The 2021 Nobel Peace Prize winner, Maria Ressa, defended in an exclusive interview with CNN the approval of laws in Brazil that regulate digital platforms and punish the dissemination of fake news.
Ressa said that the so-called big tech, the big global technology companies, need to be held accountable for the distribution of false content and misinformation.
“These companies are completely immune to any type of liability”, he says.
The Nobel laureate is a Filipino journalist who gained notoriety for her militancy against disinformation and authoritarian leaders. She showed that she is following the discussions on the fake news bill in the Brazilian Congress.
“I know that Brazil has its own laws, which are being implemented, and there was a very strong lobby by all technology companies (against the Fake News PL). I think we need to be as insistent as the big techs. Standing by and not implementing new security laws means letting tech companies decide our lives,” she said.
She also refuted allegations against the regulation of the digital environment: “it is not a question of freedom of expression. This is false information released to prevent regulators from doing their jobs. These are crazy conspiracy theories.”
Nobel Prize Dome
Ressa gave the exclusive interview to CNN direct from Washington, in the United States, where he is participating in a summit organized by the Nobel Foundation to discuss ways to fight fake news and try to find solutions to the problem.
In addition to her, 10 other Nobel Prize winners are taking part in the discussions.
For Ressa, there are some long and medium term solutions to the problem – including, obviously, the implementation of new laws regulating the digital world.
“The long-term solution is education. In the medium term, it is legislation. But in the short term, it’s just us, the people in the trenches. You can’t just give up because there’s no law, right?” she said.
During the summit, she presented a list of three action points to contain the fake news problem.
A CNN , she boiled these actions down into three main areas that deserve attention: getting big tech to stop using what she called “people-watching for profit”; end biases built into companies’ algorithms; and valuing professional journalism, which she called the “antidote” to false information.
Source: CNN Brasil
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