In 2013, Maria Ressa laid out her forward-looking vision for the future of public service journalism to me. Her book 'How to Stand Up to a Dictator' traces a humbling, harrowing journey from social media advocate to democracy defender.
After Rappler exposed the campaign and the way Duterte supporters used Facebook to manipulate public opinion, she and Rappler came under online attack. In just the few months since we'd seen each other, Ressa's tone had changed."Getting a few death threats now," she wrote me in a private message in the fall of 2016."This is another country.
Full disclosure: I didn't know Ressa well in college — but as fellow journalists we've become friends. To me, one of the book's greatest values is providing a first-person account of how an authoritarian regime weaponizes social media to try to cripple a free press and dismantle democracy. It is one of the major stories of our time. Last year, Ressa shared the Nobel Peace prize with Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov.
In college, she focused on theater and, afterwards, returned to the Philippines on a Fulbright fellowship in search of her roots. She arrived a few months after the People Power movement had swept dictator Ferdinand Marcos from power. Inspired, Ressa turned to journalism.Thirty years later, a new strong-man, Duterte, came to power in the Philippines. For Ressa, the dictator's playbook became a lived experience.
Ressa pins much of the blame for the erosion of democracy on Mark Zuckerberg. She repeatedly showed Facebook how Duterte's supporters were using the platform to spread disinformation, but says she was largely ignored. When she met Zuckerburg in 2017, she urged him to visit the Philippines and see for himself, pointing out that 97% of Filippinos online were on Facebook.
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