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

by Maria Ressa

It is ironic that autocratic leaders are often called “strongmen” when in fact they cannot tolerate dissent or even allow a level playing field.

Elie Wiesel warned us that there may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.

As these numbers show and as Facebook admits, the Philippines is ground zero3 for the terrible effects that social media can have on a nation’s institutions, its culture, and the minds of its populace.

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.

In my Nobel lecture,5 I said that an invisible atom bomb exploded in our information ecosystem, that technology platforms have given geopolitical powers a way to manipulate each of us individually.

Just four months after the Nobel ceremony, Russia invaded Ukraine, using metanarratives it had seeded online6 since 2014, when it invaded Crimea, annexed it from Ukraine, and installed a puppet state. The tactic? Suppress information, then replace it with lies. By viciously attacking facts with its cheap digital army, the Russians obliterated the truth and replaced the silenced narrative with its own—in effect, that Crimea had willfully acceded to Russian control.

Eight years later, on February 24, 2022, using the same techniques and the same metanarratives he had seeded to annex Crimea, Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine itself. This is how disinformation, bottom up and top down, can manufacture a whole new reality.

Democracy is fragile. You have to fight for every bit, every law, every safeguard, every institution, every story. You must know how dangerous it is to suffer even the tiniest cut. This is why I say to us all: we must hold the line.

All it takes is one person to stand up and fight because a bully doesn’t like to be challenged publicly. That was an early lesson in pushing back against the cruelty of the herd mentality. Here’s what I learned about popularity: people like you if you give them what they want. The question is: Is it what you want?

Later, I would realize that 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.

Or the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which I would use as the epigraph of my first book: that the very act of observing changes what you observe and that the more you drill down, the more unknowable what you are searching for becomes.

Never, never, never agree to be intimidated by anyone, no matter who he is.

That was the first time that I thought: Why bother having a law if you’re not going to stick to it? If a democracy is to survive—if a media organization is to survive—the insidiousness of corruption, does that mean that lines have to be drawn every time, that every cut against the truth must be resisted?

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.

When it leads to a group becoming a mob—whether online or in the real world—emergent behavior is unpredictable and dangerous.

The force of the mob destroyed individual control, giving people the freedom to be their worst selves.

Education determines the quality of governance.

And it alerted me to a new phenomenon: how a virulent ideology can radicalize networks and shape something I by then knew well: emergent behavior.

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 The more I reported, the more I could see how every major al-Qaeda plot from 1993 to 2003 had some link to the Philippines, the United States’ former colony,10 from the attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 to the 1998 bombings of US embassies in East Africa to the JW Marriott Hotel attack in Jakarta in 2003.

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.13 His experiments showed the power of peer pressure and how being part of any group changes each of us.

that 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. Those experiments would come to my mind again later in the context of social media: how easy it is to rile up a mob against a target.

Plutarch’s “What we achieve inwardly will change outward reality.”

The medium that carries the message shapes and defines the message itself, I told the students, invoking the media theorist Marshall McLuhan’s seminal work, “The Medium Is the Message.”

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.

Donald Trump flagrantly, delightedly lied all throughout his presidential campaign and into his presidency, and all of his lies took off through bottom-up social media operations similar to those in the Philippines. Both Trump and Duterte changed what their populaces thought and how they behaved.

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.

Comparisons to the lies and tactics of Big Tobacco in the twentieth century are wholly justified. Facebook, and the politicians benefiting from it, know full well the harms they are unleashing on the public.

Everywhere in the world, societies are being fed a steady diet of online violence that turns into real-world violence. Versions of white replacement theory are sparking mass shootings from Norway to New Zealand to the United States, powering the rise of “us against them” or, in a word, fascism.

And once a state files a criminal case against you, people look at you differently—much as I once had with Leila de Lima. It isn’t “You’re innocent until proven guilty” as much as “Prove your innocence.” Somehow our instinct is still to trust that a state won’t use its power in an absurdly vindictive manner—that is, until the evidence of it becomes overwhelming.

This is why propaganda networks are so effective in rewriting history: the distribution spread of a lie is so much greater than the fact-check that follows, and by the time the lie is debunked, those who believe it often refuse to change their views, matching social media’s impact on behavior in other parts of the world.

fighting back goes from the personal to the political, from individual values to a pyramid for collective action. There are solutions: in the long term, the most important thing is education, so start now; in the medium term, it’s legislation and policy to restore the rule of law in the virtual world—to create a vision of the internet that binds us together instead of tearing us apart. In the short term, now, it’s just us: collaborate, collaborate, collaborate. And that begins with trust.