MANILA - Nobel laureate Maria Ressa on Wednesday said showing courage, protecting facts and strengthening trust in journalism are key to safeguard humanity from misinformation and lies online, which are changing not only behaviors but also threatening the essence of democracy.

Ressa, a recipient of the prestigious Nobel Peace Prize, spoke at the Internet and Mobile Marketing Association of the Philippines' Digicon Valley 2022, a gathering of internet marketing professionals.

She and another Rappler journalist were convicted for cyber libel for a story published by Rappler years ago for allegedly violating a law that didn't even exist at the time of the story's publishing.

While Facebook has taken down network pages and users linked to inauthentic behavior, Ressa said there are still many other pages meant to discredit journalists like her.

At IMMAP DigiCon Valley 2022, the Rappler CEO shared that she wakes up to cyber attacks, on top of "baseless" cases filed against her, which are all meant to discredit her credibility as a journalist.

"Here's the stuff that I had to live with you know. I wake up in the morning and I would see this everything about me…you know I have eczema, but what they did is they made my skin look worse. They thought that I'd be embarrassed. But you know what, when you know you're under attack and you know that the goal is to shut you up, don't shut up," Ressa said.

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Ressa said many other women journalists experience online abuse. A UNESCO study showed that 73 percent of women journalists experienced online abuse, 25 percent received threats of physical violence and death threats, while 20 percent were attacked or abused offline in connection with online abuse, she said.

Social media has played a huge role not just in shaping the credibility of people, facts and organizations, but also in influencing people's behavior which could even change the landscape of democracy, Ressa said.

Misinformation, she said, is "damaging" to humanity. It can change behaviors that could dictate the outcomes of elections, she added.

This is true globally even in the Philippines, she said. Ressa shared that a study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) discovered that lies spread 6 times faster than facts, she said.

"When you hear the lie from so many different places and you hear it repeatedly, it's kind of like Pavlov's dogs, you become conditioned. So, social media became a behavior modification system and we have seen this in many countries around the world. If you don't have integrity of facts, we don't have integrity of elections," Ressa said.

“Behavior modification system has impacted the integrity of our elections. When you affect the integrity of elections, you impact the quality of our democracies,” she said.

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How then can journalists safeguard the integrity of facts these days?

To do that, there should be laws that protect interlinked aspects such as free speech, content moderation, user safety and data privacy, among others, she said.

Data privacy should also be protected from individuals using information for surveillance profit, she said.

Almost everyone uses the internet on a daily basis which, in turn, contributes to the data collected by firms which can be analyzed and studied using big data.

"The key point is to stop surveillance for profit. Why should these companies own our clones? Should we not own our private thoughts, right?" she said.

Courage and believing in the good are also crucial in protecting the truth in the age of misinformation, she said.

"Believe in the goodness of human nature because in order to be good, you have to believe there is good in the world. And then the last part is, ask yourself that question: what will you sacrifice for the truth because your courage determines the fate of humanity," Ressa said.

Ressa leads a team of fact-checkers that is working with several organizations such as Agence France-Presse to curb fake news.

A recent Pulse Asia Survey released on Oct. 11 showed that majority of Filipinos, or 9 out 10, believe fake news remains a problem in the country.

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