Maria Ressa won the Nobel Peace Prize this week for her career as a Filipina journalist working to shed light on the Duarte regimes’ corruption. She spoke of representing all journalists who must sacrifice so much to hold power to account and to bring you the truth. She started an online news publication “Rappler”after being pushed out of leading her country’s largest broadcasting newsroom. She will return to the Philippines from Oslo facing up to 100 years of  prison on trumped up charges. In her acceptance speech, she read a list of journalist murdered around the world, starting with the brutal dismemberment of Khashoggi, naming more from  Belarus, Malta, Hong Kong, Venezuela, Myanmar and Russia.  She named three dead from her own country learning just 36 hours ago that her former colleague Jess Malayan was killed with a bullet to his head. 

  “The great infestation of lies put out against us is a result of the poor state of the information ecosystem”.   In the third world, in the Philippines, internet service come to rural areas as Facebook. The lies and propaganda fed by state actors and pernicious types are the great threat to democracy.The Facebook algorithms that promote extreme positions and feed hate boost profits . Disinformation is pitting us against each other setting the stage for the rise of dictators around the world.“

  She says “at the core of journalism is a code of honor”, but state actors, the Chinese for example, generated disinformation by using AI bots on Facebook. Marcos is ahead in the elections by spewing lies about his adversaries on Facebook. Maria Ressa says, A war with cheap armies on social media, designed by humans coding for profit alone. Democracy depends on truth to develop trust in the  vote in elections to take on these existential matters of climate and peace we must unite to fix. Protect truth by protecting journalists and use laws to reign in social media.

Based The Guardian and on Amy Goodman reports from Democracy Now!