If we in this country feel put upon, said Kerry O’Brien at last week’s 70th Walkley Awards, “remind yourself of those journalists in Gaza or Ukraine, or Russia or China, or Myanmar or Afghanistan who’ve been shut down or gone to prison, or gone to their graves… for seeking to report the truth.”
When the doyen of Australian journalism speaks, I listen. So when I heard O’Brien say we should all heed what Maria Ressa had to say about this, of course I looked her up.
Introducing Ressa at the National Press Club in September, club chair and Sky News anchor Tom Connell let it drop that while she was there next to him as a winner of the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize, her former leader Rodrigo Duterte, the would-be dictator who sought to silence her, was in jail in the Netherlands charged with crimes against humanity.
Such satisfying moments are vanishingly small in these times when dictators and their corporate enablers rule the roost. Sweden’s V-Dem Democracy Report reveals that in 2025, 73 per cent of the world’s governments are autocracies.
Journalists, said Ressa, represent everyone who wants democracy to prevail in the struggle for information integrity – “the mother of all battles”. At stake is not free speech, says Ressa, but public safety.
Hobart neuroscientist Lila Landowski would agree. She believes good information is endangered by the all-consuming beast called social media, whose worst aspects are anything but sociable – actually damaging to young people’s mental health.
As reported by Philip Young in Saturday’s Mercury, Landowski sees human connection as a guide to health and happiness, releasing feel-good chemicals “like a nutritious meal for the brain”. But texting online “is the nutritional equivalent of eating a jelly bean – your brain might release some dopamine, but you don’t get that protective cocktail of neurochemicals.”
Much the same can be said about the health of democracy when the borderless, lawless world of social media is people’s sole source of news. “When local news dies,” said Ressa, “democracy withers.… Just as you wouldn’t build a city without roads or bridges, you cannot build a healthy democracy without robust protections for press freedom.”
We are now in what she describes as “the mother of all battles”. To even begin to address the great issues – poverty, human trafficking, climate change, sustainable development and the like – people and their governments must have what she calls information integrity, essential to creating shared reality and civic engagement.
“When you say a lie a million times it becomes fact,” Ressa told a United Nations interviewer a month ago, referring to a Massachusetts Institute of Technology finding that in 2018 lies were spreading in social media six times faster than facts (“and it’s much worse now). The platforms are designed this way, she says, on the premise of “free speech”.
Regardless of whose side we’re on, says Ressa, information integrity anchors us in mutually understood facts, essential for effective public debate – and for public safety.
“Without facts you can’t have truth, and without truth you can’t have trust,” said Ressa. “Without these we have no shared reality. We can’t begin to solve any problem, let alone existential ones like climate change. You can’t have journalism. You can’t have electoral integrity. You can’t have democracy.”
Social media, she says, has meant the outsourcing of information distribution to private companies whose main goal is profit, which are now being enabled by generative AI to experiment on their users in real time.
“What big tech companies fail to realise is that when you unhinge people from fact, you literally change them… What tech has done is to hack our biology. Fear, anger and hate spread fastest. It changes the way we feel, the way we act, the way we vote.”
Noting the V-Dem democracy report in March, Ressa commented: “We’re electing illiberal leaders democratically. The shift is personal, it’s group, it’s societal, it’s countries – it’s global. This is how powerful the technology is.”
“We expect every other consumer-facing industry to assess and build in protections. This technological exceptionalism has to end,” says Australia’s eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant (Mercury, 6 December). This is personal for her as a victim of the toxic sludge now endemic in social media. We now have a new, now widely-used word for it: “enshittification”.
We can take courage from people like Ressa, Inman Grant and O’Brien. And we should take Ressa’s advice to invest in the infrastructure of truth. We need governments to stand up to big tech – especially where young people are concerned – and to foster online places using open-source protocols that allow real people to have real conversations safe from manipulation.