Maria Ressa Quotes

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.

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.

If you're lucky, you realize early on that each decision you make answers a question that all of us muddle through: how to build meaning in our lives. 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.

there is no greater tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of the law and in the name of justice.

Impunity online naturally led to impunity offline, destroying existing checks and balances.

What are you willing to sacrifice for the truth?

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.

What gets our attention is what gives our lives meaning. Where we spend our time determines what we accomplish and what we become good at.

The world we once knew is decimated. Now we have to decide what we want to create.

Some days, I feel like Sisyphus and Cassandra combined, trying to repeatedly warn the world about how social media has destroyed our shared reality, the place where democracy happens.

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.

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.

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.26

So how do you stand up to a dictator? By embracing values, defined early—they’re the subtitles of the chapters you’ve read: honesty, vulnerability, empathy, moving away from emotions, embracing your fear, believing in the good. You can’t do it alone. You have to create a team, strengthen your area of influence. Then connect the bright spots and weave a mesh together. Avoid thinking in terms of 'us against them.' Stand in someone else’s shoes. And do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Every development that happens in my country eventually happens in the rest of the world—if not tomorrow, then a year or two later.

Staying silent or compliant changed nothing. Speaking up was an act of creation.

Online violence is real-world violence.

people like you if you give them what they want. The question is: Is it what you want?

You can’t have integrity of elections if you don’t have integrity of facts.

To social media platforms, I said, “Your business model has divided societies and weakened democracies. Personalization says my reality is different from yours, and we can all have our realities. But all these realities have to coexist in the public sphere. You can’t tear us apart to the point that we don’t agree on facts.” They didn’t listen, and we’re worse off today. I asked journalists and activists to stay the course, and we have—with great sacrifice.43

In an autocracy, a journalist’s opponent is the state—which makes policy, controls the police, hires the prosecutors, and readies the prisons. It has an army of bots active online to vilify and undermine anyone deemed an opponent. It has the power to take down broadcasters and online sites. Most important: it has a need to control the message in order to survive. Its existence depends on ensuring that there is only one side to every story.

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. Maria’s legacy will be felt for generations—because she never failed to protest, to try to bend the arc of history toward justice. And when young Filipino students study history, they will find that the first Filipino person ever to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize was a courageous journalist determined to tell the truth. I hope that, for the sake of future generations, they will be inspired by her example.

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.

So how do you stand up to a dictator? By embracing values defined early(...): honesty, vulnerability, empathy, moving away from emotions, embracing your fear, believing in the good. You can't do it alone. You have to create a team, strengthen your area of influence, then connect the bright spots and weave the mesh together. Avoid thinking in terms of us against them. Stand in someone else's shoes and do onto others as you would have them do onto you. Technology has proven that human beings have far more in common than we have differences.

How do you stand up to a dictator? "By embracing values defined early. Honesty, vulnerability, empathy, moving away from emotions, embracing your fear, believing in the good. You can't do it alone. You have to create a team, strengthen your area of influence, then connect the bright spots and weave the mesh together. Avoid thinking in terms of us against them. Stand in someone else's shoes and do onto others as you would have them do onto you. Technology has proven that human beings have far more in common than we have differences.

So how do you stand up to a dictator? "By embracing values defined early. Honesty, vulnerability, empathy, moving away from emotions, embracing your fear, believing in the good. You can't do it alone. You have to create a team, strengthen your area of influence, then connect the bright spots and weave the mesh together. Avoid thinking in terms of us against them. Stand in someone else's shoes and do onto others as you would have them do onto you. Technology has proven that human beings have far more in common than we have differences.

So how do you stand up to a dictator? By embracing values defined early: honesty, vulnerability, empathy, moving away from emotions, embracing your fear, believing in the good. You can't do it alone. You have to create a team, strengthen your area of influence, then connect the bright spots and weave the mesh together. Avoid thinking in terms of 'us against them'. Stand in someone else's shoes and do onto others as you would have them do onto you. Technology has proven that human beings have far more in common than we have differences.

Let me tell you why the rest of the world needs to pay attention to what happens in the Philippines: 2021 was the sixth year in a row that Filipinos – out of all global citizens – spent the most time on the internet and on social media. Despite slow internet speeds, Filipinos uploaded and downloaded the largest number of videos on YouTube in 2013. Four years later, 97% of our country’s citizens were on Facebook. When I told that statistic to Mark Zuckerberg in 2017, he was quiet for a beat. “Wait, Maria,” he finally responded, looking directly at me, “where are the other three percent?” At the time, I laughed at his glib quip. I’m not laughing anymore. As these numbers show and as Facebook admits, the Philippines is ground zero for the terrible effects that social media can have on a nation’s institutions, its culture, and the minds of its populace.

This book is my attempt to show you that the absence of the rule of law in the virtual world is devastating. We live in only one reality, and the breakdown of the rule of law globally was ignited by the lack of a democratic vision for the internet in the twenty-first century. Impunity online naturally led to impunity offline, destroying existing checks and balances. 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.

The Philippines was also a fraud hub. By 2019, it was the global leader of online attacks, both automated and human, followed distantly by the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, and Indonesia.

Comparisons to the lies and tactics of Big Tobacco in the 20th century are wholly justified. Facebook, and the politicians benefiting from it, know full well the harms they are unleashing on the public. Facebook is the world’s largest distributor of news, yet studies have shown that on social media, lies laced with anger and hatred spread faster and farther than facts.

The world would be so different today if Mark Zuckerberg had not stuck to his ignorant, self-serving interpretation of the US Supreme Court Justice Louis D Brandeis’s aphorism that the way to counter hate speech is more speech. 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.

Today, an emergent wave of right-wing populist leaders uses social media to question and break down reality, triggering rage and paranoia on a bed of exponential lies. This is how fascism is normalized and where political outrage meets terrorism, the vanguard of mass violence.

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.

We decided to use the power of group dynamics and social networks to do something positive: spread hope.

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.

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.

When Facebook opened its first office in the Philippines that year, it released startling statistics: that Filipinos spent 1.7 times more time on Facebook and Instagram than watching TV. Filipinos had 60 percent more Facebook friends than the global average, and they sent 30 percent more messages than the global average. Out of the 65 percent of Filipinos who accessed Facebook every day, the mobile app was used 90 percent of the time. Filipinos spent one out of five minutes online and one out of four minutes on mobile. “The Philippines is a highly engaged mobile-first nation,” said Facebook’s VP for Asia Pacific at the time, “filled with people who are creative, entrepreneurial and have a strong sense of community.

Please ask yourself the same question my team and I ask every day: What are you willing to sacrifice for the truth?

So she has a choice: toe the government line and be safe, or risk everything to do her job. She has not hesitated to choose the latter. And I know she will never give up.

Yet when I wake up and look out the window, I am energized. I have hope. I see the possibilities—how, despite the darkness, this is also a time when we can rebuild our societies, starting with what’s right in front of us: our areas of influence. The world we once knew is decimated. Now we have to decide what we want to create.

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.

I focused our resources on two big goals: spreading empowerment and hope; and fostering debate and engagement. My ideas for the first goal built on what I had learned while studying terrorism and mob violence in Indonesia. I relied on ideas from social network theory, the experiments of the psychologists Solomon Asch, Stanley Milgram, and Philip Zimbardo, and the Three Degrees of Influence idea, that everything we say or do impacts our friends, our friends’ friends, and even our friends’ friends’ friends.

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

What you choose to do shapes the person you become.

We are standing on the rubble of the world that was, and we must have the foresight and courage to imagine, and create, the world as it should be: more compassionate, more equal, more sustainable. A world that is safe from fascists and tyrants. This is my journey to doing that, but it is also about you, dear reader. 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.

It’s confusing when you throw away gender signals ingrained since birth. They are far more basic than cultural standards; they are embedded into your identity, affecting the way you present yourself to the world—the way you dress, the way you speak, the way you act.

I have hope. I see the possibilities —how, despite the darkness, this is also a time when we can rebuild our societies, starting with what's right in front of us: our areas of influence.

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.

Without facts, you can't have truth. Without truth, you can't have trust.

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.

Facebook didn’t only provide a platform for those propagandists’ speech or even only enable them; in fact, it gave them preferential treatment because anger is the contagious currency of Facebook’s current machine. Only anger, outrage, and fear lead to greater numbers of people using Facebook more times a day. Violence has made Facebook rich.

how to build meaning in our lives. 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.

We live in only one reality, and the breakdown of the rule of law globally was ignited by the lack of a democratic vision for the internet in the twenty-first century.

That was always the answer when violence broke out. The force of the mob destroyed individual control, giving people the freedom to be their worst selves. What I was seeing in Indonesia was something I had seen in the Philippines and someday would see in countries around the world as the power of disinformation began to devastate the minds, and transform the behavior, of often less educated people or those less familiar with the internet. Education determines the quality of governance. An investment in education takes a generation to bear fruit.

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 from it won't take away the fear. When you face it, you have the chance to conquer it.

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.

The Dayaks had once been known as the headhunters of Borneo. They believed that if you chopped off the head of your enemy and ate his liver, you received his strength. That old, traditional, animistic belief still flourished—never addressed because under Suharto, discussing issues of race, religion, or ethnicity was banned. It was too “emotional,” too contentious, and in a society where order was largely imposed by the military, it was “unnecessary” to discuss and debate contentious issues because it only made things worse.

Education determines the quality of governance. An investment in education takes a generation to bear fruit. Likewise, countries feel the impact of this disregard for education a generation later.

His twenty-minute speech kicking off his campaign offered no platform, no hows and whys, and certainly no mention of the thousands of people killed under his father, the millions of people who had lost their jobs, the trillions of pesos of national debt incurred, and the corruption scandals that came with all that. He did, however, repeatedly paint a glowing future and promised to make the Philippines great again.

Sometimes you have to skate through life, sliding on the surface because it's too hard to feel. So you keep going. Keep busy. Fill the days, hours, and minutes, hoping to come out on the other side. Stopping to try to understand why causes too much pain.

We are standing on the rubble of the world that was, and we must have the foresight and courage to imagine, and create, the world as it should be: more compassionate, more equal, more sustainable. A world that is safe from fascists and tyrants.

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 there?” Chris asked.14

Until today, Marcos has denied any connection to “trolls,”22 despite the data that we at Rappler exposed in a three-part Marcos propaganda series in 2019. Not so subtly, the messaging on his social media accounts began with changing the past. To begin with, he repeatedly lied about his education at Oxford University and Wharton. After being caught in the lie by a Rappler exclusive,23 his Senate office quietly changed his résumé on the Senate website, but he doubled down on the lie,24 a lesson many people, including Donald Trump and Mark Zuckerberg, have learned is easily facilitated by social media. His disinformation network also hijacked popular pages and news groups with copied-and-pasted comments that slowly chipped away at the legacy of the Aquino family, long seen as his family’s nemesis—all

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.

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.

what you choose to prioritize reflects your values and your goals.

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.

How honest will you be with yourself? We often let ourselves off the hook, refusing to look at our own difficult or ugly truths. We rationalize our behavior, but the world will not cushion us against those lies. So: embrace your fear. Learning to be honest begins with your own truths: self-assessment, self-awareness, your empathy for others. The only thing you can control in the world is you.

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