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

by Maria Ressa

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.

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.

I remember looking around the school at that point and instinctively knowing that nothing would ever be the same again. In moments like that, you look for anchors. Mine was the library book in my bag that would be overdue the next day.

Striking

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.

Face your fear

silence is complicity.

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

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that there are successful people who, because of their childhood experiences, learn to suppress their emotions as long as their life is peppered with achievements. “They do well, even excellently, in everything they undertake; they are admired and envied; they are successful whenever they care to be,” Miller wrote, “. . . but behind all this lurks depression, a feeling of emptiness and self-alienation, and a sense that their life has no meaning.”1

I wanted to achieve an “empty mirror,”3 a concept I took from a book about a Buddhist monastery: to stand in front of a mirror and see the world without my image obstructing the view. I wanted to know myself to such a degree that I could take myself out of the equation when approaching the world around me and responding to it. That is clarity—the ability to remove your self and your ego.

Cheche’s words that year aged well for me, gaining more meaning in the present moment of the past. Never, never, never agree to be intimidated by anyone, no matter who he is.

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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.

What I saw then was how powerful participatory media can be: how citizens using their cell phones are enfranchised to demand justice and accountability. It showed me how technology could be used for good: for citizen empowerment, voting and democratic engagement, and integrity and truth. It is why I still believe that the Philippines was not destined to become the country it did under Duterte and that ultimately, average citizens won’t stand for a dictator’s repression if there was a free press they could run to for help.

Well before the 2016 presidential elections, the stage had already been set in our country for three converging trends that helped the government shamelessly consolidate power: click and account farms, information operations, and the rise of political influencers in the grayer areas of the advertising industry.

The Philippines was also a fraud hub. By 2019, it was the global leader of online attacks,20 both automated and human, followed distantly by the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, and Indonesia. A report at the time pointed to three reasons: “sophisticated tools, cheap manual labor, and good economic incentives associated with online fraud.” (Forty-three percent were human, i.e., not bots.) The Philippines also has a higher-than-average number of unlicensed software installations,21 often seeding malware into PCs to turn them into botnet platforms for automated attacks.

This evolution in the Philippines had begun in 2014, when online fans began using social media to support their stars, and political operatives discovered the potential of this kind of engagement.

Those young people told us that all you had to do was organize people “to tweet seven thousand times per minute” to make a hashtag trend. The groups became so large and successful that it was only a matter of time before corporate marketing seized on their tactics. Then fandom turned into politics.

That was the tactic Facebook didn’t pay attention to. What we now call “astroturfing”—the fake bandwagon effect—however, was extremely efficient.

I laid out how Rappler had charted three stages of the degradation of the online information ecosystem and political life in the Philippines. One was the early experimentation and buildup of campaign machinery in 2014 and 2015. The second was the commercialization of a new online black ops industry. The third was the consolidation of power at the top and the spread of political polarization across the country.

Three key websites took the entire Rappler story and republished it out of context and without our permission: News Trend PH (newstrendph.com), SocialNewsph.com, and Pinoy Tribune (pinoytribune.com), all of

which were created days after President Duterte took his oath of office. All three were taken down soon after we exposed the operation.

but nothing was done in those early days. Timely action could have maintained a trust system that Facebook instead exploited; early action could have prevented the anarchy and chaos that encouraged and rewarded information operations in the coming years.

That was the beginning of my growing disillusionment with the company that had initially opened up such exciting possibilities for Rappler. Today, I’m beyond disillusioned. 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. Harvard Business School professor emerita Shoshana Zuboff called this exploitative business model “surveillance capitalism.”41 We all let it happen.

There are three assumptions implicit in everything Facebook says and does: first, that more information is better; second, that faster information is better; third, that the bad—lies, hate speech, conspiracy theories, disinformation, targeted attacks, information operations—should be tolerated in service of Facebook’s larger goals. All three ideas are great for Facebook because they mean that the company makes more money, but none of them is better for users and the public sphere.

So how do you prioritize what to build? As you saw with Rappler, what you choose to prioritize reflects your values and your goals. In Facebook’s case, one of Mark’s choices early on reflected what a young man would think but not what an experienced responsible corporate executive would do, like giving every Facebook engineer unlimited access to users’ data. In that upside-down world, that became a Facebook recruitment tool; he offered tech engineers a workplace without bureaucracy so that engineers could test and build with user data, unimpeded by the real-world concerns of other companies.

Another harmful decision that has been made by every social media platform is to grow its business through algorithms that recommend friends of friends. Executives at those companies have realized that that’s the most efficient way through what’s called A/B testing, which tests the impact on users of any two things on the internet—real-time experimentation on real human beings, treating us like Pavlov’s dogs. We click and grow our individual networks, and by extension the platform’s, more when we’re served friends of friends.

So in 2016, after Rodrigo Duterte used Facebook to help him get elected, this “friends of friends” algorithm, along with his divisive us-against-them rhetoric, further radicalized Filipinos. If you were pro-Duterte and you were getting recommendations for posts from friends of friends, you moved farther right. If you were anti-Duterte, you moved farther left. And over time, the chasm between the two sides grew. This has been a global theme; substitute Narendra Modi, Jair Bolsonaro,

This is how information operations work everywhere. Lies that are repeated over and over exponentially change the public’s perception of an issue, something that world powers have always known about propaganda but that gained new meaning and pitch in the age of social media. As Facebook then reached more than 3 billion people around the globe, world leaders found a way to play power politics through individual social media users.

It was only in 2018, after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the Brexit referendum, the 2016 elections of Donald Trump and Rodrigo Duterte, and more, that Facebook began high-profile post takedowns in the Philippines and around the world, which included limiting the reach of Mocha Uson’s page and taking down the

network built by Duterte’s social media campaign manager. By then, of course, it was too late.

Nevertheless, Duterte’s allies in the Senate stripped Leila of her committee leadership. The senator who took over her chairmanship, Richard Gordon, promptly closed the investigation into Duterte’s drug war, as well as the alleged killings years earlier in Davao.25 In a further act of retaliation, the House of Representatives, dominated by Duterte allies, launched an investigation into Leila’s supposed role in the illegal drug trade within the national penitentiary in Muntinlupa; the allegation was that Leila had received drug

It is hard to always see the thousand cuts in real time. Looking back, it should have been obvious that the checks and balances of our democracy were collapsing. Here was our president, successfully jailing an opposition politician who had fought to expose his crimes, with the support of the people and institutions that should have kept him in check. Duterte, like Facebook, benefited from the system of trust that they both destroyed. The weaponization of the internet had evolved into the weaponization of the law.

The information operations against Leni took off in January 2017. The same three content creators led the charge against her: Sass Sasot, RJ Nieto, and Mocha Uson. By that time, all three had appeared in photos of palace gatherings; Mocha was now a government official, working for various Duterte administration entities, including his communications office, while RJ Nieto was a consultant for the Department of Foreign Affairs. They accused Leni of working with US groups to oust Duterte. It was laughable,39 yet Facebook gave their wild statements mass distribution. Again, that was Facebook’s call. In 2018, the data, and our work that identified that the attacks were coming from government officials and groups close to Duterte, proved to us that it was state-sponsored hate.40 Three years later in 2021, the Commission on Audit would find that the government office that had disseminated the hate attacks (#LeniLeaks was the main hashtag for the attacks against Robredo) had hired some 375 contract workers,41 260 percent more than its regular staff. It had cost $1.4 million.

Let me tell you one more thing that happened that year, when I met with a woman named Camille François, the principal researcher for Google’s think tank, Jigsaw. Rappler had joined Camille’s research project

with about a dozen other groups around the world. Camille had a strong background in public policy and technology (she had been special adviser to the chief technology officer of France) and gender studies, as well as human rights. Titled “Patriotic Trolling: The Rise of State-Sponsored Online Hate Mobs,” the resulting paper gave a big-picture view of patriotic trolling: “the use of targeted, State-sponsored online hate and harassment campaigns leveraged to silence and intimidate individuals.”53 It featured more than fifteen case studies in which governments, to varying degrees, were using online hate to inundate and overwhelm a truth teller and change the public narrative. More than anything else at that time, the report captured the scope of the global disinformation crisis. It was to be released in August 2017, but it kept getting delayed.

Just because others compromise doesn’t mean you do. Just because they’re silent doesn’t mean you have to be.

That was the genesis of #HoldTheLine: the line in our country’s Constitution that defined our rights. Using fear and violence, the holders of power were trying to force us to step back and give up our rights. In my mind, we linked arms to hold the line at any attempt to violate them. And we would never voluntarily give up our rights, no matter the danger.

When I arrived at NBI headquarters, accompanied by Glenda, Beth, and our lawyers, we were made to wait in the conference room. After twenty minutes, I looked at the clock and realized that the officials there were delaying so that the night court would close and they would be able to detain me for the night. So we decided to ignore the “Do not enter” sign on the door and burst into their office, where we found the arresting officers having dinner. That moment was as close as I got to raising my voice. They knew what they were doing. But despite our protests, they kept stalling, and by 8:30 p.m., it was clear that I wouldn’t be able to post bail. Their plan succeeded. This government wanted me to stay in jail that night to harass and intimidate me. That firsthand experience of how petty it was and how far it would go only strengthened my resolve to #HoldTheLine.

On the way, I was stopped by a breathless Dr. June Pagaduan-Lopez, an acquaintance from an award we received, The Outstanding Women in the Nation’s Service (TOWNS), a group of women high achievers. She had come to the NBI office as soon as she’d heard I was arrested because she didn’t want me to be alone for the medical exam, when you are forced to take off your clothes and are at your most vulnerable. She knew that I could bring my own doctor with me, so she asked me to declare her my physician, which I did.2 I was overwhelmed by that act of kindness—because no matter how much you plan ahead, you can’t think of everything. My eyes misted: June cared so much, powered by her knowledge of what can go wrong in such instances. The kindness of strangers would be a recurring theme in the coming years, strengthening my faith in the goodness of human nature.

That night, when my government took away my freedom, they drew the line of repression directly to me. It was the moment when my rights were violated, when I went from being a journalist to being a citizen. If they could do this to journalists with some power, in the glare of the spotlight, what would they do to vulnerable citizens literally left in the dark? What recourse did a poor person have in a dark alley?

Silence is complicity because silence is consent. “What we’re seeing is death by a thousand cuts of our democracy,” I continued. “And I appeal to you to join me. . . . I’ve always said that when I look back a decade from now, I want to make sure—” My voice broke then, so I repeated the sentence. “I want to make sure that I have done all I can. We will not duck. We will not hide. We will hold the line.”

Waiting inside their van were six officers in SWAT gear, fully armed. I guess to a lying government, a journalist is a terrorist, setting off bombs that blow up their lies. When one of the women officers held my head as I entered the van, I pushed back. Somehow that hand at the back of my head symbolized every wrong that I was subjected to. Then I remembered: Pull back. Suppress your emotions. Find clarity of thought. Again I posted bail and kept going.

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.

Mark Zuckerberg had recently announced the creation of Facebook’s “Supreme Court,” an oversight board7 designed to take content moderation to an independent court-style setup. That board addressed the wrong issue: content, which had never really been the problem. The first problem was the company’s distribution model: an oversight board on content could never match the speed of the dissemination of information online.

“Our group has come together for one purpose,” Shoshana said. “We demand comprehensive action to ensure that Facebook cannot be weaponized to undermine the vote and with it American democracy.” We decided that instead of making broad, lofty demands, we would focus first on quickly actionable points,8 especially given the tight timeline and Trump’s increasingly unhinged behavior. We distilled them down to three demands of Facebook: to enforce its own policies and remove posts inciting violence; to ban ads that seek to delegitimize election results; and to take measures to prevent disinformation and misinformation about the election results. It was a sign of the times that within twenty-four hours, Facebook acted on all of them. It never admitted it, though. Instead, it attacked our members. In those months, much of what Rappler had discovered about Facebook and social media based on our own data and research, as well as many of our suspicions, was slowly being confirmed by reporters, whistleblowers, and even the companies themselves.

“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...

Our Sharktank database is now available to academic institutions and researchers who want to understand how information operations can transform a robust democracy into authoritarian rule.19 By August 2021, the Sharktank database had captured 382,633,021 public posts and 444,788,994 comments from 68,097 public pages, 23,736 public groups, and 4,759,678 users on Facebook. It had also captured 11,400,241 unique links from 235,265 websites. Once YouTube overtook Facebook as the number one social media platform in the Philippines in 2021, we began monitoring public channels and now have insights into content from 331,471 YouTube channels.

Each circle is a Facebook page, and its size is based on eigenvector centrality, or its power to distribute.

Eigenvector centrality

Friedrich Nietzsche was right: what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

“primary extraction”—even

Primary extraction is a morally reprehensible practice that Shoshana compares to slavery; she demands that it be outlawed. If that original sin is corrected, every other problem it has created, the cascading failures it has allowed, would be addressed, including safety, competition, and privacy.10

“surveillance capitalism”: