What it’s like to go up against a dictator

Jun 30, 2023

Welcome back to Global Insider’s Friday feature: The Conversation. Each week a POLITICO journalist shares an interview with a global thinker, politician, power player or personality. This week, D.C.-based China Correspondent Phelim Kine talks to a Philippine media freedom icon and Nobel Peace Prize winner.

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The Conversation

Filipino journalist Maria Ressa arrives at the Court of Tax Appeals in Quezon City, Philippines.

Filipino journalist Maria Ressa, one of the winners of the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize and Rappler CEO, arrives at the Court of Tax Appeals in Quezon City, Philippines, Jan. 18, 2023. | Basilio Sepe/AP Photo

Maria Ressa has devoted her four-decade journalism career to some of Southeast Asia’s most dangerous issues. Ressa began her career at the Philippine state PTV 4 and by the mid-nineties was based in Jakarta, Indonesia for CNN where she did groundbreaking coverage of the regional tentacles of the al-Qaeda terrorist network. Ressa co-founded the online media platform Rappler in 2012, which quickly became one of the country’s leading news sources.

Under Ressa’s helm Rappler documented how former President Rodrigo Duterte and Facebook promoted false and hateful messaging during the 2016 election campaign that helped sweep him into office. Ressa oversaw Rappler’s award winning coverage of Duterte’s so-called “war on drugs” — a campaign that resulted in unlawful police killings of thousands of Filipinos — that made her the target of a series of politically motivated lawsuits and prosecutions and a years-long cascade of rape and death threats.

Ressa fought back with her “Hold the Line” campaign that positioned Rappler’s woes as a key front in a global battle to defend media freedom. Time magazine named her a “Person of the Year” in 2019 and she won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021 for her efforts “to safeguard freedom of expression, which is a precondition for democracy and lasting peace.” Ressa distilled her experience of combating the Duterte government’s intimidation campaign into a book titled “How to stand up to a dictator: The fight for our future” published last year.

I spoke with Ressa about the dangers of AI, Duterte’s legacy and the redemptive power of becoming a Nobel laureate. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Duterte’s government targeted you and Rappler with a blizzard of lawsuits and criminal prosecutions including a Securities and Exchange Commission allegation that Rappler was foreign-owned to accusations of cyber libel and tax evasion with potential multi-decade prison sentences. Do you and Rappler remain in legal danger?

There were 10 arrest warrants. And they came one after each other in relatively quick succession starting Valentine's Day of 2019. Of the 10, seven have been dismissed. The most recent dismissal was of four criminal tax evasion charges in January where Rappler and I were acquitted of these really ridiculous charges. But it took four years.

What's left are three charges. One is cyber libel and it's now in the Supreme Court. And they’re still hanging a Damocles Sword over us with the SEC case, which can mean that they could shut us down any day. And then the criminal charge is called a violation of the Anti-Dummy Law [which bars transactions that mask alleged foreign ownership of Philippine assets]. I still can't travel without getting court approval. And every now and then they don’t give approval. You become stoic, you bust through it and you keep going.

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You started ringing the alarm on Facebook’s role in weaponizing hate speech for political purposes back in 2016 and have compared Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to a “dictator” for his control over the platform’s messaging power. Has the situation gotten better or worse seven years later?

It's far worse because of generative AI. Look at the damage that the first-generation AI used by social media companies has already done. It has created a behavior modification system that has allowed geopolitical powers — Russia, China — to come in and do information warfare on citizens of a democracy. When you look at the design of these social algorithms — because the only thing that they care about is profit — showed that lies spread six times faster than truth. And if you lace it with anger, with fear, then it spreads even more. We are, with the help of social media, electing illiberal leaders democratically. And like Duterte they are crushing democratic institutions from within.

I'm only talking the first generation of AI right now, but now we have generative AI, like ChatGPT released in December last year. If the old AI allowed exponential spread of the lies, generative AI allows for exponential-exponential spread.

We didn't learn our lesson and neither did the U.S. government, because they're not protecting us. And it's now not just American tech companies. It’s now [Chinese-owned] TikTok. We should be protected against this type of insidious manipulation for profit.

President Duterte left office a year ago, replaced by his successor, Ferdinand “Bongbong” Romualdez Marcos. His vice president is Duterte’s daughter, Sara Duterte. Is the Duterte era really over?

Duterte isn’t gone — there’s still a power struggle between Sara and Bong Bong. Rodrigo Duterte is not completely out of this. He has appointed the majority of the justices to the Supreme Court and he got former Chief Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno kicked out, as if she didn’t exist. But the environment of fear that Duterte created has largely lifted. There’s still a chilling effect, but it’s not Siberia anymore.

The judiciary is starting to be independent and I want to fan the flames of that because the first way that we can reclaim our democracy is to have an independent judiciary. Another cause of optimism is that Rappler is now allowed in the Presidential Palace after getting banned from the palace and anywhere Duterte was. We now can cover the palace and we can be the pool reporter inside Marcos’s plane. Does that mean everything is great? No. Look at Senator Leila de Lima [a Duterte critic jailed on politically motivated drug charges in 2017]. She’s still in prison after six years and of the people who helped put her there many have died or rescinded their accusations. So it’s still an upside-down world but things are getting better.

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How did winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021 help you in your fight to protect media freedom in the Philippines?

Journalists are handcuffed because we don't like writing about ourselves, but we were having to sacrifice in ways that we've never been asked to do before. So that Nobel Prize was a recognition of how much journalists have had to suffer to do our jobs. I don't think the Philippine government knew what to do after I won. I didn’t know what to do. I was like, “Oh my god, we're not alone!” It was like a recognition that doing the right thing is the right thing.

And it isn't over. We can see this in all parts of the world, including in America. It is much harder to do our jobs. We are personally attacked in ways that didn’t happen when I was a journalist with CNN, they weren't personal attacks. The lines were so clear but now the lines are blurred. The people who we serve are manipulated and often turned against the journalist. It’s a new world and it will become even easier with artificial intelligence.

Thanks to editor Heidi Vogt and producer Andrew Howard.