntarily give up their rights right which is uh people would call it the chilling effect I would call it Siberia we lived in Siberia during that time period and there were costs for standing up to power it's too early but president Marcos the the only son and namesake of Ferdinand Marcos who was accused of stealing 10 billion US dollars in 1986 dollars well he has spent more of his first hundred days traveling outside the Philippines he cares what the rest of

the world thinks he has I think what you see is a is a leader of the country who also is looking to vindicate his family name and so I hope that he listens and also continues his his Focus like his father is on the economy this is a difficult time for the world and uh and the Philippine grocery is significantly better than the West um but whether or not this translates into real into into real policies that help our people that's the challenge ahead I'm very glad that the situation of media Freedom has been improved but you know

it's like we were so low it was everything was in a slight Improvement and the friends in Philippines were talking about the possible backlash under the new president yes because he may um uh you know try to legitimize his father's Legacy and the authoritarian piece of your country I think this is happening in almost every country around the world you know we are testing history and with the rise of the far right with the rise of when lies spread faster than facts on the delivery platform for information on technology

platforms on social media it makes every part of History debatable right the facts are debatable then everything and and what we have on social media is uh is two algorithms working you know the first is on Facebook friends of friends algorithm which essentially polarized us right we saw this happen in the Philippines in 2016 when duterte was elected if you were Pro duterte you move further right if you're anti duterte you move further left this is what happened in the United States in Hungary in

Brazil you know you you see this but there's a recommendation engine and you see this in YouTube you see this in Facebook um where if you click on a video on YouTube for example uh or on Twitter you would then be fed your the recommendation engine will bring you something more extremist so there's a downward radicalization there's a polarization and a radicalization so your question becomes more complicated in this information ecosystem for Marcos and and now kind of you know it's interesting with Korea with Germany

which has seen the rise of right like of the far right all of these things were embedded in our society and Civil Society groups use tactics like name and shame sure to determine what right is right right but right now when lies are rewarded the World Turns Upside Down and this becomes debatable so in terms of actions himself you know what we've seen from president Marcos again because the bar was set so low by the previous administration we now see a little bit of a professional um governance a professional way he

shows up he doesn't curse policy is clearer uh the appointments are clearer um he they do this Administration does listen to the public backlash for bad policy but I think despite the fact that we've suffered uh because of the weaponization of the law I'm also of the same mind that we need to be fair and look at the actions today and not necessarily the past although this is the hard part was he a tax evader right did he fail to pay his taxes it's ironic because he now encourages Filipinos to pay their taxes so you know you have

it's it's a little bit it's very confusing you know where is the moral High Ground at the same time this is where I become slightly pragmatic my task as a journalist in rappler our task is to hold power to account we will give you the context of this right with India's Prime Minister Modi both Modi and Marcos could not travel to the United States but when they were democratically elected by their people they could travel a lot of these things go away all right so we Democrat he was overwhelmingly elected

so I guess part of it is we need to stay vigilant we need to keep doing the stories um I still have three rappler and I still have three criminal cases against us there's a fifth tax evasion charge there's a cyber libel case there is the Securities case that is connected to foreign control oh you have to be optimistic otherwise it can be debilitating okay oh well you know you mentioned about so much different perspective about the passive story yeah and it is happening in Korea too about the colonial period

yeah and also uh the authoritarian is period correct so it's a very very uh dividing our civil society not to mention all politicians right and and we have so many Medias not only newspapers all the YouTube and and social media yes so it's difficult to see whether there is the truth or if the divided Society can compromise or come up with the consensus about historical interpretations so in that kind of uh environment what would be the good advice to control this this information and also encourage the divided quality yes

to come up with more constructive Common Ground yes so you know I feel so first of all I always felt Korea was in a better place you know partly I mean this is when we go back to Milan candara's quote the struggle of man against Power is the struggle of memory against forgetting and the design of social media today actually turns a lie into a fact right a lie told a million times becomes a fact I said this in the Nobel lecture this has now become an individual battle for integrity and individual balance for

facts an individual battle for values which is why it's great that Korea is holding not just how this second democracy Summit of the regional grouping but also we'll be holding the next one it is good that the third democracy Summit is coming to Asia which by the way according to the the latest v-dem report Asia the Asia Pacific has seen the worst decline of the quality of our democracies globally you know the rest of the world has gone back to 1986 levels in Asia Pacific where 1978 levels so um what's the solution so first you

still have part of it is because of the culture of Korea um traditional news organizations still have significant power um they're losing business control uh the the business model is dying quickly and I think it's interesting that Korea in Korea uh Google is not number one neighbor is but these news organizations have given up significant power and relationships to neighbor um I think the same thing that Korea Korea needs to do the same thing that we've been pushing in the EU in advocating is the right word I guess

part of it is you know I'm tired of doing the whack-a-mole game of either content moderation or trying to fight the 90 the 90s the 98 messages per hour you know it's impossible we should not be fighting it Downstream we have to fight Upstream so in the long term first is education medium term is legislation and in the short term it is the awareness that we are being insidiously manipulated that our biology our emotions are being used against us and that you know on social media this is an MIT study from 2018

lies spread at least six times faster than facts and if it is if it includes inciting hate inciting fear inciting tribalism this is part of the reason we're so polarized this is created it appeals to the worst of human nature to the worst of society and the impact is not just at the individual level it is sociologically at the group level right we behave differently in groups that you know I I went back in in my book I talked about the Milgram study where this is a study that was done and it actually it was supposed to have been

done in in Germany Stanley Milgram did this and and he didn't do it in Germany he did it in the United States on a campus and the the the test was you know you were told so there were test subjects behind the screen and you were told the test uh was told you know you have to keep giving longer and longer electric shocks to the people who you see and then they see the person suffering more and more who essentially are acting for the for the subject and yet with authority they continued to to to give electric shocks right there

there's something in our when we're in groups when Authority tells us gives us permission to be our worst selves we do it and this is where you know some of the warnings for example of Timothy Snyder in on tyranny is you know don't follow the group so that's the second level the third level is human behavior emergent human behavior our Evolution as a species this is addictive a young generation are have higher levels of depression of sleeplessness Facebook's one of meta's own internal reports that was one of ten thousand

plus documents released by The Whistleblower Francis Haugen actually showed that young teenager girls on Instagram um are have have increased levels of Eating Disorders right their impact the harms now are very clear aside from oh yes killing democracy um actually more than that it's the rise of fascism okay um you know we haven't debated a lot about this social media world and also this horrible disinformation effect but as a journalist when you face the conflicting principle namely freedom of expression and another principle of

protecting privacy feel reconcile when these two principles are colliding it is false to say that they collide because this is not a freedom of speech issue right um it is actually a deep keeping issue which news organizations were The Gatekeepers to the public sphere you could hold us accountable uh if we distributed a lie if we echoed a lie we could be sued right right now the tech companies make more money in surveillance for profit and we didn't even have a name for that business model until 2019 when shashana zuboff wrote

surveillance capitalism and surveillance capitalism actually goes into how these tech companies use machine learning to create models of us that know us better than we know ourselves and you know this I've lived through and I see this right those models are then scooped up by Ai and that becomes the motherload database that is used to micro Target micro targeting is not the old advertising we know micro targeting knows your weakest moment to a message and sells it and these this advertising marketing model

it started that way is now what is exploited by geopolitical power that exploitation began in 2014 like we saw experiments right but in 2014 Russian disinformation began to Target Crimea began to Target America began to Target Korea I mean these are some of the things and as they succeeded and they did succeed it was replicated in different countries around the world part of the reason we are seeing illiberal leaders elected democratically because if you don't have integrity of facts you cannot have integrity of

Elections right if we extend this debate to North Korea it's not just a liberal leader it's a totally closed society and people are indoctrinated whether it be the good way for the uh the the Democrats to intervene in the you know psychic of North Koreans about this all these Freedom issues and Democrats issues have you thought about the North Korean case I mean if you look at the world today right we have several cases that Russia invaded Ukraine the world came together reacted on it and now the ICC came up

with a an arrest warrant that's the quickest the world has acted since World War II right um Syria for example was very disjointed people thought oh well democracy doesn't really need to get nurtured it will survive all of these I called it death by a thousand Cuts coming from Al qaeda's own idea that this is the way you fight for it you have Taiwan which is engulfed by information operations by China right Taiwan separate from China and then you have South Korea and North Korea you have the Koreans and I think

you see them as kind of different stages of it and what I'm worried about is that if we don't do anything significant with our information ecosystem we wind up like North Korea because think about it like this right in January 2021 on January 6 we saw for the first time violence on Capitol Hill in USA yeah this is you know when you say North Korea indoctrinates I say social media is a behavior modification system and because it is in Echo Chambers how far will it go right we saw January 6 violence in the United States we saw

January 8 violence this year in Brazil and you know one of the things that's fascinating and we don't not enough research has been done on this but the role of YouTube for example in Brazil in the United States in the Philippines in Korea because YouTube so this is um research by the Belfort Institute that was released by The Belfort Institute in Harvard essentially they started working on clustering algorithms of YouTube and zika before covet and then they worked on bolsonaro and what they showed was

that bolsonaro was a far-right French figure but essentially he was brought to the center became president because the algorithms of YouTube in recommending content clustered together the far right The Fringe every single conspiracy theory that in the real world would never have been able to find each other they were too far Fringe but they had common it's it's an it's a terrorist idea the enemy of that my enemy is my friend this is essentially what you saw happen and this clustering algorithm of recommendation

engine provided the support base this is according and this is in a book by by Max Fisher it's called the chaos machine he he claims this then brought bolsonaro to the presidency and if you look then is this the same clustering algorithm that created the violence on January 8th go back to Yuri andropov who's a former KGB chairman and he talked about this information in a way that I don't think we in Democratic countries take seriously he and his quote is this he said the sin for matsia is like cocaine

you take it once or twice you're okay but if you take it all the time you're a changed person this is where we are in 2023 after algorithms have exploited us um and used our data to change the way we think through our emotions and ultimately the way we Act yes it was fascinating I'm sure you know our audience learned a lot from Maria Lessa who's so experienced in online media and also you know fighting for democracy somebody else said thank you so much for having time to talk about this issue