The Nobel Laureate They Tried to Troll Offline
A big-data study of hundreds of thousands of posts found that most online attacks on Philippine journalist Maria Ressa were designed to discredit her reporting. The abuse, much of it on Facebook and Twitter, unfolded as she faced a cyber-libel prosecution that ended in conviction.
Maria Ressa, the co-founder of the Philippine news site Rappler, spent years documenting Rodrigo Duterte’s presidency — and years absorbing a torrent of online abuse that ran alongside her reporting. In 2021, she shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Russian editor Dmitry Muratov, honored, the Norwegian Nobel Committee said, “for their efforts to safeguard freedom of expression, which is a precondition for democracy and lasting peace,” according to the committee’s citation.
Rappler drew the government’s attention after it investigated killings tied to Duterte’s campaign against suspected drug dealers and reported on the spread of pro-Duterte disinformation online, according to PBS Frontline. What followed, researchers found, was not only a legal campaign but a sustained effort to tear down her credibility online.
What the data showed
A big-data case study published in March 2021 by the International Center for Journalists, produced with the University of Sheffield and Rappler, analyzed hundreds of thousands of social media posts directed at Ressa between 2016, when Duterte took office, and 2021. Almost 60 percent of the attacks extracted from Facebook and Twitter “were designed to undermine her professional credibility and public trust in her journalism,” frequently by branding her reporting as “fake news,” the study found, according to the Centre for Freedom of the Media at the University of Sheffield, which co-produced the research.
Over 40 percent of the attacks targeted Ressa at a personal level, the study found, with 14 percent of all abuse — and 34 percent of the personal attacks — classified as misogynistic, sexist and explicit, per the same summary. The researchers said there was “evidence that some of the attacks on Ressa are coordinated or orchestrated – a hallmark of State-led disinformation campaigns.”
Part of a wider pattern
The Ressa case was one strand of a larger project. A UNESCO-commissioned study carried out by the International Center for Journalists analyzed roughly 2.5 million social media posts aimed at Ressa and British journalist Carole Cadwalladr, and surveyed more than 900 women journalists across 125 countries, nearly three-quarters of whom reported experiencing online abuse, Al Jazeera reported. “Unfortunately what we are seeing here is that this is a global phenomenon,” Guilherme Canela, UNESCO’s chief of freedom of expression, told Al Jazeera.
Prosecution offline
The online campaign ran parallel to a legal one. On June 15, 2020, a Manila court convicted Ressa and a former Rappler researcher of cyber libel over a 2012 article, a charge that carried a sentence of up to six years, court records show. An appeals court upheld the conviction in 2022, and the Securities and Exchange Commission moved to revoke Rappler’s incorporation, PBS Frontline reported.
Ressa’s international counsel, Amal Clooney, said in a statement that “Maria has been considered guilty until proven innocent — and then prevented from proving her innocence,” according to PBS Frontline. Researchers who documented the attacks argued that the online abuse and the courtroom pressure were connected — that a campaign to discredit a journalist in the feed can help clear the way for one against her in the courts.