Let’s Ponder On This

Wswazinews@times.co.sz

a chaotic and stressful year 2021 has been! The COVID-19 pandemic has been turning our lives upside down and the political unrest has left everyone wondering what tomorrow holds; no one knows whose home or property will be burnt next by the unknown arsonists running roughshod over anyone they consider an enemy of the regime change agenda; pupils are uncertain whether schools will reopen peacefully come January 11, 2022; there are no signs that the coronavirus will go away anytime soon; whether the much-needed job opportunities will be available next year nobody knows; fingers are crossed that the national dialogue process will be acceptable to everyone so as to forge a way forward to the prevailing political situation; there is just a lot of unpredictability everywhere in the Kingdom of Eswatini. The only sure thing everyone knows will happen is that the sun will keep rising from the East and set in the West. That’s the only fact social media, particularly Facebook, has failed to manipulate or lie about. Yes, in the midst of COVID-19 and political unrest, social media has made things worse; in fact, social media, with all its disinformation, has fuelled the stressful and chaotic situation.

Philippine journalist Maria Ressa, the joint winner of the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize – an honour she shares with Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov, when receiving her award last Friday, criticised United States(US) technology giants such as Facebook for making a profit by disseminating lies and hate. “Without facts you can’t have truth; without truth you can’t have trust; without trust we have no shared reality, no democracy and it becomes impossible to deal with the existential problems of our times – climate, coronavirus, now the battle for truth,” she said.

HAT NEWS

Ressa told international news organisation Al Jazeera that the greatest threat to democracy is ‘when lies become facts. Because that breaks our shared reality and that allows the manipulation of the public.’ Ressa decried that facts were being doubted and implored news organisations to collaborate and help each other. “The days when we used to compete with each other, those days are gone. We are now on the same side fighting for facts. Who I always call out on the other side … are the new gatekeepers, the technology companies that have abdicated responsibility for the public sphere,” Ressa told Al Jazeera. She highlighted the sad reality that social media was being weaponised, followed by the weaponisation of the law. “This weaponisation of social media ‘gets rid’ of facts … How do we avoid the doubting of facts? … How can we do our jobs if trust is broken down? The people watching – do they believe us? That’s the core of the problem I think that we are facing today,” Ressa said.

What the Nobel Peace Prize laureate said is exactly what the Kingdom of Eswatini is faced with at the moment – the weaponisation of social media to cause social and political strife. False information is peddled every day to cause disharmony between citizens and to stir hate for the country’s leadership. Ressa’s analogy has been corroborated by Muratov who also told Al Jazeera that disinformation was a significant and growing threat. “Manipulation leads to war,” he said. And yes, because of this manipulation, Eswatini is on the brink of a civil war. “We are in the middle of a post-truth period. Now, everyone is concerned about their own ideas and not the facts,” Muratov said, and added: “Social scientists have shown that, when even knowing what is the truth and what is a lie, 75 per cent of people will consider the lie as truth as they like the lie better. This is happening already. We are at the very bottom of the manipulation of the human mind.”

This is to a large extent the result of what Ressa said was news organisations losing their gate-keeping powers to technology platforms such as Facebook. Losing this power has made facts debatable because facts and lies are now treated equally. In fact, the Philippine said, the algorithms of Facebook – the world’s largest distributor of news – actually favour lies laced with anger and hate that spreads faster and further than facts. She agreed that this was the more reason why the peace prize has not been given to Facebook because this social media organisation is better associated with ‘the fascism of lies; the fascism of untruths’.

She has the probable solutions to this problem that is brought about by social media. Firstly, Ressa called on journalists to expose, to tell people, to do the stories that show exactly how insignias manipulation happens; how social media has become a behaviour modification symbol. Secondly, she called for strengthening of independent journalism and for continued demand for legislation against technology companies. Thirdly, she called for the building resilient communities that demand fact-based and evidence-based information. “You can’t have trust on the platforms tainted by the virus of lies that has entered the information ecosystem,” she said

PEACEMAKER

Having won the peace prize, Ressa has had to respond to a question of whether she is a journalist or a peacemaker, to which she said the answer was identical in the sense that it all went back to the facts. To make peace, she said one had to get all the sides to actually agree that the facts are what they really are and get the people to understand that and agree to it. “If you can do that then you can begin to heal divisions that are there. As it stands right now, the divisions are what’s being pounded by information operations that help power and consolidate power.” Ressa agreed that no matter how divided people could be, sooner or later they had to talk to each other; they had to get onto the negotiating table. She said her position had been that the present time had to be treated like the Second World War in 1945 when America dropped the world’s first deployed atomic bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The explosion immediately killed an estimated 80 000 people; tens of thousands more would later die of radiation exposure.

Three days later, another atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, killing an estimated 40 000 people. “We need to stop human being from doing the worst to humanity. What came out of that was multilateral, multisectoral; they came together and created the United Nations(UN) and the Universal Declaration on Human Rights. And by coming together and agreeing, we were able to create this period of relative peace,” she said.

Regarding the responsibility of journalists in this process, she stated: “Our role is to make sure that you have the facts so that everyone sitting at the table can talk and solve these problems.” As the Kingdom of Eswatini looks to a national dialogue that could bring about peace, the value of presenting all the facts as they were/are is what the media should strive for. By all means necessary, the disinformation that people are flooded with though social media has to be countered. Some people have opted to discontinue their social media accounts to get away from the lie and hate they encounter on these platforms on a daily basis. They say ever since they took this decision, they have had peace and stress free lives. Social media is toxic!

On July 1, 2021, Verywell Mind, an award-winning resource for reliable, compassionate, and up-to-date information on the mental health topics, reported that the huge usage of social media prompted mental health experts to investigate whether the enormous popularity of these platforms (Facebook, Twitter and Instagram) plays a role in depression. “Research suggests that people who limit their time on social media tend to be happier than those who don’t. Studies also indicate that social media may trigger an array of negative emotions in users that contribute to or worsen their depression symptoms.” According to Verywell Mind, a Lancet study published in 2018 found that people who check Facebook late at night were more likely to feel depressed and unhappy; another 2018 study found that the less time people spend on social media, the less symptoms of depression and loneliness they felt; and a 2015 study found that Facebook users who felt envy while on the networking site were more likely to develop symptoms of depression. This is because of the hate, anger and disinformation that these social media platforms carry on a daily basis as espoused by Ressa and Muratov. The joint Nobel Peace Prize winners’ analysis of Facebook is accurately backed by Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen who left the company in May this year after leaking internal company research, including reports that reveal Instagram’s impact on teenage girls’ mental health.

In an interview with American TV network CBS, Haugen provided documents showing the company being aware of both the spread of hate speech on its platforms and also of how challenging a problem it posed. “We estimate that we may action as little as 3-5 per cent of hate and ~0.6 per cent of V&I (Violence and Incitement) on Facebook despite being the best in the world at it,” one internal report was quoted.

“We have evidence from a variety of sources that hate speech, divisive political speech, and misinformation on Facebook and the family of apps are affecting societies around the world,” another was quoted. According to Haugen, fixing Facebook’s hate speech problem could take more than heavier content moderation and stricter rules. Eswatini is a victim of the hate speech, divisive political speech and misinformation (I prefer to call it ‘disinformation’) being spread through Facebook and other social media platforms. As we end the year and look to a better 2022, emaSwati should consume content on these platforms wisely and not be easily manipulated by individuals or groups seeking personal gain.