Previously Ressa had been living with her paternal grandmother, after her father’s death and mother’s emigration. It was a homecoming in a sense – she had been born and raised there until she was 10 – but she’d been educated mainly in the US, after her mother, who had moved to America and married for a second time, “kidnapped” her, as she puts it. Maria Ressa has been a force in journalism since long before Facebook and somewhat before even the internet existed, arriving in Manila on a Fulbright scholarship from Princeton in 1986 and quickly joining the government TV station PTV 4. When we see election results that don’t make sense, voters lurching towards manifestly unhinged candidates, and those results echoing into the future – Trump’s victory turning into the overturning of Roe v Wade, Brexit leading to Liz Truss, previously sane nations becoming basket cases before our eyes – it is because “what happens online is what happens in the real world. The incentive structure of our information ecosystem actually rewards lying At the root of it all, she argues, is the elemental truth that lies are simply more interesting than facts. “The incentive structure of our information ecosystem rewards lying.” The entire business model of social media platforms is to grab the attention in ever more inventive ways: collect more data on users, target content more accurately, until we all have a 360-degree news vista comprising only the stories we want to read. ![]() It’s about Facebook – and she forensically critiques how little the company has done to protect civil society – but it’s about all of social media. In her forthcoming book How to Stand Up to a Dictator, she describes those events and the career leading up to them, and absolutely hammers home the point that “our information ecosystem is corrupted”. Rappler published a three-part analysis of this process, and Maria Ressa has been living on this knife-edge – between international acclaim and threats to her life and liberty – ever since. This included fake news and misinformation, amplified by “patriotic troll armies”, flooding the discourse so that facts were contested, honest brokers bullied into silence, and regular, disinterested citizens could no longer tell what was going on. But after the election of President Duterte in 2016 and his violent “war on drugs”, which was, in fact, a war against his own most deprived citizens, she started to piece together the dark side of this new media. Back then she was an enthusiastic early adopter of social media and its news potential, especially for citizen journalism, or what she calls “participatory” reporting. Four years before she had co-founded Rappler, an online-only news site. The particular element of Ressa’s work that was celebrated in Oslo began in 2016 with the publication of a series on the weaponisation of the internet. She had an appeal denied last week and is in the final stages of this “upside-down” process. The government has lodged multiple specious charges against her, from cyber libel to tax evasion, which cumulatively carry a maximum sentence of more than 100 years. Slight, effervescent and with a garish tangerine lipstick that turns out to be a filter – Ressa is both puckish and techy – the 59-year-old apologises: she’s four minutes late because she has come straight from the supreme court of the Philippines. In the Philippines, as a joke, we’ve been saying since 2017: ‘First, they came for the journalists. Her point is that, along with journalists, these are the last ramparts against authoritarianism that’s creeping, not at all slowly, across the globe. ![]() “They gave the awards to journalists last year and this year to civil society.” The 2022 prize went to human rights advocates from Ukraine, Russia and Belarus. “The Norwegian Nobel committee got the right sense,” Ressa tells me, over Zoom from her office in Manila. ![]() Back then, the German reporter Carl von Ossietzky couldn’t accept because he was in a Nazi concentration camp. W hen Maria Ressa jointly won the Nobel peace prize in 2021 with Russian editor Dmitry Muratov, they were the first journalists to be recognised in this way since 1936.
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