GLOBAL MEDIA FORUM
The Internet — danger or boon for autocrats? The Internet can be used as a tool of oppression. But it can also be a p latform for critical voices. Journalists Maria Ressa from the Philippines and Lina Attalah from Egypt and A mnesty International’s Markus N. Beeko d iscussed the importance of the Internet in autocratic states in a digital s ession of this year’s Global Media Forum. by Ines Eisele, DW editor
Maria Ressa is a co-founder and editor-in-chief of the news website Rappler in the Philippines. She is under immense pressure because of Rappler’s critical coverage of the government, particularly on President Rodrigo Duterte’s declared “war on drugs.” Ressa has already been arrested many times and recently received a libel conviction. Her sentence is still pending.
Lina Attalah is the founder and chief editor of the online newspaper Mada Masr — one of the remaining independent media outlets in Egypt — and which has been banned for the past three years by President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s government. Egyptian authorities have taken action against Mada Masr on several occasions: the newspaper was raided last November and Attalah was briefly arrested in May.
Markus N. Beeko is the secretary general of Amnesty International in Germany. He is also the chair of Amnesty’s international steering group on “Human Rights in the Digital Age.” Appointed to head the German section in 2016, he has been active in leadership positions for Amnesty in Germany and the international secretariat in London since 2004.
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Social media as a weapon According to Ressa, global societies are witnessing the “death of democracy by a thousand cuts.” She stresses that the Internet, in particular social media, has contributed to this process in the Philippines in recent years: “The government uses social media as a weapon by flooding it with so much information and so much hate that at some point people no longer know what is true,” she explains. Despite legal and physical attacks against critical journalists, it is still possible to talk of media diversity in the Philippines, whereas in Egypt, extensive criminal prosecutions and censorship have had a seriously diluting effect on the media. “The only media that escape censorship are those that are either state-owned or have sworn allegiance to the state in one way or another,” says Attalah, describing the situation in the North
African country. Independent media organizations, on the other hand, are barely able to do their job anymore; Mada Masr has had to adopt “alternative publication methods” because their website has been blocked. For Beeko, what is happening in Egypt and the Philippines and other countries like China or Russia, in terms of state influence online reflects what is happening in the analogue world: “Repression is increasing. Human rights are under attack, press freedom is under attack, activists and lawyers are under attack.”
Social media as an alternative meeting place At the same time, however, the Internet remains an important platform for many people to become informed, to exchange and to engage with each other — especially where real spaces for exchange no longer exist,
