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

by Maria Ressa

“Recently, Filipino politics kinda looks a lot like the United States,” he continued, rolling his eyes and gesturing with his hands. “You’ve got a president who was Trump before Trump was Trump, and you have relationships with people close to him with SCL and Cambridge Analytica. And you had a lot of data being collected—the second largest amount of data after the United States being collected in the Philippines. Also if you look at how SCL and Cambridge Analytica operated in a lot of countries . . . one of the things they talk about is that they use . . . they don’t go into a country as Cambridge Analytica. They don’t go into a country as SCL Group because it’s too obvious. So you use local partners—” “Proxies,” I clarified. “You use proxies,” he continued. “. . . They’re on camera admitting this. They go into countries, set up bullshit companies that are just fronts and they send in staff. It makes it very difficult for regulators or opposition parties to actually identify what’s happening. And as they also have admitted, once an election is done, they just get out. So they’re in. They’re out. They’ve got their guy in, and then you know they can come back and ask for favors.” “Okay,” I interrupted, “Alexander Nix [the Cambridge Analytica president] came to the Philippines at the end of 2015 before the campaigns began, and there was a photo of him—”13 “Yeah, he met with people there,” said Chris. “—the staff of Duterte,” I finished. “Yeah! What do you think he was doing t...