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

by Maria Ressa

Being a journalist taught me to have faith in myself and our shared humanity.

Welp i don't lol

I didn’t tell war stories but instead spoke about something more conceptual: the myth of the “objective journalist.” I distinguished that idea from the principles of journalism, which, through an organizational system of checks and balances, have built a goal of objectivity into the process of reporting. 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.

The goal was not to win an argument or win a popularity contest; it was to create the more informed citizenry necessary for a democracy to work.

Ramos was followed by Joseph Estrada, a movie star. When Estrada faced allegations of corruption, the Filipino people took to the streets to oust him, in what some called a second People Power. But Estrada wasn’t a dictator like Marcos; he had been democratically elected and had survived an impeachment process. Did the protests violate the rule of law? Where was the line between the wisdom of the crowd and mob rule?

September 11, 2001, ripped off a veneer, the collective lie we had built about post–Cold War peace.3 What many did not realize at the time—and what I was intent on reporting more fully—was how Southeast Asia had served as an early breeding ground for al-Qaeda.

The names I first reported from the Philippines are now familiar.7 Ramzi Yousef and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had both been in the Philippines in 1995, plotting to assassinate Pope John Paul II and US president Bill Clinton.8 The plot we all reported was called Oplan Bojinka, a scheme to bomb US airplanes flying from Asia. What we ignored then—because it seemed too fantastic—was another plot to hijack commercial planes and crash them into buildings: the World Trade Center in New York City, the Pentagon, the Sears Building in Chicago, and the TransAmerica Pyramid in San Francisco.9

OoO

To study radicalization, I started with groupthink and the experiments of the psychologist Solomon Asch in the 1950s, in which, when confronted with simple questions in twelve critical trials, 75 percent caved in to the pressure of the group rather than sticking to their own conclusions.

Stanley Milgram (remember “six degrees of separation”?)

people lose their individuality and take on the characteristics of the roles they’re given.15 In other words, authority can give us the freedom to be our worst selves.

Three Degrees of Influence Rule, a theory first posited by Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler in 2007.16 Their work showed that everything we say or do ripples through our social network, creating an impact on our friends (one degree), our friends’ friends (two degrees), and even our friends’ friends’ friends (three degrees).

I felt uncertain: so much of who I had become was tied to my CNN identity. If I left CNN, who would I be? Would I be anyone without CNN? And now I was going to become part of a media system whose faults I knew all too well. Could I survive the internal politics of ABS-CBN, an organization still struggling with corruption, self-censorship, a culture of patronage, and all the flaws of corporate, political, and social life in the postdictatorship years, and help build a stronger institution?

I can almost hear lmm singing this lol

It was hard to see the surprise, the anger, the anxiety on our employees’ faces, and then the understanding and acceptance as I explained why we were letting them go. 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.

Leadership

which relies on collective intelligence, personal initiative, and coordinated immediate action.

By mid-2007, ABS-CBN was competing with the best news organizations in the world.

Thats in like two years

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.

A4 movement

Having journalists manage the crisis was the best thing ABS-CBN could have done. I had deep sources inside the police and counterterrorism forces; Glenda Gloria, whom I had just brought in to head our twenty-four-hour English cable news channel, had deep sources inside the military. We got Ces and her team out in ten days.

Wow. 知己知彼 百戰不殆

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.

Feminism in china

I focused our resources on two big goals: spreading empowerment and hope; and fostering debate and engagement.

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.”

The Maguindanao massacre was a milestone for our citizen journalism program and proved the tremendous potential of embedding citizen journalists in communities and institutions.

On Chinese front there's 李老師 on twitter.

We are all women, and our decisions were based not only on facts but also on emotions and values. Still, each of us could be personal and sensitive. Sometimes we didn’t take criticism kindly. Our deep loyalty to one another sometimes affected our decision making, a weakness we tried to guard against. But we all knew that ultimately our work was about our friendships, the trust that was forged in the trenches—because even before Duterte, we were fearless together.

❤

Over time, disinformation networks would exploit the greed of Facebook and YouTube and we would see in real time how behavior changed, with information operations artificially inflating the votes for “anger” and creating a new normal.

That successful initiative would eventually be abandoned by the Duterte administration, and death tolls would soon rise to triple digits again.

The f... but on the other hand not too surprised, when I was in China they had the military to save people through earthquakes and other natural disasters, these days people just dies.

Our fourth campaign, #WhipIt,29 was a commercial partnership with Pantene focused on gender bias and women’s rights. Rappler commissioned a survey30 looking at how society perceived women31 in the Philippines and organized a women’s forum to launch an innovative advertising campaign. The online ripple reverberated globally when Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg32 posted about the campaign, prompting Procter & Gamble, the makers of Pantene products, to announce that it would bring the Philippine-born campaign to the West.

Wow

Rappler chronicled how a combination of bots and fake accounts had suddenly shut down the entire #SmartFreeInternet online campaign: when someone used the hashtag, it would signal to a bot or fake account to automatically message you something negative.

China bot does that too

It was Sheryl Sandberg43 who brought surveillance capitalism44—which treats human data as commodities to be bartered and traded in markets45—from Google to Facebook after Mark Zuckerberg hired her as his second in command in 2008. Sandberg created and fine-tuned Facebook’s business model, as well as ran its policy and integrity groups.

The lady first introduced me to idea of feminism :(

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.

Try tiktok and xiaohongshu

The world would be so different today if Mark Zuckerberg had not stuck to his ignorant, self-serving interpretation of US Supreme Court justice Louis D. Brandeis’s aphorism that the way to counter hate speech is more speech.60 Brandeis said those words in 1927, long before the time of abundance, the time of Facebook, when a lie can now be delivered a million times over.

We also detailed a network of the twenty-six fake accounts on Facebook that had ultimately influenced at least 3 million other accounts.

Since taking office, he had appointed nearly six thousand government employees, chosen, he himself said, because of their loyalty, not their competence.

Xi jinping smh

I was able to see a bigger picture outside myself. I learned how what I was living through fit into the larger global landscape, and it helped me embrace my fear.

Abuse survivor can relate

Until today, I don’t know what made Google kill the report. But it brought home to me, again, the lesson I was learning: silence is complicity.

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.

The lesbian continuum!

we worked (at least we were allowed laptops). The next morning, the bail negotiations began early.

It was the first time I had spoken so harshly in public; every time the government did something draconian, it radicalized me.

Yes!

The subtle dissension within their ranks showed me something: individuals in a country that is sliding toward autocracy don’t lose their personal agency in one day; they make choices every day whether or not to comply with the autocrat’s demands.

Our first step in the fact-checking process was to find the lies. As mentioned previously, the best lies are half-truths that work to support a metanarrative, like “Duterte is the best leader” or “Journalists are criminals.” Step two was to use natural language processing, using computers to process large amounts of text to pull out the consistent messages of networks of disinformation. Doing that led us to step three, which was identifying the websites and other digital assets associated with those networks, including those profiting off the enterprise.

By prioritizing “official” sources, Facebook made attacks against journalists carried out by state assets more effective and harder to counteract. What can be done? When asked whether activists should create fake accounts or use the same tactics, I replied the same way: don’t become a monster to fight a monster.

Pandemic forced media to prioritize gov info. Furthered evil gov's push

By prioritizing “official” sources, Facebook made attacks against journalists carried out by state assets more effective and harder to counteract. What can be done? When asked whether activists should create fake accounts or use the same tactics, I replied the same way: don’t become a monster to fight a monster.

Last night's play (twilight: LA 1992) and this made me want to think deeper about my aggressive approach toward feminism. But like said before, I'm only so radical b/c unfair bs I've seen in my life.

it had prioritized the Chinese-made Sinovac, which had the lowest efficacy of the available vaccines.

Lol

“The journalism is coerced into self-optimization for social media.” Shoshana finished my thought. Social media was shaping journalism, much like Facebook told advertisers and publishers that video would get greater distribution11 so news groups around the world had laid off editorial staff and hired video teams and advertisers had placed their ads on video on Facebook. Except that Facebook lied: it inflated the number of its video views12 by as much as 900 percent, and, according to its internal documents, it lied about its mistake, keeping it secret for more than a year.

First, we must demand accountability from technology.31 This has to start with government action, as the social media companies regard public pressure and outcry as something that can be safely ignored. But aside from legislation, the only way to fight technology is with technology. One thing we’ve done at Rappler is to build and roll out Lighthouse, a technology platform built by journalists to try to preserve public discourse around facts.

The second pillar is to protect and grow investigative journalism. One global initiative I’ve helped lead is the International Fund for Public Interest Media, an immediate short- and medium-term solution to the drop in advertising revenues of news groups all around the world. If you are a government that believes in democracy, put your money where your values are—well, that was the idea, to increase the 0.3 percent of the Official Development Assistance (ODA) fund to find new money for journalism.

there needs to be a concerted systemic effort for international law.

context: Protect journalists, always better codify into law

For our third pillar, we continued to build larger and larger communities of action. The mantra: collaborate, collaborate, collaborate.

Layer two of the #FactsFirstPH process involves civil society groups, human rights groups, NGOs, business groups, and the Church—in all, more than a hundred groups that take facts and amplify them to their communities with instructions to share them with emotions.

Directing and using peoples passion lol

If your nation has elections coming up, organize your #FactsFirst pyramid a year earlier. The very minimum is six months.

wow

To build that world, we must: Bring an end to the surveillance-for-profit business model; end tech discrimination and treat people everywhere equally; and rebuild independent journalism as the antidote to tyranny.

Protect citizens’ right to privacy with robust data protection laws.