JOSEPH ARANETA GAMBOA l OCTOBER 12, 2022 l Business Mirror
FACE-to-face events are back after two years of virtual conventions and online meetings. As a sign of post-pandemic normalcy, the Financial Executives Institute of the Philippines (Finex) held its 54th annual conference at the Fairmont Hotel Makati last October 5 with a wide array of speakers that included global and regional leaders in business and finance.
Finance Secretary Benjamin E. Diokno gave the opening keynote address on “Reshaping the Future with Transformational Change.” Among the other speakers were: Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas Deputy Governor Bernadette Romulo-Puyat; Edgardo Tiongson of WWF Philippines Inc.; Wilson Teo of Refinitiv Pte. Ltd.; Juan Gabriel R. Tomas IV of Rizal Commercial Banking Corp.; Rolando J. Paulino of ACE Enexor Inc.; Dennis A. Velasco of Prosperna Philippines Inc.; Nishant D’Souza of MotherNurture Inc.; Katrina Rausa Chan of Ideaspace Foundation Inc.; and, Micah del Carmen of Noahsys Corp. For their part, Roberto L. Castro of Palawan Express Inc., Griselda G. Santos of Water.org and Jose Paulo R. Soliman of Unionbank served as panelists in one of the plenary sessions.
A last-minute addition to the roster of speakers was Nobel Peace Prize laureate Maria Ressa, who delivered the closing keynote address on “Social Media and the Corruption of the Information Ecosystem.” She flew in from New York City where she had just received the inaugural Albie Award from the Clooney Foundation for Justice.
The award is named after South African Justice Albie Sachs, who was instrumental in ending apartheid along with Nelson Mandela, the first president of South Africa. It aims to serve as “a new platform that would shine a protective light on the many courageous individuals who, at great personal risk, have devoted their lives to justice.”
At the Finex conference, Ressa spoke about how our world is being transformed by the change in scale in the amount of data available to us. Starting 2014, news organizations lost their distribution power and new gatekeepers have emerged consisting of social media influencers and bloggers who dominate the area of content creation. She also cited a 2018 study conducted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology showing that lies spread faster than facts.
Parallel to this recent “information warfare” phenomenon is the transformation in politics and governance worldwide with the rise of authoritarian rulers who have been elected democratically. Ressa believes we are now in the last two minutes of democracy and 2024 will be the year that the most crucial elections will take place in the US, India and Indonesia. That year will determine whether the geopolitical power shift to fascism becomes a permanent global trend.
Another issue that Ressa discussed was surveillance capital, which first came to public attention via the Netflix docudrama in 2020 titled “The Social Dilemma.” When she and Dmitry Muratov won the Nobel Peace Prize in Norway last year, they launched a 10-point action plan to address the information crisis and put an end to surveillance for profit. Nine other Nobel laureates from various fields endorsed their plan to support journalism against online impunity.
Social media has thus become the battlefield for the information war, fueled by the attention economy controlled by a nameless, faceless crowd that can easily turn into a mob. Social media algorithms and the proliferation of fake accounts or manufactured reality have led to the “weaponization” of the Internet.
It is interesting to note that a Filipino-American film won the Emmy Award last week for outstanding social issue documentary. Directed by Ramona Diaz, “A Thousand Cuts” follows Ressa’s journey as she places the tools of the free press and her own freedom on the line in defense of democracy and the truth.
How to rebuild trust? According to her, “If we don’t have facts, we can’t have truth. Without truth, we can’t have trust. Without these three, we don’t have a shared reality, we can’t have democracy.”
*** Joseph Gamboa is the chairman of the Financial Executives Institute of the Philippines Media Affairs Committee and director of Noble Asia Industrial Corp. The views expressed herein do not necessarily reflect the opinion of these institutions and the BusinessMirror. #FinexPhils www.finex.org.ph