Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Ressa: ‘It’s incredible we have to dance to Elon Musk’s tune on Twitter’

It is hard to comprehend how the woman sitting in front of me could be facing prison sentences totalling 100 years. Maria Ressa rarely stops smiling in her hour-long conversation with i; humility, kindness and principle seem to hang in the air around her. Yet, when this Nobel Peace Prize-winning journalist flies home to the Philippines in a few days, her legal nightmare will resume. 

Ressa is being pursued in the Filipino courts in retribution for exposing “systematic murder” unleashed by her country’s former president, Rodrigo Duterte. She is restricted from discussing the cases publicly, but she has always insisted the charges – fraud, tax evasion and “cyber libel” – are nonsense. This lawfare is purely intended to intimidate and gag her, she says, and could potentially bankrupt Rappler, the news website she co-founded with three other women 10 years ago. 

In the words of her lawyer, Amal Clooney, “a five-foot-two-inch woman with a pen in her hand” is not our typical image of a “superhero”. But in fighting this “barrage of bogus prosecutions”, the barrister argues that Ressa’s struggle “defines our times”. Like her, many reporters and editors around the globe are threatened for scrutinising authoritarian governments. 

As if that battle wasn’t enough, Ressa, 59, is also one of the world’s leading campaigners for new laws to police social media firms. Having revealed how disinformation on Facebook has hijacked and distorted democracy in her homeland, inevitably, she has become a victim. She receives online abuse every minute; some is misogynistic, some is homophobic, much is based entirely on lies intended to discredit and intimidate. 

“It is horrendous,” she tells me one evening in London, midway through her tour of Europe and the US promoting her new book, How to Stand up to a Dictator. “It’s bombardment, 90 hate messages per hour – I have never lived through anything like that… Free speech was being used to stifle my free speech. It is meant to pound me into silence.” The only reason she doesn’t cry, she says, is because she knows many of the accounts are fake. “I can see the data. I know it is being manipulated”. 

She has long been a critic of Facebook and its founder, Mark Zuckerberg. But throughout her internet persecution, the journalist says that Twitter had remained a safer place – relatively, at least – than many other platforms for sharing and reading genuine news. That seems surprising, given how widespread abuse can be on all forms of social media, but “I felt better protected on Twitter”, she says. “Obviously, that doesn’t seem to be the case now.” 

After Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44bn, his wild leadership – which has seen him unilaterally restore Donald Trump’s account and share a baseless conspiracy theory about US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband after he was attacked – has alarmed Ressa deeply. 

“Since Elon Musk has taken over, I took a wait-and-see attitude on this – and it’s imploded,” she says. “It’s incredible that one man who was never elected can tear apart the public sphere in such a random, haphazard manner, and we all have to dance to that tune… That’s a big problem.” 

She was astonished at Musk’s move to let anyone buy blue-tick badges, previously a symbol of account authenticity, which meant hoaxers could make fake accounts look more convincing. Many people were fooled by a page pretending to represent the drug company Eli Lilly when it posted the message, “We are excited to announce insulin is free now”, causing the firm’s stock price to drop by 4 per cent. “There should be accountability for this,” says Ressa. “It shows you the danger.” 

What makes it more disturbing, she says, is that Musk isn’t naïve. “He talked about bots on Twitter, he knows about ‘information operations’.”

Musk has pledged that “Twitter will earn the trust of the people” and tweeted of the need to “stop scams, spam” going viral. “New Twitter policy is freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach,” he has written. “Negative/hate tweets will be max deboosted.”

But Ressa worries what could happen if the platform, weakened by staffing cuts, leaves the door open for those who want to whip up “rage, anger, fear”.

Biography: Maria Ressa

• Maria Ressa was born in the Filipino capital, Manila, in 1963. Her father died when she was a year old, and her family were “so poor that we used to brush our teeth with salt”, she writes. 
• At 10, she was taken to the US by her mother. She remembers being the shortest child in her class “and the only brown one”. She was so introverted she went a year at school without talking. But she was also a “huge nerd” and went on to study at Princeton University.

• Ressa returned to the Philippines in 1986 where she started out in TV journalism, working for two national broadcasters, before joining CNN and working in Indonesia. 
• She later investigated al-Qaeda plots in South East Asia, including how many terrorist attacks on the US – including 9/11 – were conceived in her homeland or linked to it. 
• She moved back to the Philippines in 2005 to become head of news and current affairs at ABS-CBN, managing more than 1,000 journalists. In 2012, she co-founded Rappler with three other women, serving as its CEO and executive editor. 

Fighting back 

If you’re wondering why Maria Ressa and the Philippines are so important in the story of disinformation, consider this fact: until 2021, Filipinos spent more time on the internet and social media – 10 hours and 56 minutes a day on average – than any other nationality in the world for six years in a row. 

Like many reporters and editors, Ressa originally saw the internet as an opportunity. Social media was a place to harness citizen journalism and share stories with bigger audiences. “I even secretly entertained the idea of actually working for Facebook,” she writes in How to Stand up to a Dictator. “Like CNN for my generation, Facebook was determining the flow of information for this one.”  

But from 2014 onwards, she and her team began to see how social media was being used to spread political lies and misinformation, especially on Facebook. Accounts that had been set up for entertainment and grown big followings gradually started sharing alarming stories about drug users, many of which were misleading or wrong, and the site’s algorithms were helping this material go viral. 

Rappler documented how the populist Duterte and his supporters exploited Facebook to spread fake news – first to radicalise voters, then to win election in 2016, next to consolidate power. And the team saw how these methods were affecting other countries, too. Some of the world’s earliest “like factories” originated in the Philippines – in 2015, one in every 27 supposed Trump followers on Facebook was from the country. Troll farms were also set up and still operate in the nation. 

Ressa became increasingly concerned. She remembers telling Facebook executives in August 2016 that if action wasn’t taken, “Trump could win”. She recalls how they all laughed at this prospect – including Ressa herself, partly because it seemed incredible, and partly because she still thought something would be done. 

It wasn’t. 

Having stoked a social panic about drug use that Ressa believes were way out of proportion with the problem, Duterte’s election victory in May 2016 was a turning point for law and order in the Philippines. 

The newly elected president said: “Hitler massacred three million Jews… There’s three million drug addicts. I’d be happy to slaughter them.” (Not only was this grossly offensive, he wasn’t even accurate: the Nazis killed 6 million Jewish people.) 

He instigated a “war on drugs” in which police and vigilantes alike carried out brutal extrajudicial killings on suspected drug users. Gangsters and addicts were murdered along with children and entirely innocent bystanders, with the poorest neighbourhoods being terrorised the most. By the time Duterte left office last summer, it is thought that between 6,000 and 30,000 people had been killed. 

Ressa’s team investigated the violence and also published a three-part series exposing Duterte’s “weaponisation of the internet” in October 2016. They spent three months charting how just 26 profiles were able to reach 3 to 4 million other accounts with their lies. But the articles were attacked by pro-government comments within just seconds, showing how the very tactics they were highlighting were being used against them. 

Ressa’s brave leadership led to her being named a Time Person of the Year in 2018. But she believes it was those three reports that have led to her being targeted with legal action by the state. 

In February 2019, she was arrested on charges of “cyber libel”, using legislation only introduced after the alleged offence. She was detained again the following month, accused of violating foreign ownership rules. She was convicted in the libel case the following year, and while she is appealing against this verdict, she is being prosecuted and sued in several other tax cases. 

Ressa was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in October last year, which she says was not only a morale boost but has also helped protect her by boosting her profile. Having previously been banned from travelling abroad twice, she was pleased the Filipino Supreme Court allowed her to make this month-long trip. 

But in June this year, Rappler was ordered to shut down and the website says it is now on the brink of closure. 

And the internet, even today, remains a place that can “create and sustain flat-earthers, QAnon, Stop the Steal, and a rabid anti-vax movement”, she writes in her book. 

“Politics has become a gladiators’ battle to the death”

Maria Ressa

“The business model of social media is meant to keep you scrolling,” says Ressa. “Social media spreads lies faster than facts – because when that happens, you scroll. That means you can’t tell fact from fiction. That means you have no facts. Without facts, you can’t have truth. Without truth, you can’t have trust. Without those three things, we have no shared reality, we cannot solve any problems, you cannot have democracy. 

“They test: how do we keep you on our platform? And it doesn’t matter what the impact is – that they tear apart reality… This is part of the reason why politics has become a gladiators’ battle to the death. They are using our biology against us, enflaming your amygdala to keep you on the platform, and it encourages the worst of who we are as people.” 

She compares social media to gene-editing technology, pointing to all the restrictions placed on medical science to prevent patients dying in experiments, and asking why the same principles weren’t applied to social media. 

Facebook’s owner, Meta, argues it has been taking action and continues to do so. “We have built the largest global fact-checking network of any platform, with more than 90 fact-checking partners around the world who review and rate viral misinformation,” wrote Monika Bickert, vice president of policy at Meta, in its most recent Community Standards Enforcement Report.

In the second quarter of this year, she wrote, “we displayed warnings on over 200 million distinct pieces of content on Facebook (including re-shares) globally based on over 130,000 debunking articles written by our fact-checking partners.” Her report added: “We continue to make progress on the prevalence of bullying and harassment content, which is now 0.08 per cent to 0.09 per cent or eight to nine views per 10,000 on Facebook.”

Ressa’s team at Rappler works with Facebook to fight disinformation, but still feels the firm isn’t taking the issue seriously enough. She rails against Zuckerberg’s “ignorant” attitude to what his invention is doing, arguing there is no room for complacency. 

She writes in her book that when Zuckerberg “accepts 1 per cent disinformation on his site, it’s like saying it’s okay to have 1 per cent virus in a population unchecked. Both can take over, and if not eradicated, they can ultimately kill.” 

She means that last word literally. While many people in the West are familiar with how Russian cyber-espionage and propaganda during the 2016 elections aimed to undermine public trust in democracy, damage Hillary Clinton and boost Trump – leading to 13 Russians being charged with trying to manipulate voters through social media – hateful content on social media has led to genocide. 

“Look at how many people died in Myanmar,” says Ressa. In the country once known as Burma, hate speech which spread via Facebook played a “determining role” in provoking the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya people in 2017 – in which more than 6,000 people died in the first month of the violence alone – according to United Nations human rights experts. 

Responding to this finding in 2018, Meta admitted that “we weren’t doing enough to help prevent our platform from being used to foment division and incite offline violence”. In February this year, it banned Myanmar’s military, the Tatmadaw, from Facebook – and in September it handed millions of pieces of information to UN human rights investigators which Facebook had taken down and “could support allegations of war crimes and genocide” against Myanmar. 

Amnesty International claimed in September that the company “knew or should have known that Facebook’s algorithmic systems were supercharging the spread of harmful anti-Rohingya content in Myanmar, but the company still failed to act”, saying its “dangerous algorithms and reckless pursuit of profit substantially contributed to the atrocities”. In a statement at the time, Meta did not respond directly to these allegations but said it “supports efforts to hold the Tatmadaw accountable for its crimes against the Rohingya people”. 

“Free speech was being used to stifle my free speech”

Maria Ressa

“I compare social media to the tobacco industry,” says Ressa. “It is knowingly harming people, and that should not be done with impunity.” 

She adds: “This is not about freedom of speech. Anyone can say anything. It’s the fact that by design, the most incendiary lies are the ones that spread the most. It is a distribution issue.” 

It can’t hurt Facebook to have senior retired politicians working for it. Take Sir Nick Clegg, for example. The UK’s former deputy prime minister joined the company in 2018 and was made Meta’s president of global affairs in February. 

Announcing his promotion, Zuckerberg said Clegg was tasked with “making the case publicly for our products and our work” and would “lead our company on all our policy matters”. The role put Clegg “at the level” of Zuckerberg himself and Sheryl Sandberg, who later announced in June that she was leaving her post as chief operating officer after 14 years with the business. 

Asked about people like Clegg using their political knowledge and influence on Facebook’s behalf, Ressa says: “I am sad because of the way that people who are working there – who know, who see – continue to lend their name to it.” 

She recalls meeting Helle Thorning-Schmidt, the former prime minister of Denmark who now is co-chair of the Meta Oversight Board for Facebook and Instagram, at a conference in Norway this summer. “I said to her: you are lending your credibility to something that is fundamentally wrong.” (Thorning-Schmidt replied that “dilemmas about freedom of speech and content moderation will never disappear… No government can solve this problem”.) 

Would Ressa say the same to Clegg? 

“Yes,” she replies, but adds: “I don’t waste my time… I’m not so sure he understands the impact of it. Politicians come in and don’t understand the big data.” 

Clegg has previously defended Facebook, arguing last year that people needed to stop trying to “blame everything on algorithms”, writing: “We need to look at ourselves in the mirror, and not wrap ourselves in the false comfort that we have simply been manipulated by machines all along.” 

“They are using our biology against us”

Maria Ressa

Securing real change

Perhaps the real problem, I ask Ressa, is that the public shows little real sign of caring? 

We’ve been warned repeatedly about social media algorithms and the harm they do in our online “echo chambers” for years now. And yet so many of us are still on social media. Even Ressa, even now, still has a Facebook profile. She still uses Twitter, where she has 533,000 followers. I will share this article online, and perhaps you are reading it now after seeing it there – while all the misinformation in other reports swirling around social media will no doubt be attracting millions more readers. 

We still sign up to websites that track everything we do, giving away details of our lives and identities for free use of email, calendar or shopping services – details that are then sold to control what we see online and influence what we do, under what Ressa calls “surveillance capitalism”. 

If the public does not make these issues a priority, even after the QAnon-inspired pro-Trump insurrection at the US Capitol last year which sought to overturn a fair election, then why would our politicians choose to risk their reputations taking it on?  

Dmitry Muratov, the Russian editor of the Novya Gazzetta newspaper who was Ressa’s co-recipient of last year’s Nobel Peace Prize, has argued this point himself. People “decided to give up freedom of speech as a base value of democracy,” he told the BBC’s HardTalk in a joint interview last year. “Perhaps their mortgages or an opportunity to watch funny news about cats for a large proportion of the population became more important than real facts and real knowledge about what is going on in the world.” 

If we want change, is it time for journalists and people who value the truth to close our accounts and join a boycott? 

“I have more faith in people,” replies Ressa. “If people read and realise they’re being manipulated, they can demand better – and they should. That’s our only defence… How do you solve this problem? In the long term: education. The medium term is legislation. The short term is hand-to-hand combat, a person-to-person defence of democracy.” 

For Ressa herself, remaining on social media is essential to seeing what is happening, to combat it and raise the alarm. “I prefer to know the dangers. And by being on these platforms, I see the dangers – I report on them, I tell you.” 

And these platforms still have important emotional uses for people keeping in touch with relatives and friends. “My family lives in the Philippines, but I have family in the US and Europe. Somehow, we are connected.” Though she admits her own relatives have been divided by the online manipulation of Filipino politics, “because when Facebook took down Russian disinformation, some of my family’s accounts also went down”.

“Being on these platforms, I see the dangers” 

Maria Ressa

Isn’t the other problem, I suggest, that today’s news organistions rely on social media to attract readers, stay relevant and – fundamentally – survive? Many media outlets have seen hits to their online traffic recently after staffing cuts to Twitter prevented newsrooms from pitching threads about their stories as “Moments”. The presence of legitimate media outlets publishing fair and accurate reports on social media helps maintain platforms that meanwhile spread damaging misinformation, but they can’t walk away because it would be commercial suicide. 

“If you’re a digital news organisation, social media is your primary distribution… There is no alternative right now,” agrees Ressa. “There was a point for Rappler when I looked to see: what if we stopped? There would be a cost to opting out – for distribution, for the company itself, the news organisation – that I couldn’t avoid. 

“The second concern is opting out of the public sphere,” she says. “I’m not willing to abdicate, I’m not willing to give up the space where people are. That’s why we set up Rappler. If we all leave Twitter, what will it become? Will there be violence? Will it be a cesspool? It already is, but will it get worse? I will wait and see.” 

Ressa’s next court hearing will be early in 2023. If there is one reason for her to be optimistic, it is that Duterte has gone. He stepped down as president of the Philippines in May.

The problem is who won the election to replace him: Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr.

Marcos is the son of the dictator who led the country from 1965 until 1986, a man who holds the Guinness World Record for the “greatest robbery of a government” – believed to total up to $10bn, allowing his wife Imelda to collect 3,000 pairs of shoes. His regime tortured 34,000 people and killed another 3,240, according to Amnesty International. 

And the Duterte influence has not disappeared: the former president’s daughter, Sara Duterte, is now vice president.

Ressa still finds reason to smile. “I always have to hope,” she says. “This president cares about what the rest of the world thinks, he cares about the economy – ostensibly, on the surface. 

“It’s still to be determined where this administration takes us. How well they do will determine how Filipinos live. But I want the government to do well – hand in hand with the constraints of the constitution: the rule of law, freedom of expression, press freedom. Human rights.” 

‘How to Stand up to a Dictator: The Fight for our Future’ by Maria Ressa is on sale now (£20, WH Allen)