Maria Ressa has been a well-known name to those who follow the news. She has been essential for anyone trying to understand why the news is getting harder and harder.
Ressa was born in Manila and raised here. She is now 58 years old. Ressa co-founded Rappler in 2012, an exciting online news site in the Philippines. Incendiary populist Rodrigo Duterte was elected President in a country where Facebook is the Internet. Rappler exposed his hidden hand in viral posts, trolling and malign disinformation as well as the failure of Facebook's attempts to police itself. Ressa has been living at the dangerous intersection between social media and despotism since then. She was threatened, harassed, and arrested online. In 2018, she was named TIME Person Of The Year under the heading "The Guardians and War on Truth".
Now, Ressa and Dmitry Muratov have been awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace. They are also founders of Novaya Gazeta. Six journalists were murdered at this independent Russian newspaper. Ressa called TIME from Manila just hours after receiving the Oslo news. Her new book, How to Stand up to a Dictator : The Fight for Our Future is due to be published in April.
Moises SamanMagnum Photos for TIME
Congratulations. How do you see this impacting the world? You spoke about the practical impact of this on protecting you and your work when TIME named you Person of Year for 2018.
It was a shield. It was a shield. It helped us survive. That was December 2018. My arrests started about two to three months later. And it was only getting worse. Imagine what it would have been like if you hadn't done that.
It was at that moment that I realized the only defense we have against the darkness is shining the light. You had also given us more power, a global megaphone. That gave us the ability to continue our work. I don't think it could have been worse.
What does the Nobel Peace Prize accomplish?
Oh, my gosh, I cant quite fathom yet. Although I should not, I assumed it would be [Alexei] Navalny. It makes sense. It is the exact same reason you voted for the Guardians in 2018. News platforms are biased against news. We are being insidiously manipulated. All this is destroying trust. Journalists are at the center of all this.
Read more: Maria Ressa: Democracy Cannot Be Infected by the Virus
It's almost as if we have bought into a digital landscape which commoditizes information. The real news we have, which is time-consuming and expensive, is placed in the same place as the gossip on the street. The gossip always wins. It is the same with sugar and vegetables.
It made me realize it was existential. It's a fight for facts. We were on the front lines, and it has become far more dangerous than in the past. This also shows the importance of journalists in fixing this mess and fixing it.
Where were you when you heard it?
Live, I was a member of a panel representing independent news organizations in Southeast Asia. They had just finished watching A Thousand Cuts [the Frontline documentary about Ressa]. We were discussing the survival of independent media groups in Southeast Asia and how we can move forward. Right. In the middle of all that, I get called. It just said Norway.
I said, "Hold on, a second," and then muted. I accepted the call. The announcement was made, and I was stunned but then I began to feel like I was a normal person. That's when I started talking about journalism's importance, and the experiences we had, that's when I broke down.
It arrives at a strange time for Rappler and me. January marks our 10th anniversary. This is a testament to how far the news world has come since Rappler was founded in 2008. It was all about building communities of action. We used social media with the hope that this technology could spark development and help us achieve our dreams. It worked. It worked all the way to 2016. Then came the nightmare. That was the nightmare we saw. It was our first experience. [In June 2016, Rodrigo Duterte, a populist, was elected President of the Philippines. This happened four months before Donald Trump was elected to the U.S.]
This is a clear indication of the importance journalists play. Without facts, truth cannot be found. Trust is impossible without truth. Without truth, democracy is impossible. This is the thread that binds us all: the shared reality.
Read More: Maria Ressa is on the 2019 TIME 100 List
It will bring energy home. This is the week that Filipino candidates will announce their positions. Bongbong Marcos also said that he would run to be the president. The opposition leader also said that she would run. We are here. Imagine this: 35 years ago, the Marcos family fled the Philippines. People Power chased them out. Now the son is back and he's running for president. We exposed Marcos' disinformation networks in 2019, which were even larger than Dutertes. His was in 2015. It's on YouTube, it's Facebook. How can you make history change? Social media is the best way to do this. It is done by seeding metadata. It is death by a thousand cuts. Its historical denialism. There is a lot at stake in May's elections. American social media platforms will also play a part in whether elections are fair and honest.
Do you know Dmitry Muratov, your co-winner?
We don't. However, I do know the company.
Moises SamanMagnum Photos for TIME
This was a terrible week for Facebook. TIME published a headline in 2019 entitled Facebook Let My Government Target me. Here's Why I Still Work with Them.
The only thing that has changed is that I am now part of the Real Facebook Oversight Board. Yes, we are still one of the two Filipino fact-checking partners for Facebook in the Philippines. I am also much more proactive. The shift in me occurred when I began writing my first book, "Seeds of Terror". Radicalization was the transmission of the virulent ideology behind al Qaeda. I was wondering how people would become suicide bombers. So I looked at information cascades. One individual, the 911 hijacker, behaves differently in a group that has peer pressure. This is the Solomon Asch experiment. Is that something you are familiar with?
No.
Solomon Asch created this experiment in which you have three lines and six people around the table. The sixth person is the test subject, and the other five are actors. He asked the five test subjects to name the longest and the most difficult line. 75% of the test subjects said that the longest line was the shortest, despite what their eyes tell them.
The group is also different. When you're talking about social networks and scale, it is clear that the group exerts pressure upon the individual and emergent behaviors create behavior. This is exactly what social media does now. This is where violence, anger, and disinformation are pumped through. This is Francis Haugen's example.
The Senate is focusing on Instagram and its impact on teens, but what about the impact of this platform on journalists? This is the same platform being used by dictators and autocrats to change behavior through microtargeting. It takes place in the darkness. I am much more insistent about legislation. I've been to the Forum on Democracy and Information. In November of last year, we came up with 12 structural solutions and 250 tactical ones. Marietje Schaake was my co-chair. It included Roger McNamee and Chris Wiley, who were some of the same people we also invited to the Real Facebook Oversight Board.
You have been prohibited from traveling to other countries since your cyberlibel conviction in December last year. Are you able to travel to Oslo in December?
It is not a final conviction. However, I have had four requests turned down. My mom was diagnosed with cancer last December. She had a mastectomy. I wanted to go, but the court turned it down. I will apply for travel to Oslo and will fight for my right.
Write to us at letters@time.com
