In this episode of *Democracy in Question*, Nobel Peace Prize-winning journalist Maria Ressa joins Shalini Randeria to examine how digital platforms have transformed journalism and accelerated democratic decline. Drawing on her experience confronting Rodrigo Duterte’s government in the Philippines, Ressa explains how disinformation erodes facts, trust and shared reality, allowing online attacks to become real-world repression. She discusses the dangers posed by profit-driven algorithms and rapidly expanding AI systems, as well as the concentration of technological power in a handful of companies and countries. Ressa concludes with a call for regulation, collective action and public-interest technology that supports democratic communities without manipulating them.
Democracy in Question? is brought to you by:
• University of Bremen research group on soft authoritarianism and on pro-democracy youth activism: www.woc.uni-bremen.de/research-centers/
• The Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy in Geneva: AHCD
• Nobel Peace Conference: Democracy on the Brink
• The Podcast Company: scopeaudio
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Shalini: [00:00:00] Welcome to Democracy in Question, the podcast series that explores the challenges democracies are facing around the world. I'm Shalini Randeria, holder of an Excellence Chair at Bremen University, Germany, and a Senior Fellow of the Albert Hirschman Center on Democracy Graduate Institute, Geneva. This is the second episode of Season 12, which continues with a new episode every month.
I'm pleased to welcome as my guest Maria Ressa, the Filipino-American journalist who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021. She shared it with the Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov for their efforts to safeguard freedom of expression. I'm continuing today the conversation that Maria and I began at the Nobel Peace Center in Oslo in September at a meeting convened to discuss democracy on the brink with 14 young [00:01:00] Generation Z activists from across the world.
Maria Ressa is an indomitable rights activist and a fearless defender of freedom of expression who exposed the abuse of power and the use of violence by the authoritarian regime of the Filipino president, Duterte, especially[1] his murderous anti-drug campaign. For that, she has had to face decades of legal harassment by the government.
The Filipino ex-president will soon face charges of crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Quite unusually for a Nobel laureate, Maria is also a successful entrepreneur. She's co-founder, CEO, and executive editor of Rappler[2], a Manila-based digital news organization. She and Rappler have also documented how social media are being used to spread fake [00:02:00] news, harass opponents, and manipulate public discourse.
Maria is co-chair of the United Nations Independent International Scientific Panel on Artificial Intelligence[3]. She also teaches at Columbia University, where she is professor of professional practice. Her book, How to Stand Up to a Dictator: The Fight for Our Future, published in 2022[4], is both a memoir and a manifesto on disinformation and the dismantling of democracy.
It's a fascinating, if depressing, account of the links between authoritarianism and social media. It details the intimidation and legal harassment by the state to silence independent journalism, and it cautions us against the digital spread of disinformation and state repression that together are silencing dissent and undermining media independence.
I'll ask Maria to share her [00:03:00] experience of the transformation of journalism over her long career due to digital technologies and due to social media proliferation. She will then discuss her attempts to counter state-linked networks of online disinformation by setting up her own digital news organization.
She'll explain why she considers independent, fact-based journalism as precondition for functioning democracy, not merely a check on government. This is a lesson as important in Philippines as in the USA and in other liberal democracies today. We also talk about her new book, titled The Fight Back[5], with its subtitle, A Citizen's Guide to Standing Up to Dictators, which will be published this month.
I ask her to discuss what we as citizens can do to demand accountability from social media and tech platforms and corporations [00:04:00] whose profit-driven algorithms and extractive business models enable authoritarian actors. To those of you who would like to follow Maria Ressa's amazing personal and professional journey, I can only strongly recommend the documentary, A Thousand Cuts[6], which was shown at the Sundance Film Festival in 2020.
It records her and her organization Rappler's fight for media freedom. Maria, thank you so much for being with me today. It's a great pleasure and a privilege to have you join the podcast.
Maria: No, thanks for having me.
Shalini: Maria, I'd like to start with a personal question, if I may. You hold dual Filipino and American citizenship.
You were raised partly in the US after your family fled the Philippines after the declaration of martial law. But returned to the Philippines to work as a journalist. You were the bureau chief of CNN in Manila and Jakarta from 1995 to 2005, and then headed the [00:05:00] newsroom of Philippines' largest broadcaster before you co-founded your own organization, Rappler, in 2011.
These were very early days of digital activism. It was one of the first digital activist and investigative news sites, and we'll talk about it in detail later. But let me begin by asking you how this dual perspective has shaped your understanding of the dismantling of democracy in the Philippines and now in the US, where it's being destroyed by a thousand small cuts, as you have rightly pointed out.
Maria: Oh my gosh, a very multi-layered question. Let me start with the first. I'm a journalist. This is my 40th year as a journalist. I was trained not to be an activist, but to be a broadcast journalist, right? An old-style broadcast journalist. In 1987, we opened the Manila bureau. In 1995, I opened the Jakarta bureau, [00:06:00] and these were incredible times 'cause I was watching the meltdown of authoritarian one-man rule in Southeast Asia from 1986 People Power Revolt in the Philippines[7].
By 1998, it was the end of almost 32 years of Suharto[8]. So I covered this transition of these one-man authoritarian rules to democracy, but at the tail end of my career I began seeing, oh my gosh, we're going backwards. The pendulum is swinging back. So the first is I didn't consider myself an activist until it became clear that- It was a battle for facts, and when it became a battle for facts, then journalism is activism, 'cause we fight for the facts, right?
You mentioned death by a thousand cuts.[9] I meant that in two ways. What I kept saying is that we hold the line. These are the lines guaranteed by our Constitution. The Philippines has a constitution patterned after the United States, and we hold the line, right? We tell [00:07:00] you the story, and it was before the time when the public information ecosystem was corrupted.
So death by a thousand cuts then referred to both the erosion of facts, truth, and trust in the digital sphere, but hand-in-hand with that was the death by a thousand cuts of government. The Duterte administration in 2016, it's almost like what you're seeing play out in America, right? Are you gonna fight for Gulf of America?
Are you gonna fight for Lake America?[10] Or, and if you give up and you don't fight that, did you just lose? What we saw in the Philippines was that when an autocrat takes over, he was working hand-in-hand with tech. It's information operations, narrative warfare at the top of the funnel, which then makes the facts debatable, which means people don't know how to act.[00:08:00]
If you can make people believe that lies are facts, that's the beginning of the erosion of democracy, 'cause the next phase is the breakdown of institutions. How are you gonna have checks and balances? How can institutions operate if you disagree on the facts? And why would you want to break down these institutions?
It's strategic corruption and kleptocracy. We lived through this in the Philippines. We've watched it happen in different parts of the world. And I first talked about it at a very emotional time, because I was getting an average of 90, nine-zero, hate messages per hour on social media, largely Facebook.
These bottom-up attacks, they make real a lie. In 2017, these information operations, the Duterte machinery, began trending #JournalistEqualsCriminal, [00:09:00] #ArrestMariaRessa. And in 2017, it was almost laughable, but by 2019 when I was actually arrested- It was like fertilizer paving the way for that to happen. The bottom-up social media attacks were followed by, within 14 months, 11 arrest warrants, 11 criminal cases that made the information operations narrative warfare real in the physical world.
And you don't see it. It sneaks up on you. The body politic weathers all these cuts, and you're bleeding out from every cut to a point where the body politic is so weak that it dies Thankfully, in the Philippines, what we learned to do was to harness a whole of society approach, right? The activists, the families of the drug war victims clamored for [00:10:00] justice.
The journalists, we kept doing our jobs despite the fact that we were under attack. And in 2025, on March 11th, Rodrigo Duterte, the man who tried to jail me, was himself arrested and brought to The Hague to face charges of crimes against humanity[11]. His trial begins at the end of November this year.
Shalini: So the US for you is a sense of deja vu.
You've been through this before, but could you have anticipated that the same pattern and playbook would be something you'd be witnessing in the US just a few years later? The reason I'm asking this, Maria, is, are there early warning signs which we failed to take seriously enough?
Maria: I feel like Cassandra and Sisyphus combined.
In 2016, I was telling news heads and Google and the people running the tech that what was [00:11:00]happening for us was coming for you, for America, and I thought January 6th[12] was Silicon Valley's sins coming home to roost, but it wasn't enough. So yes, look, I am both Filipino and I'm American, and it's horrific to go through this.
Actually, if you think about it, I've gone through this several times from Marcos, the first Marcos in 1972 when martial law was declared[13], Duterte, and now the Trump administration in America. I have deja vu and PTSD, and yes, Americans should have known because the Cambridge Analytica scandal[14], the country with the most number of compromised accounts was America.
But the country with the second most number of compromised accounts during that was the Philippines. This is something the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower, Christopher Wylie, told me. He said that they tested these tactics of mass [00:12:00] manipulation in our country, and if they worked, they ported it over to the West, and the target was America, right?
Part of the problem, I think, was that in some ways, journalists, we were fangirling and fanboying over the technology, but the technology that rules our lives today is predatory and extractive. It is not safe, and that's part of the reason, as we walk into the end of 2026, both journalism, the business model is dead.
It's being choked by big tech now. Journalism, if it dies- Can democracy survive without it? We're hitting an existential moment globally, and this is really triggered by the technology that rules our lives.
Shalini: Interestingly, if I look at your personal trajectory, in your early years, you were a true believer, as you call it, in social media's power [00:13:00] to do good before you turned into one of its most prominent critics.
And we'll come to the critical part in a moment. But you began by using Facebook very early on to encourage citizen journalism in a bid to optimize its potential to democratize and to allow participation. Then you realized that these algorithms are systematically amplifying negative emotions, outrage.
I found a very powerful quote from you when you say, "Those were the same developments that I welcomed in twenty eleven would soon be fine-tuned by the platform's business models, co-opted by state power, and turned against the people, fueling the rise of digital authoritarians, the death of facts, and the insidious mass manipulation we live with today."[15]
Do you think some of your early enthusiasm and optimism could still be relevant for the younger generation, which is using digital [00:14:00] media and mobilizing on these new platforms when they are protesting, say, Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka? And could you also talk about your highly negative experiences, especially when you warned Facebook and they failed to heed your warnings?
Maria: I think first that this is not the same technology That we were working with in 2016, which is the presidential elections that elected Duterte. That was the first time that I saw information operations, the repetition of a lie online. You say a lie a million times, it becomes a fact, and when people cannot tell the difference between the lie and a fact, that disintegrates our societies, right?
The three sentences I've said over and over since 2016, and this is based on data, without facts, you can't have truth. Without truth, you can't have [00:15:00] trust. Without these three, we can't have a shared reality. You can't have journalism, and you can't have democracy. That's the trajectory we've been on for over a decade now, right?
And this trajectory began as early as 2014 when, again, there are two ways that information operations become narrative warfare. You seed the meta narrative that's a lie, and then you opportunistically amplify it, and over time, that lie, through time and frequency, becomes the fact. You change reality. So in Ukraine, for example, that meta narrative was seeded in 2014 to annex Crimea, and then repeatedly amplified, and this is now a fact, and used by Putin in 2022 to actually invade Ukraine itself.
So you can see how the destruction of reality happens, right? It was Imelda Marcos who said perception is reality[16], and social media took it all the way [00:16:00] to the Nth degree. At the beginning, when Facebook became our internet, I think when I talked to Mark about it, by 2017, 97% of Filipinos on the internet were on Facebook.
And I told Mark, "You gotta come visit because this is so incredibly powerful. It could be an incredible force for change in a positive way." And he was frowning when, after I said 97% of Filipinos are on Facebook, and he said, "Wait, Maria, where are the other 3%?" And I was like, "Wow." I guess it's a different mindset, and part of the harms that these tech companies, that big tech has enabled, without admitting to it, right?
There was just, uh, class action cases filed by attorneys general in the United States that were settled by Facebook for about $17 billion[17]. Anyway, so what I saw was the shift- When it was a force for good, [00:17:00] and it could have been a force for good, but then the greed that pushed once you had an infinite scroll, and then the design, and these are design choices.
The infinite scroll, for example, is one of the things that child safety advocates want out. They're addictive by design, right? So the goal was to keep people scrolling, not for our good, but for profit, right? Both Facebook and Twitter, they're networks that had never really worked together. But then the minute they did, authoritarians could see that you could do that, and when you have much more money and many more people you could pay, that then you can control it, which is exactly what wound up happening starting with 2016.
The political tipping point really happened in 2016, but we began to see the tip of the iceberg in 2014 in Ukraine. In 2014, I watched history begin [00:18:00] changing. The death by a thousand cuts of history[18] in the Philippines was when Ferdinand Marcos Jr., our president today, the only son and namesake of the dictator who was ousted in the People Power Revolt in 1986, he's on a video where he's a Jedi Knight holding a lightsaber, right?
And that began a shift away from the name Marcos and kleptocracy and corruption, $10 billion that were stolen in 1986[19], and Marcos became the greatest leader that the Philippines has ever known. People may not know, but in the '70s, Marcos ran under a tagline, "Make the Philippines great again." And here's the irony.
I've traced that through. Hungary used, "Make Hungary great again," right? What the tech enabled was the hacking of our biology. Thinking slow was pushed down, our [00:19:00] rational minds, our emotions were tapped, our biology was hacked. That's the attention economy, and again, that changed our world. Online, you can say something a million times, and people can believe it, and the minute they actually look for the facts, they'll wake up.
And depending on how important that fact is, like for example, if it's in the middle of a typhoon, that could mean a life-and-death situation. At the UN General Assembly, I was the last speaker to open the opening high-level panel at the UN General Assembly, and I said that this information integrity, knowing the difference between fact and fiction, is the mother of all battles.
Because without information integrity- We cannot have institutions that work. We cannot have trust. We're separated and isolated, and the technology [00:20:00] that rules our lives commodifies us. It is predatory and extractive. I'm using these words that I could never have fathomed when we started Rappler website in 2012.
Shalini: Maria, the question that arises in this context is, how do you think accountability could be demanded by lawmakers and the public from tech corporations, either through regulatory means or otherwise? Because the lawmakers are usually in bed with the tech companies, and the two of them together are using the tools and platforms for surveillance on the part of governments as well.
How could one come to a different design and a different governance of a system which, as you say, is predicated on the promotion of lies, of hatred, and is predatory and [00:21:00] extractive by its very design?
Maria: The internet doesn't have to be like this. In fact, these companies took over something that-- the vision of a far more egalitarian world.
But let me give you some stats that are correct today and then tell you how I think we get to where we need to be. As of July, and this is Cloudflare that came out with this, fifty-one percent of the traffic on the internet today is now non-human. Think about that, right? It's non-human, which means that for news websites like Rappler, we're literally paying scrapers, bots, to scrape our websites to steal our content.
The first is that the death of news websites are coming, the death of the internet as we know it. Only 25% of the internet today is open, meaning that the other [00:22:00] 75% are now closed, walled-in gardens. They're social media platforms, or they're AI companies, right? Which brings us to the expanded threat. AI has been around for 70 years, artificial intelligence, but it's neither artificial nor intelligent.
The three times that it's been rolled out on a mass space has been social media, which is hacked. Our biology was hacked through something people call the attention economy, right? The two next phases that are already out and yet have no guardrails, chatbots that are powered by large language models, take the data of the internet and use it as training data.
Like, what about copyright laws? These are all being contested now, and news organizations, we're being literally crawled by scrapers that are stealing our content, and yet we can't actually get paid for it, and they're using it to build businesses. Big tech rolls out code [00:23:00] every two weeks. The frontier models are moving forward at a pace that we couldn't have actually anticipated.
We need to put red lines in place. AI, artificial intelligence, should never replace humanity, right? Here's the hacking of our biology by, through chatbots. There are now cases that have shown that it literally takes the epidemic of loneliness from social media and pushes it into some place we cannot see.
Right? When you're talking to a chatbot, the chatbot is based on a fake relationship. I'm thinking of the case filed by Megan Garcia[20], the mother of a 14-year-old boy who committed suicide after he was using AI, a, a character he called Dany from the Game of Thrones, and this character AI was created by two former Google employees and had a deal with Google.
Megan Garcia, a lawyer from [00:24:00] Florida, filed a case against Google, the two founders, and character AI because her son died by suicide. Her son died by suicide after a few months, and these are the five things they pointed out. The first is the entire thing is based on a fake relationship. It's anthropomorphize this character AI, right?
But it's not real, right? The second is that that fake relationship that you have is predicated on data that is presented as memories, again, taking the lie even further, and that memory pretends to care about you in ways that your mother doesn't. That's actually what one of the founders said, right? "This chatbot will replace your mother."
The third is that for many people who are in an epidemic of loneliness coming out of social media, they're talking to the chatbots [00:25:00] like they're their confidants. So chatbots, which takes the lie even further, it moved from attention to intimacy. And then the last one are agents and multi-agentic AI.
Agents that you give access to act for you, but yet we know these agents do things you never authorize them to do. Some people have lost their data. Some people buy things they never actually did. But let me say this in a far more systemic manner. In July this year, OpenAI admitted that what it created hacked Hugging Face and actually created a chat group where they colluded together, like the worst of humanity, to get what they wanted done.
Shalini: Maria, you are co-chair of the United Nations Independent [00:26:00] International Scientific Panel on Artificial Intelligence. In that role, what are the recommendations that you and the commission have made to transform the internet and regulate, regulate tech corporations that are doing little to halt these alarming developments?
Maria: I co-chair with Yoshua Bengio, and I've said this in every instance that we've spoken with 193 member states, but also publicly. With the AI we live with today, there are three things: power, pace, and control. It's literally changing our world in terms of power geopolitically. It is changing the power structure of the world because a few countries and companies own it all.
The United States has 75% of the world's compute power. China only has 15% of the world's compute power, and the EU, which has done the most to [00:27:00] protect humanity, only has 5%. Power. Pace, it's accelerating, and even the people who are building it are admitting they cannot control it, right? So why is this being rolled out to the public?
Why are governments allowing its citizens to be treated like Pavlov's dogs? The 35-page preliminary report[21] that we released on July 1, and we handed it in Geneva to the member countries at the global dialogue. We looked for the positives that the tech can do, but the harms are so clear that if we cannot neutralize the harms, the world will tip, and it will not tip in a positive way.
That's why I guess I said in December 2021 at the Nobel Lecture that we are standing on the rubble of the world that was[22]. An atom bomb exploded in our public [00:28:00] information ecosystem. It was a quiet explosion. You didn't have the kind of alarms that went off when 140,000 people died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
You could see that, you could hear it, you could feel it, but you could also see the genocide in Myanmar. In the Philippines, right, you can see the destruction of democracy. As of March this year, V-Dem said 74% of the world is now under authoritarian rule. We are literally electing illiberal leaders democratically because of the information we get.
We're the targets, so stop being a target. Stop being passive and scrolling, and understand what's at risk right now: yourself, your agency, your children, your, our future. This is it. This is the moment.
Shalini: This is a really urgent and powerful appeal, Maria. [00:29:00] What can we as users, as consumers of this technology that is galloping out of control do to influence its future course?
What pressures can we bring to bear on governments to put guardrails in place? And are there other alternative courses of action that we have to democratize the technology and its governance? Your new book, The Fight Back, will be published this month. It's subtitled A Citizen's Guide to Standing Up to Dictators.
You outline in it very concrete steps that we can individually and collectively take to protect ourselves, our children, and our societies from the harmful effects of artificial intelligence. Could you discuss some of your recommendations?
Maria: I think people feel helpless. It's learned helplessness, and it's part of the reason I wrote The Fight Back, which is [00:30:00] 10 chapters.
At the end of every chapter are 10 steps citizens anywhere around the world can take, and those hundred tactical steps roll up into 10 strategic goals. I think that when information warfare, when the technology is targeting you, you listening, watching, are targeted by the technology you're using, right?
When you are the target, when your data is extracted, mined, when you're being strip mined, when you have been cloned by the social media platforms, you become very powerful. But this reminds us again of what democracy means, right? Stop feeling like you can't do a thing and begin to work to protect yourself and build your community together.
Ultimately, these problems of technology and climate, [00:31:00] of pandemics, are problems that not one nation can solve alone, and yet the leaders who fight big tech are targeted and are slowly being voted out, right? What can citizens do? We have to understand, defend, and build, and that means citizens have to help their leaders help themselves, right?
We need safety regulations. We need guardrails in place. Money should not be the driver. We have the new robber barons, but they will not be able to give back their money later on, as the robber barons did in the age of industrialization, because hand-in-hand with the destruction of our information ecosystem, with the corruption, is climate change.
We're at an existential moment globally. We will not have a do-over. So this is the time for people to realize the power they have to [00:32:00] protect and build, right? This is the moment. Come together. And actually demand better. Not only will our leaders need to understand the tech, and it is made opaque on purpose, and they shouldn't be talking only to the people who build the tech.
They should be looking at the impact and holding these companies responsible for the harms that have already been caused and that we can see will be caused.
Shalini: Your new book, The Fight Back, is in a way a sequel to your earlier book, How to Stand Up to a Dictator. The third pillar that you describe in your latest book is a call to build.
What is it that you would like us as citizens to build? Stronger alternative infrastructures or a different architecture of technologically governance, or rather build a new media system which [00:33:00] has more strength at the local level, so people get their news from different sources which are more immediate, more relevant, and thus less susceptible to disinformation?
And how much time do we really have left to build anything at all?
Maria: Time is running out really quickly, right? Look, the midterm elections in the United States, once that happens and we see what happens there, it's alarming to see where the world is. We just saw the elections in Germany, and you can see again the pattern and the trend continues.
But let me talk about what we need to build, and we need to stop Trying to find a solution based on the problems that have been created by the design of the platform. Polarization is a design choice. You cannot try to get people together in a room after they've been polarized. I think about this as a river that's been polluted.
It's a polluted river. You can't clean up the [00:34:00] river by taking a glass and then cleaning it up and then dumping it back in the river, which is what all of these kind of Whac-A-Mole goals do. What you need to do is to shut down the factory of lies, then you begin to actually clean up the river. Another analogy I use, and I used this before the pandemic hit, I used to say that the virus of lies infects us, and when you get infected, it changes the way you see the world, and there's a tipping point.
It's like in the world of epidemiology, at a certain point, the system tips, and we've hit some of those tipping points already. So how do we fix this? Public interest technology, right? Governments build parks, they build libraries, but they've not built public interest technology that replicates what we have in the physical world, in the virtual world, [00:35:00] without commodifying us, without manipulating us.
Shalini: Could you tell us a little more about how and why you built Rappler, your own news organization? How does it work, and how is it different from mainstream news organizations?
Maria: We created Rappler when we realized that traditional news organizations, what made them successful in the old days were exactly what was going to make them fail in the age of technology.
Rappler, we're roughly 100 people. We're roughly a $5 million a year company in terms of revenues, and we would, during election years, hit 90 million uniques per month. We've built our own chatbot. Because we own our data, and we built it in a particular way with a data lake and an ontology and a graph rack, our error rate is significantly less than commercial models.
It's [00:36:00] 1.63% a year ago. The best of the commercial models was about 12%. Large language models are probabilistic models. This is not accuracy. It should not have passed in running our public information ecosystem because you hold journalists to extremely high standards, i.e. accuracy, and this machine is not.
So this is a moment where we have to decide, are we going to be Alibaba and the 40 Thieves? Is that the way the world is going to go? Does might make right? That's what's at the table right now. A few countries and a few companies will decide our future, and they shouldn't be allowed to do that.
Shalini: Maria, earlier you mentioned briefly that we as citizens should pressurize our governments to build public interest technology instead of allowing it all to be in the hands of a tiny number of private corporations that are using it to make [00:37:00] exorbitant profits by extracting our data and manipulating our emotions, our desires, and also monopolizing our attention.
Could you say something about the kind of technology your own organization uses and has built as an alternative?
Maria: Some of these things do exist. The Matrix Protocol chat app that we built on top of Rappler, I was getting attacked in 2016 with 99 zero hate messages per hour. And so by 2023, we decided that we would let go of what social media offers and instead build a Matrix Protocol chat app[23].
Real people talking to real people without being manipulated, because that's what a democracy is. Democracy doesn't yell at each other. It actually tries to listen so that you can find the best way forward. It's enlightened self-interest. So what [00:38:00] we did in 2023 was we rolled out a Matrix Protocol chat app, which we built on top of Rappler.
It's where we began to build our communities. In 2011, when I was raising money for Rappler, the elevator pitch was we build communities of action and the food we feed our communities is journalism. You need facts to anchor your world. Go back. Trust is what cements our world. The systems of governance are on top of that.
So the first is public interest technology. So I joke all the time in our community, you know you're gonna be talking to real people with real problems and we'll listen to each other and we will moderate using these very simple tools. Three strikes, you're out. We will ban you because this is a public space where we want to have the process of democracy actually be able to happen.
The irony, of course, is that you're gonna get bored. We're not there to manipulate you and people [00:39:00] need information they can trust. So we have to build our own infrastructure. That's the first. The second is We have to go back to multilateral institutions. There's so many people who facilely say, "We don't need the United Nations."
For example, in states with impunity like Russia, right? Like, these are the states who are in the UN Security Council using their vetoes to turn the world upside down. Rodrigo Duterte is now detained at The Hague for crimes against humanity. I believe that the rule of law is important, so are multilateral institutions.
Chapter nine in the book is called Govern Collectively. It is a sovereignty issue. It is an agency issue from a personal level to groups to governments, right? And then the last one is the world we want. We need to build more equitably. It's strangely [00:40:00] exciting if we're to take it as a challenge, but if we wait too long, technology will move forward, and this will be taken out of our hands.
This is the moment. That's why it is time to fight back.
Shalini: Thank you ever so much, Maria, for this wide-ranging and fascinating conversation. It's provided so many insights into your own work as a journalist and how your work and the entire field has changed over the years. But thanks also for your warnings about the alarming turn that technological developments, including AI, have taken.
Your voice as a Cassandra is as important as your principled insistence on facts as the basis of building trust, trust that is essential for the functioning and flourishing of liberal democracies. Thanks so much for taking the time for the podcast today.
Maria: Thanks, Shalini. [00:41:00] Good to see you again.
Shalini: My guest began by tracing the wave of democratization across Southeast Asia, which she covered as a journalist in the late 1980s and 1990s, that has swung back to authoritarian rule across the region in the last several years.
She emphasized the parallel transformation of news media that furthered authoritarianism by using narrative warfare to spread fake news and incite hate. In order to protect independent journalism, whose principled adherence to facts and to truth Maria considers indispensable for democracy, she set up her own digital news site.
She and her organization were relentlessly attacked and harassed through false cases by the government, a playbook that is being repeated by President Trump in the USA today. Maria Ressa also explained why her early enthusiasm for [00:42:00] the democratizing potential of social media soon turned to disillusionment.
She expounded on her idea of how democracy is undermined daily and is destroyed not by a coup, but by a thousand small cuts that are often unnoticed. She cautioned about the risks due to the hacking of our biology through chatbots, but also the dangers of the enormous concentration of power in the hands of a few tech corporations whose support for authoritarian rule is endangering our democracies worldwide.
Seventy-four percent of the world's population lives today under authoritarian rule, as she reminded us. Finally, Maria Ressa made a powerful appeal to us as citizens to act before it's too late. The profit-oriented and extractive business model and addictive algorithms used by powerful tech corporations are inimical to informational [00:43:00] integrity as they blur the distinction between truth and lies.
Political and societal polarization is not an accident. It's a design choice that these companies have made. Her new book helps us to understand the challenges of big tech and artificial intelligence that we face today, and to demand accountability for the harms these technologies are causing. She urges us to urgently build pressure on our governments, not only to regulate these powerful private actors, but also to build public interest technology that would neither commodify nor manipulate us.
This was the second episode of Season 12 of Democracy in Question. Thank you very much for listening. Please join me in November when my guest will be Lauren Manus, a young American activist who was also a guest at the Democracy [00:44:00] on the Brink meeting at the Nobel Peace Center in Oslo. Lauren began her career as a climate justice activist in the Sunrise Movement, then was political director of If Not Now, a movement opposing Israeli occupation of Gaza and West Banks, and is currently working with the Democracy Revival Center in Washington, DC.
We'll of course discuss in November the results of the US midterm elections, which many of us around the world are watching with bated breath. But our conversation will focus largely on Lauren´s work of mobilization to bring about some fundamental changes in the American political and electoral system to make it truly democratic.
Please go back and listen to any episode you might have missed, and let your friends know about the podcast if you've enjoyed it. We'll continue to upload new episodes of Democracy in Question on the second Wednesday of [00:45:00] each month. You can stay in touch with the work of my research group on soft authoritarianism and on pro-democracy youth activism at the University of Bremen at the webpage of the Worlds in Contradiction, Bremen University at. https://www.woc.uni-bremen.de/ , and the work of the Albert Hirschman Center on Democracy at www.graduateinstitute.ch/democracy .
[1] Rodrigo Duterte, President of the Philippines 2016–2022. Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodrigo_Duterte; on his “war on drugs” cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippine_drug_war
[2] Rappler, Philippine online news organisation, founded 2011/2012. Cf. https://www.rappler.com and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rappler
[3] Ressa co-chairs the UN Independent International Scientific Panel on AI together with Yoshua Bengio. Cf. https://www.un.org/independent-international-scientific-panel-ai/ and https://www.rappler.com/world/global-affairs/maria-ressa-yoshua-bengio-un-independent-international-scientific-panel-ai/
[4] Maria Ressa: How to Stand Up to a Dictator. The Fight for Our Future. New York: Harper 2022. Cf. https://www.npr.org/2022/12/15/1142428212/maria-ressa-new-book-how-to-stand-up-to-a-dictator-a-memoir-and-manifesto
[5] Maria Ressa: The Fight Back. A Citizen’s Guide to Standing Up to Dictators. New York: Harper / London: WH Allen 2026. Cf. https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/485472/the-fight-back-by-ressa-maria/9780753562901; see also Ressa’s essay in Foreign Policy (25 Sept. 2026): https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/09/25/maria-ressa-big-tech-democracy-ai-autocracy/
[6] Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Thousand_Cuts_(2020_film)
[7] The People Power Revolution (EDSA Revolution) of February 1986, which ended the rule of Ferdinand Marcos. Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People_Power_Revolution
[8] Suharto, President of Indonesia 1967–1998. Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suharto
[9] “Death by a thousand cuts” is Ressa’s recurring metaphor for the gradual erosion of democracy; it also gave its title to the documentary film about her and Rappler, A Thousand Cuts (dir. Ramona S. Diaz, 2020). Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Thousand_Cuts_(2020_film)
[10] Allusion to Trump’s Executive Order 14172 of 20 January 2025 renaming the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America”, cf.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Mexico_naming_controversy, and to the executive order of August 2026 renaming Lake Ontario “Lake America”, cf. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/lake-ontario-to-lake-america-who-gets-to-decide-what-goes-on-maps
[11] On the proceedings against Duterte at the International Criminal Court (ICC), including the confirmation of charges of crimes against humanity in April 2026, cf. https://www.icc-cpi.int/philippines/duterte and https://www.icc-cpi.int/news/icc-pre-trial-chamber-i-confirms-all-charges-against-rodrigo-roa-duterte-and-commits-him-trial
[12] The attack on the United States Capitol on 6 January 2021. Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_6_United_States_Capitol_attack
[13] Ferdinand E. Marcos (President 1965–1986) declared martial law in September 1972 (Proclamation No. 1081). Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martial_law_under_Ferdinand_Marcos and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdinand_Marcos
[14] On the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal (2018) cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Analytica_data_scandal. According to Facebook, the Philippines had the second-highest number of affected accounts (approx. 1.2 million), cf. https://www.gmanetwork.com/news/scitech/technology/649053/phl-had-2nd-most-number-of-accounts-accessed-by-cambridge-analytica-facebook/story/; Christopher Wylie’s statement to Rappler: https://www.rappler.com/technology/social-media/239606-cambridge-analytica-philippines-online-propaganda-christopher-wylie/
[15] The quotation is from Ressa’s book How to Stand Up to a Dictator (2022), not from her Nobel Lecture; there it reads: “Those very same developments I welcomed in 2011 would soon be fine-tuned by the platforms’ business models …”. Cf. https://www.goodreads.com/notes/63062236-how-to-stand-up-to-a-dictator/130829786-karen-joppe/9dd70405-4c96-4754-94c3-03e1d64637c9(reader’s highlight, approx. 31 % into the e-book).
[16] Imelda Marcos, widow of the dictator Ferdinand Marcos. The quotation usually attributed to her is “Perception is real, truth is not”, popularised by Lauren Greenfield’s documentary The Kingmaker (2019). Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imelda_Marcos and https://www.spot.ph/entertainment/movies-music-tv/79705/imelda-documentary-kingmaker-trailer-a4362-20191105
[17] In October 2023, a coalition of U.S. state attorneys general sued Meta (Facebook, Instagram) for designing addictive features harmful to children and teenagers; on 26 August 2026 Meta agreed to a settlement of up to USD 17.1 billion. Cf. https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/2026/attorney-general-james-secures-171-billion-and-groundbreaking-reforms-meta and https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/26/meta-social-media-trial-settlement.html
[18] Cf. notes 6 and 9 above and the documentary A Thousand Cuts (2020): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Thousand_Cuts_(2020_film)
[19] On the wealth illegally acquired by the Marcos family (commonly estimated at USD 5–10 billion; Guinness World Records 1989: “largest-ever theft from a government”) cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ill-gotten_wealth_of_the_Marcos_family
[20] Garcia v. Character Technologies et al.: wrongful-death lawsuit filed in October 2024 in the U.S. District Court in Florida against Character.AI, its two founders and Google after the suicide of her 14-year-old son; in January 2026 the defendants agreed to settle. Cf. https://www.k12dive.com/news/characterai-google-agree-to-mediate-settlements-in-wrongful-teen-death-la/809411/ and https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/07/business/character-ai-google-settle-teen-suicide-lawsuit
[21] Preliminary report of the UN Independent International Scientific Panel on AI, published 1 July 2026 and presented at the Global Dialogue on AI Governance in Geneva. Cf. https://www.un.org/independent-international-scientific-panel-ai/sites/default/files/2026-07/Press%20Release%20-%20Independent%20International%20Scientific%20Panel%20on%20AI%20Launches%20Preliminary%20Report%20on%20AI%20Opportunities,%20Risks%20and%20Impacts.pdfand https://news.un.org/en/story/2026/07/1167862
[22] Maria Ressa, Nobel Lecture, Oslo, 10 December 2021: “We are standing on the rubble of the world that was …” and “An invisible atom bomb exploded in our information ecosystem …”. Cf. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/2021/ressa/lecture/
[23] Matrix is an open, decentralised standard for real-time communication, cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrix_(protocol). On Rappler’s community app built on it cf. https://www.rappler.com/about/things-to-know-communities-app/ and https://www.rappler.com/about/rappler-communities-tech-faqs/
[MD1]Es in 2021