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

by Maria Ressa

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.

Their accomplice is technology, the silent nuclear holocaust in our information ecosystem.

Media has always been crucial to the maintenance of political power; the airwaves are the first thing any dictator must control.

But there is no such thing as an objective journalist; anyone who says otherwise is lying.

A good journalist doesn’t look for balance—as when, say, a world leader commits a war crime or outright lies to his or her citizenry—because that would create a false equivalence. When a journalist confronts the powerful, it is easier and safer to write it in a “balanced” way. But that’s a coward’s way out. A good journalist, for example, would not give equal time and space to known climate deniers and climate change scientists. Good journalists lean on the side of evidence, on incontrovertible facts.

Good journalism is a professional discipline and judgment exercised by the entire newsroom operating under a strong standards and ethics manual. It means having the courage to report the evidence even if it gets you in trouble with the powers that be. The words impartiality and balance are dangerous when used outside this context, often hijacked by those with vested interests.

Those very same developments I welcomed in 2011 would soon be fine-tuned by the platforms’ 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.

I believe that Facebook represents one of the gravest threats to democracies around the world, and I am amazed that we have allowed our freedoms to be taken away by technology companies’ greed for growth and revenues. 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.