The world is getting smaller and increasingly interconnected on account of technology. Profound changes are taking place on how people and even states relate with each other. Two vital areas of change are privacy (related to how individuals interact) and sovereignty (related to how states interact).
First, privacy. In 2010 Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg remarked at a Silicon Valley awards night that, with online social networking, people lose the protection of privacy. For him, “public” instead of “private” will become the prevailing social norm.
He said: “Blogging has taken off in a huge way, and all these different services that have people sharing all this information. People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time.”
Zuckerberg’s words were prophetic. According to a recent report by Hootsuite and We Are Social, more than 3 billion people log on to social-media platforms like Facebook or Twitter every day. That means up to 40 percent of the global population today broadcast their lives and share personal information online.
Information sharing at such magnitude has led to many changes, including the journalism world. In a 2010 Reuters Institute and Oxford University paper, nearly all of the news editors surveyed said that, while social media has helped newsrooms receive breaking news faster, doubts over accuracy, the need for verification and the loss of control over information have become the main risks facing their profession.
Such information sharing has also blurred the public and private spheres, enabling the rise of bloggers who aren’t part of the institutional press but, nevertheless, cover national or political issues. Their emergence has resulted in a more dynamic and lively media. But it has also raised several concerns, such as misinformation and accountability tackled during a recent Senate hearing on fake news.
The hearing was prompted by a blog post, claiming that seven senators refused to sign a proposed resolution decrying the prevalence of extrajudicial killings in the country, involving teenagers in particular.
The senators alluded to cried foul, asserting that the blog post amounts to cyber libel as defined in the Cybercrime Prevention Act (Republic Act 10157). They also point to Article 154 of the Revised Penal Code, criminalizing the publication of “any false news that may endanger the public order, or cause damage to the interest or credit of the State.” In 2014 the Supreme Court ruled that the Revised Penal Code applied to the digital world, when it upheld the constitutionality of the Cybercrime Prevention Act.
The bloggers assert that, as private citizens, they have no obligation to uphold fairness in their posts nor are they bound by journalistic ethics. Such preposterous claims have truly disturbing implications. Anyone with an Internet connection can post or share anything they think of, including content considered libelous, defamatory, sacrilegious or seditious with impunity.
Such stance makes for inhumanity and lawlessness, a gross abuse of the new medium of the Internet. The simple truth is that the Internet does not, and should not, change humanity’s rules of civility and decency.
Let’s take a look at sovereignty, a more familiar and older theme.
After the Cold War ended, an intensified movement for global trading ensued. Globalization benefited many as the trade and technology flows between countries increased the prosperity levels for a third of humanity never before seen in history. A 2014 McKinsey Global Institute report estimated that one in three goods traded crossed national borders, and more than one-third of financial investments were international transactions. In 2012 such flows of goods, services and funds amounted to roughly $26 trillion. Countries that were more connected to these global flows increased their GDP growth by up to 40 percent.
Globalization was easily facilitated by the so-called Bretton Woods institutions like the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and the United Nations, the dominant supranational organizations.
Globalization, however, did not lift the welfare, much less wealth of the bottom third of humanity.
Through the years, disenfranchisement of vulnerable sectors by the globalized system intensified. According to a 2016 Foreign Policy, the disenchantment against globalization gave rise to nationalism and isolationism, growing hostility against immigrants (or foreigners in general) and loss of faith in international institutions.
These fissures climaxed with Brexit and the victory of Donald J. Trump’s “America First” platform. They also explain, I believe, why a number of our high officials readily invoke Philippines’s sovereignty against inquisitive states or international organizations’ human-rights monitors.
The plain fact, however, is the Philippines already surrendered part of its sovereign rights when it subscribed to the UN and the Asean Charters. Or when it ratified the World Trade Organization, the Paris Accord, the Treaty establishing the International Court of Justice and many other international covenants.
Such self-imposed constraint is necessary for peace and stability, and a clear demonstration of our abiding dedication to a rules-based world order.
Globalization has it pitfalls—the biggest of all, I believe, is the enabling of the 1 percent of the society’s elite in accumulating wealth and power, while disenfranchising the masses.
That’s a grave cause for dismay. But it should not make us lose hope. Reform movements in history regularly occur and triumph. And, in this age of rapid communication and transportation, such changes will come sooner than later. We just have to remain patient and stay focused.
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