How to Stand Up to a Dictator: The Fight for Our Future

by Maria Ressa

Impunity online naturally led to impunity offline, destroying existing checks and balances. What I have witnessed and documented over the past decade is technology’s godlike power to infect each of us with a virus of lies, pitting us against one another, igniting, even creating, our fears, anger, and hatred, and accelerating the rise of authoritarians and dictators around the world.

Without facts, you can’t have truth. Without truth, you can’t have trust. Without all three, we have no shared reality, and democracy as we know it—and all meaningful human endeavors—are dead.

invisible atom bomb exploded in our information ecosystem, that technology platforms have given geopolitical powers a way to manipulate each of us individually.

Meaning is not something you stumble across or what someone gives you; you build it through every choice you make, the commitments you choose, the people you love, and the values you hold dear.

The first was always to make the choice to learn. That meant embracing change and mustering the courage to fail; success and failure are two sides of the same coin. You cannot succeed if at some point you haven’t failed. Most people, I realized, chose comfort, remaining in what was familiar: old friends, routines, habits.

When you take a risk, you have to trust that someone will come to your aid; and when it’s your turn, you will help someone else. It’s better to face your fear than to run from it because running won’t make the problem go away. When you face it, you have the chance to conquer it. That was how I began to define courage.

All it takes is one person to stand up and fight because a bully doesn’t like to be challenged publicly.

an orchestra was a perfect metaphor for a working democracy: the music gave the people our notes, our systems, but how you play, feel, and follow—and how you lead—that’s all up to you.

I learned that drawing the line, calling out unfairness and being honest, though uncomfortable, often means moving life forward, bringing something new to fruition.

Staying silent or compliant changed nothing. Speaking up was an act of creation.

In my mind, that was the mindset of mediocrity, when you settle for what you can get instead of pushing for more.

Del and Cheche modeled those values in their purest forms: delicadeza that showed professionalism and pride and utang na loob that never degenerated into patronage and corruption.

So I know what scaling up quickly does to an organization; everyone has hit-and-miss calls. If you have a good team and a good process, you hit more than you miss. But a shared mission stated by a strong leader is paramount.

What I was learning in Indonesia was emergent behavior: that the way a system behaves can’t be predicted from what you know about the individual parts. In fact, the system as a whole exerts pressure on the individuals, a kind of peer pressure exerted by group dynamics, which often makes people do things they wouldn’t do if they were alone.

Education determines the quality of governance. An investment in education takes a generation to bear fruit. Likewise, countries feel the impact of this disregard for education a generation later. That determines their productivity, the quality of their workforce, their investments, and ultimately their gross domestic product (GDP). A nation’s budget line item for education is an investment in its people.

The ability to discern and question, which is crucial to both journalism and democracy, is also determined by education. Journalists and news organizations are a reflection of the people’s power to hold its leaders accountable. That means that ultimately the quality of a democracy can also be seen in the quality of its journalists.

Good journalists lean on the side of evidence, on incontrovertible facts.

“Be cruel to be kind.” Managers weren’t assessing the work of their subordinates honestly because they wanted to be nice, to avoid conflict. We needed to be cruel to be kind for three reasons: because we wanted to be the best; because we wanted to be world class; and because as a media organization responsible for reporting the truth about a country’s state of affairs, we had an outsized role to play in our society.

That process strengthened my conviction that the hardest decisions are the ones that you must communicate yourself. If you don’t have the courage to deliver the news to the people affected by your decision, think twice.

A question I asked every one of our people to ask themselves was: Why do I do what I do?

If you try to change a culture, it will fight back. You have to have the stomach for it.

There is a “golden hour” in every crisis during which you can proactively shape and tell a story before someone claims it for their own and it becomes a crisis. You need to know clearly what message you want to send over which distribution networks (phone calls, emails, and so on)—and all this was before the age of social media. The goal is to tell your story first, especially if it’s about you, not only to gain control of the narrative but to protect the people at risk. If you handle that well, almost everything else follows. This is how an organization survives threats to its integrity and its people.

We started with trust. When you don’t know what’s going to happen next, being vulnerable and open is the first step to bring everyone together.

The idea of the tipping point has its roots in epidemiology: when a virus multiplies below the radar screen and then hits the point when it changes the entire system. Crowdsourcing suggests that if a group’s members have diversity of ideas, independence of one another, a decentralized structure, and a mechanism for turning judgments into a collective decision, they can make smarter decisions than any lone genius can. Those four elements create the “wisdom of the crowds,” not mob rule.

We used a simple tagline or slogan: “Ako ang Simula,” which means “I am the beginning.”9 In spirit, it means “Change begins with me.” We drew from universal messages. This one was inspired by an idea often credited to Mahatma Gandhi—“Be the change you want to see”—but it went all the way back to the ancient Greeks: Plutarch’s “What we achieve inwardly will change outward reality.”10

Studies15 had shown that 80 to 95 percent of how we make decisions is based not on what we think but on how we feel.

It was my old mantra again: trust until they prove they can’t be trusted.

Tech sucked up our personal experiences and data, organized it with artificial intelligence, manipulated us with it, and created behavior at a scale that brought out the worst in humanity.

The dangers of “more” and “faster” have led us to dystopia: the suffocation of our minds by junk, a loss of clarity of thought and a lack of concentration, and the empowerment of individual over collective thinking.

Lies repeated over and over become facts in this online ecosystem.

what you choose to prioritize reflects your values and your goals.

Those technical decisions fed the surveillance capitalism model: increasing the companies’ growth with friends-of-friends recommendations and increasing the time you spend on a site by serving you ever more emotive, radical, and extremist content.

If you read something that makes you emotional and prone to share or act, slow down; think slow, not fast.

Our ability to slow down, though, is limited because over time, Facebook knowingly created a disastrous and extremely harmful feedback loop: the more time you spend on Facebook, the more data the company gets to trick you into spending more time on Facebook. Your emotions, triggered by hormones and neurotransmitters like dopamine, are elevated; you feel as though you’re doing something, but in the end, it becomes a time suck, siphoning your energy away from real-world action and accomplishments. Think the Matrix, powered by human batteries. And what were we doing? Performing in our own Truman Shows.

I followed the serenity prayer: to accept the things I could not change, find the courage to change the things I could, and have the wisdom to know the difference.

As I had learned throughout my career: don’t let anyone else tell your story in the golden hour.

Silence is complicity because silence is consent.

Over time, you get used to fear. It diminishes. You accept that bad things may happen, and if it does, what will you do? I can almost clinically take apart the worst-case scenario. I know I can survive it. There are always upsides to even the worst events. If I were to go to jail, I could sleep, for one.

You value life most intensely when you are living with the threat of its end, and you fight every step, moment by moment, to find meaning.

“How do you fight a disease that doesn’t play fair?” Twink asked her cancer support group after receiving the news. “Why do you fight when fighting is futile; when fighting won’t cure you: when losing is inevitable and the only reason to fight is just to ‘not go down without a fight’?” Whether we are cancer survivors, patients, or totally healthy individuals, we actually die a little every day, they told her. Each day lived is also another day never to be repeated. Now all we ask is to spend our remaining days with significance.

who exploit the platforms, I’ve tried many different ways to fight back: ignoring them (it doesn’t work—you lose without even knowing it); responding to them (massive time suck, much too atomized). Finally, I settled on my own North Star, what had also been the elevator pitch of Rappler: build communities of action.

The struggle of man against power,” wrote Milan Kundera, “is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”

So how do you stand up to a dictator? By embracing values, defined early—they’re the subtitles of the chapters you’ve read: honesty, vulnerability, empathy, moving away from emotions, embracing your fear, believing in the good. You can’t do it alone. You have to create a team, strengthen your area of influence. Then connect the bright spots and weave a mesh together. Avoid thinking in terms of “us against them.” Stand in someone else’s shoes. And do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Technology has proven that human beings have far more in common than we have differences; the tech platforms insidiously manipulate our biology regardless of our nation or culture. Fascist ideology, whether you call it “the great replacement” or not, pits homogeneity against domestic enemies, who invariably champion democracy and its ideals.

“What gets our attention is what gives our lives meaning,” I told them. “Where we spend our time determines what we accomplish and what we become good at. The battle for our minds—and this is a battle for your minds—is waged and won, not by helping you think. It’s won by manipulating your emotions. Anger and hate are literally shaping who we will become as a people. It’s pumping toxic sludge through us. So if you feel angry or you feel like you hate another group, step back and take a deep breath.”

So I asked them to think for themselves, be skeptical of social media, and walk in someone else’s shoes. Put your phones away, I said, because in the end what matters is the people you love. You find meaning by choosing where to spend your precious time. “What you remember are the people whose lives you’ve touched and those whose lives have changed yours.”