Living with zero credibility

Making her case before a foreign audience only showed Ressa’s lack of confidence that her views will be believable among Filipinos who know the nation’s real situation.

Rappler founder Maria Ressa had joined the likes of coup plotter Antonio Trillanes IV and Vice President Leni Robredo in taking their futile attempts to discredit President Rody Duterte overseas.

Ressa who is free to battle it out against Rody in the country, since she and her cohorts in the yellow media have not encountered any restrictions or censorship, decided to use the United States as a launching pad for her diatribes in what may be considered as writings of an American speaking to Americans since Ressa has a US passport.

In an opinion article in the Los Angeles Times, she warned about a look into a dystopian future for America through the Philippines under Rody whom she claimed is tearing “our democracy apart in the Philippines.”

Her assertion is that social media had greatly assisted Rody in imposing his will on the nation.

“What is happening to the Philippines is a warning to democracies around the world,” Ressa opened her venomous piece.

“More than three years ago, lies laced with anger and hate began to systematically tear our democracy apart in the Philippines. They split open the fracture lines in our society, eroded trust in our institutions, created and inflamed ideas of us against them,” she claimed.

Ressa’s beef was that American technology giants “created the platforms that enabled manipulation at a mass scale, structurally designed to undermine democracies by playing to our worst selves.”

She cited the strongman figures other than Rody, such as “Donald Trump in the United States, followed by Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil” as mainly being the creation of social media.

Curiously, she mentioned the role of American firm “Cambridge Analytica, which was founded by Stephen K. Bannon, the former Trump White House advisor, and funded by billionaire Robert Mercer, harvested data on tens of millions of Facebook users to create psychological profiles used to tailor content specifically for them.” The American firm was known to have been tapped not by Rody but by former President Noynoy Aquino for the 2010 polls which he won.

“The goal was to support insidious information operations, whether in politics or business. It is — as it has always been — about power and money,” she wrote.

Ressa even revealed a meeting with Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie who told her that the Philippines was used by that company as a “petri dish” for testing tactics used for behavior modification: among them, to disseminate propaganda and manipulate voter opinion.

The long-winded article concluded with Ressa maintaining that she and Rappler are victims of persecution from Rody and the President’s supporters in social media with the insinuation that such support is abetted by government.

She also complained that “in a little more than a year starting in January 2018, the Philippine government filed 11 cases and investigations against us for alleged foreign ownership, securities fraud, tax evasion and many other ludicrous charges. I had to post bail eight times in a three-month period, and this year, I was arrested twice and detained once.”

The hammer blow in Ressa’s masterpiece was her claim that “anyone on Facebook who questioned Duterte’s drug war became a target. That included human rights activists, journalists and news organizations.”

None of such is happening except for the exchange of sometimes vicious views from opposing camps on the social media platform.

The real situation, however, is that most of the accounts of Rody’s supporters have been taken down from Facebook, which had the biggest mistake of tapping Rappler as one of its fact-checkers.

Making her case before a foreign audience only showed Ressa’s lack of confidence that her views will be believable among Filipinos who know the nation’s real situation.