The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart on Thursday addressed his audience as a “patriotically obedient host,” satirically describing his show as administration-compliant, and hosted an actual Nobel Peace Prize winner for her fight for freedom of expression in her home country, the Philippines.
Maria Ressa, journalist and author of How to Stand Up to a Dictator, drew comparisons of Trump’s administration to that of Rodrigo Duterte in her home country of the Philippines, saying that Americans are like “deer in headlights” while free speech and the collapse of institutions are happening faster than she had anticipated.
“If you don’t move and protect the rights you have, you lose them. And it’s so much harder to reclaim them.”
Ressa said people the world over were electing “illiberal leaders democratically because of insidious manipulation … which starts with the manipulation and corruption of our public information ecosystem”.
By design, she says, it begins with disinformation spreading online. “Social media spreads lies, by a 2018 MIT study, at least six times faster,” Ressa told Stewart. “So by design, lies spread faster.”
“That’s the incentive — and then in 2017 we saw in our country, in the Philippines, that if you lace it with fear, anger and hate, it can go viral,” she added. “That’s the incentive structure. So that was used to attack us. Now imagine if you’re pumped full of … toxic sludge. Online violence is real-world violence.”