Maria Ressa on how to save democracy from Big Tech

The conversation opens with Reid Hoffman and Aria Finger congratulating Maria Ressa on victories in the Philippine Supreme Court. Ressa says that ten cases were filed against Rappler, the news organization she leads, and eleven against her personally. Although most have now been resolved, one case remains before the Supreme Court. For nearly a decade she lost her right to travel; even attending this event required writing to the Supreme Court for permission. Her warning is that once rights are taken away, recovering them is slow, so they must be defended before they are lost. Asked about the leader who tried to silence her, Ressa says the struggle involved “two dictators.” Rodrigo Duterte, who attempted to put her in prison for life and shut Rappler down, was arrested in March 2025 on charges of crimes against humanity; his trial at the International Criminal Court was scheduled to begin November 30. Ressa then names her second, more powerful dictator: Mark Zuckerberg and the wider technology industry. In 2017, when 97% of Filipino internet users were on Facebook, she told Zuckerberg to visit the Philippines because the platform’s ability to do good was enormous. He responded by asking where the other 3% were. Ressa says Facebook was effectively the Philippine internet then, and its unchecked power has only grown.

Ressa argues that information integrity is the gateway issue. Speaking about the 80th anniversary of the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, she says that if people can distinguish fact from fiction, they can begin addressing climate change, gender inequality, and the rule of law. If information warfare and “cognitive surrender” make citizens unable to tell fact from delusion, she says, society loses the ability to solve everything else. She describes three intertwined crises. First is a crisis of truth: social-media systems are designed so that lies spread rapidly, especially when they exploit fear, anger, and hate. In the Philippines in 2017, women journalists were attacked online at least ten times more often than men, making gendered disinformation part of the problem. Second is a crisis of order: when citizens cannot agree on reality, institutions are hollowed out and the rule of law breaks down, producing the impunity illustrated by the two dictators. Third is a crisis of accountability, because the international legal system is fraying even as Duterte faces crimes-against-humanity charges. Ressa extends the argument to AI. She describes social media as having “hacked our biology” through the attention economy, chatbots and large language models as having “hacked intimacy,” and agentic AI as threatening human agency itself. As co-chair of the UN’s Independent International Scientific Panel on AI, she points to the concentration of compute: about 75% is in the United States, about 15% in China, while the European Union makes many of the world’s laws with roughly 5% of the compute. She also says that, as early as July, people who built frontier models were acknowledging that they could not fully control them.

When asked how people can defend information integrity, Ressa rejects passive resignation: “Get off your seats and stop with learned helplessness.” She says agency is the “cellular level” of democracy and is precisely what technology targets. Her book, The Fight Back: A Citizen’s Guide to Standing Up to Dictators, contains ten steps in every chapter and ends with ten strategic goals. She resisted her publisher’s request to put the goals first because a long list of goals can feel like climbing Mount Everest; taking one step at a time makes action possible. Her first practical suggestions are deliberately immediate. People should check how much time they spend on screens and identify which app makes them angriest, then consider deleting it. The book’s structure moves from understanding to defense and then to building. The opening chapters explain the “two dictators.” Four chapters focus on defending oneself through a 15-minute security audit, defending one’s community, defending journalists before it is too late, and defending institutions. The final chapters ask readers to move from defense to offense. Ressa says people should build their own technology, develop public-interest technology, govern collectively, and articulate “the world we want.” She argues that no nation can handle the problem alone, while also challenging Silicon Valley to recognize its responsibility: this small region has transformed the global south, and its technology companies must now help repair the damage rather than assume values statements are enough.

Ressa explains that Rappler is a roughly 120-person news organization generating about $5 million annually. She has been a journalist for 40 years, opened CNN bureaus in Manila in 1987 and Jakarta in 1995, and previously ran the Philippines’ largest news group. In 2011, she embraced social media because she believed Facebook could enable bottom-up accountability. For a while it did, she says, until the platform was “tweaked” in ways that made it useful for manipulation. When the Philippine government first tried to shut Rappler down on January 15, 2018, Ressa gathered all roughly 100 employees and told them she would help anyone who wanted to leave find another job. No journalist left. She says the organization became intensely mission-driven. The pressure had immediate financial consequences: within four months, Rappler lost 49% of its advertising revenue, a blow that should have killed the company. Instead, the organization created a sister company called Nerve to provide technology and data services. Nerve could identify clusters of messages attacking Rappler and map the networks spreading them. That work now contributes approximately 40% of Rappler’s revenue, because Ressa considers the traditional advertising model effectively dead. She says the current crisis is also driven by distribution changes: zero-click search reduced referral traffic to news sites in the Philippines by 85%, while Facebook’s role as a news distributor fell by at least 60–70% by 2024. She adds that 53% of internet traffic is now non-human, and AI companies’ scraping raises publishers’ server costs while they pay nothing for the content.

Asked about her work on AI safety at the United Nations, Ressa says no country can solve the problem alone. She argues that the Security Council is compromised and has failed to move, but that the General Assembly has begun creating new mechanisms. The UN established the Independent International Scientific Panel on AI, which the United States voted against, and also created a global dialogue. Ressa says the panel’s role is to establish facts about rapidly changing technology, because effective action depends on a shared factual foundation. She sees particular opportunity in the global south, where governments want to understand how AI can be used for public benefit. But she warns them about a “Faustian bargain”: technology can offer valuable capabilities while embedding extractive or predatory terms. Ressa describes the emerging international order as a spider web. Individual strands look weak and can be torn, but the web can hold if countries maintain their connections. Her proposed coalition includes middle powers and countries across Asia and the global south. China has about 15% of global compute, while the United States retains enormous power; if the US cannot be nudged toward responsible action, Ressa says the remaining 193 UN member states are still the global majority and can work together. She says she has not given up because giving up is not an option, but she needs people with influence in Silicon Valley to help make the international system more representative.

With US midterm elections less than two weeks away, the hosts ask what people should watch and do. Ressa again rejects resignation: “Hope comes from action.” She recommends practical participation such as becoming a poll watcher, running for office, and building communities of action. She describes a civic circle as a group of eight to fifteen people who coordinate for difficult scenarios, asking listeners to identify their own circle and decide how they would work together to protect electoral integrity. For Silicon Valley specifically, she urges people to build public-interest technology. Ressa says Rappler spent a decade playing “whack-a-mole” against attacks and asking major technology companies for help, only to hear that the work would not make money. The organization therefore adopted the Matrix protocol, which has 150 million addressable users and supports Germany’s entire health system. Rappler launched its own chat app in 2023; 65 Filipino news organizations are using it, and the project is expanding into Southeast Asia. Because it is federated and does not manipulate users, Ressa jokes that it will be boring—but says it can preserve information integrity. She also describes Roost, an open online-safety effort incubated at Columbia University’s Center for Public Affairs. Companies including OpenAI and Discord contributed trust-and-safety tools, which were combined and made available free to others. Ressa calls this a possible “floor for safety.” Her closing appeal is that Silicon Valley should use its privileged seat at the table while the window for action remains open, because it is closing fast.