Offline with Jon Favreau - Offline presents The Axe Files hosted by David Axelrod, featuring Maria Ressa

Episode Date: October 2, 2022

Nobel Prize-winning journalist Maria Ressa faces 100 years in prison stemming from what she says are illegitimate charges, but that hasn’t stopped her mission of exposing political malfeasance and lies in her home country of the Philippines. She joined David to talk about immigrating to the US as a child and later returning to the Philippines where she built a career, technology’s corrosive impact on journalism and democracy, founding Rappler and finding herself a government target, and maintaining hope as she fights corruption and disinformation through her journalism.

And now, from the University of Chicago Institute of Politics and CNN Audio, The Axe Files, with your host, David Axelrod. Despite threats of violence and prison, she's led her intrepid digital news organization, Rappler, to cover the Philippines thoroughly and honestly, even when it's meant shining a bright light in the dark corners of an increasingly violent and autocratic regime. She's become the victim of an organized online campaign of disinformation and hate abetted by the policies and algorithms of Facebook. Yet with all that, Maria Ressa cheerfully, courageously persists in her battle to report the news, clean up social media, and save the

Philippines and democracies everywhere, including ours, from a world without truth, a world without facts. Here's my conversation with the 2021 winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, the remarkable Maria Ressa. Maria Ressa, it's so good to see you. I saw you last week in Chicago at the conference that the Institute of Politics had in conjunction with The Atlantic. You were the extraordinary kickoff speaker there, and now you're back in the Philippines, and it's good to see you again. No, it's very good to see you again, and congratulations. That was an incredible conference. Best minds to pull together. Not the least of which because of your participation, and we're going to get to all that.

People know you now as a Nobel Prize winner and as, you know, an exemplar of the fight for press freedom and for democracy. But I want to know how you got there. I want to start right from the beginning. You were born in Manila and your dad died when you were quite young, one year old. Yeah. And my family, well, my sister and I, my mom came back and got us in 1973, which was just a year after martial law was declared. Before we get there, I wanted to ask you about that, though, because your mom left to go to the United States after your dad died, I guess to try and make a living, and left you with your grandparents, you and your sister.

I mean, how did you experience that being separated from your mom? Your dad was gone. Did it seem, I mean, was it just normal to be with your grandparents? It didn't, how much did you see your mom? You know, it's funny. You're the first person to really ask me that, but I'm in the middle of writing this book. So going through it, I mean, look, I grew up in those early years. I think, you know, we didn't have parents, my sister and I, we were with my grandparents. And for a little while, you kind of people ask who, where's your mom? Where's your dad? Well, neither of them are here. But I grew up with my grandparents. And then my mom did come back and get us. I mean,

she went to the United States. Here's the funny thing. I came from an immigrant family. And when I was young, those ages, from one to 10 years old, it was like, America was a dream. And it was, I think when my parents finally, my mom remarried, so I had a new father, he's ItalianAmerican. So my family is a product of two different immigrants, Italian and asked, I think I asked my parents if the streets are really paved with gold. You know, these are the types of things. So when we, I landed in New Jersey, well, that's where my parents moved. I went to a public school. They had another child.

You had another sister, I guess, who you'd never had met. At that point, my gosh, you did your, David, you're here. Yes, at that point, my mom had given birth less than a month before she came back to the Philippines to get my sister and me. And so when we came back to the United States, I had a new sister and I became, you know, over the years, the eldest of five children. So I had the four girls and one boy and my dad being Italian American said he didn't want his son growing up in a house full of women. No, this sounds horrible at this day and age. Right. But you know what my parents did? We had two Vietnamese foster brothers, both of whom came through the first asylum camps in the Philippines. So I had a fantastic childhood. And a lot of that time shaped me, made me who I am today. I should point out that the reason that your mom came back when she did, because the whole idea of democracy is sort of interwoven in your personal story.

The reason she came back was because Ferdinand Marcos had declared martial law in the Philippines and she didn't want you and your sister to be there, and she brought you back to be part of this American experiment, as it were. Yeah, you said, so you arrived, you really weren't a fluent English speaker. How was that, arriving in Tom's River, New Jersey? You're 10 years old. You're thrust into school. You're different. You're the other. Yes. You know, my teachers told me I didn't speak for a year. I mean, because English is not my first language. I mean, in my home in the Philippines with my grandparents, we spoke Filipino, Tagalog. And when I landed in New Jersey and snow, right? I mean, like, and I walked into my classroom, I was at four foot two at that point, the shortest, only brown kid in the class.

I knew I was different. And so I think I retreated a little bit to learn, to understand. And it's ironic because after the Nobel Prize was announced, my third grade teacher, so I was put into third grade and then within like a few months or so, again, quiet, but I knew I did the work I needed to do. My elementary school kicked me up, wanted me to move up to the fourth grade. So I had just gotten into the third grade and I felt very comfortable, was starting to feel comfortable. And then they're telling me, you have to leave that classroom and go to another classroom with even bigger kids and louder voices. I think that was one of the things

that shocked me. I grew up in an environment where you speak when you're spoken to. I'm not a rule breaker. So I walked in and then all of a sudden, like the easy confidence of Americans, this was new, that the kids could speak to their teachers in the way they did. This was all right, you're going to have to leave my classroom. I didn't want to. And she just said, you have to because you have to always make the choice to learn. And you have nothing more to learn in my classroom. After the Nobel Prize was announced, she emailed me. Like the last time I saw her was like in third grade. And she now lives in Oslo, you know, because she's of Norwegian heritage. So it was like, she reminded me of that time period.

So growing up was, look, I think this is part of the reason I keep track of what goes on in America. I had an amazing time. I went to school in Silver Bay Elementary School. And, you know, they knew, I guess, that we were new and we were quiet. And so they gave me free piano lessons. I remember a teacher sitting down in the room and giving me piano lessons. And that was how I began.

And you became quite a musician. Yeah. Well, you know, when you don't have the language, music is incredible. I spent hours and hours learning and then also I it was a connection to my father who was at some point I guess a concert pianist here in the Philippines so I did the things that were connected to the Philippines very strangely you know I'm very short and yet I play basketball I'm a point guard I saw that. Yeah. The list actually of your high school accomplishments are sort of mind boggling. You were a debate champ. You were class president for three years.

You were in theater. You were in orchestra, chorus, basketball, softball. And then you were voted most likely to succeed, which is pretty good for a kid who showed up when she was 10 trying to figure out how it all worked here and the language. I think this is the American dream. You know, it's strange. When I got to college, it's part of my idealism. And I know there are opportunities that were given to me that I would never have had if I had stayed here. I wouldn't be the person I am today. And so in that sense, these are experiences that I cherish that are part of what makes America, America. And I just hope we don't lose any of that.

Yeah, yeah. As the son of an immigrant, I couldn't agree more. I wanted to ask you about one thing you said. You said that learning how to play the piano was, in some ways, a link to your father, who had been a concert pianist in the Philippines. How much did you know about your father? Not very much. I mean, it's strange. I actually just got a photo of him and he's here. But it all came from my grandmother, who we stayed with when we were there. And the little that I did know, I wound up mimicking to a degree.

He played chess. I played chess. I was on the chess team. I mean, you know, it was, but that was the other thing. I don't know if you felt the same way. I guess for me, I felt like an outsider. And so in order to be there, to belong, I needed to prove that I belonged. And in some ways that was both good and bad. It's not, I mean, good in the sense that it forced me to constantly learn. And I did a lot of things and it got me, you know, it got me to where I am today. But also, you know,

it's not nice to have a devil on your shoulder, kind of just telling you, you keep going, keep going, keep going, prove you belong. But I don't, it's okay. I, looking back, there's nothing I regret in everything. You know, I did a podcast with Sanjay Gupta, who's the great medical correspondent for CNN and a wonderful guy. And he talked about growing up in an all-white suburb. And he said that he joined everything. He joined everything because he wanted to belong. And he said he never quite really felt like he belonged, but he joined everything in an attempt to belong. And he said he never quite really felt like he belonged, but he joined everything in an attempt to belong. And so what you're saying sort of resonates with that.

You went to Princeton, which we at the University of Chicago refer to as a fair school in the East. But then you chose to go back to the Philippines. And, you know, I saw a quote of yours that was interesting to me. When I'm with Americans, I feel Filipino. When I'm with Filipinos, I feel American. And it really spoke to sort of the search for identity. And so tell me about that choice that you made to return to the Philippines. So this whole thing of belonging, I think is part of it. By the time I was graduating college, I didn't really, you have to make choices in what you're going to do. So I did all the things. I was pre-med, so I applied to medical school. I applied to every single thing I

was supposed to do. I got a corporate job, which I deferred, but I wanted roots. I never felt completely American. I knew I was different. I remembered when I was in third grade, like standing in front of the mirror, saying the words so that I could say them, right? Because you don't want to stand out. And I think at some point I wished I had blonde hair and lighter skin. It's not politically correct to say it now. But back then, it was a different time. And I think part of what I realized was I wanted to go back to find home. And I really didn't set a home until I was in my 40s.

When I was 40 years old, I set this deadline for myself. You are going to choose a home. So I applied for a Fulbright the other way. And I got to the Philippines. And when I landed, I was all set to feel different, you know, and there were lots of wonderful things I loved here. It's not a cynical culture. Satire doesn't work as well. You know, I'm not

sarcasm. Also, for me, I felt sarcasm was kind of mean growing up in America. And so when I got here, it's like, okay, there's no irony. There's no sarcasm. It's like, it was easy. But then the more, then it was a whole new learning experience. I needed. I didn't have the cultural signals of being Filipino, the same way that I didn't have the cultural signals when I was 10 years old of what being an American meant. When I left the U.S. in 1986, I could hear a Jersey accent. I could hear a New York accent, and those would be subliminal signals. I landed in the Philippines, and I have no cultural signals. And I expected to be Filipino. And so I realized that, you know, it's like, you actually, I had a choice, which is I could combine. And that's what I, and it fell right into journalism. Yeah, I want to ask you about that because journalism, you know, is all about learning and discovery and storytelling. And I wondered if journalism in some ways was a way to search for your own, for your own roots, for your own, your own history. It was a way to learn for sure. I

mean, imagine David, someone pays you to ask questions, you know, and I, I remembered like, you know, a volcano Mount Merapi, this was in Indonesia where we were climbing a volcano. And when you're with CNN at that point, probably the safest way to climb an erupting volcano because you have all of the safety measures in place. And I was thinking, oh my gosh, what an, I mean, I've seen the best and the worst of people. And how incredible that a president will stop and answer your questions. That, you know, someone who, incredible people who you can stop and learn from. That's part of what kept me in journalism. I mean, the way I fell into it was in the Philippines.

I came in on Fulbright for political theater. And there's no bigger political theater in this country than reality. And so instead of just doing political theater, I walked into the government station, then a classmate of mine from third grade brought me in, and she was an anchor and I was like, oh my gosh, I think I can learn how to, I can learn about this country through being a journalist. And that's what I did. And that's how I learned all of Southeast Asia. CNN gave me the opportunity to stay here. It was almost 20 years. I was the bureau chief in Manila for almost a decade. I opened it in 87, 88. And then in 1995, I opened the Jakarta Bureau. And each time, that's when you realize, I think this is the fun part, which I know you land in a country, you know nothing about it.

That's the closest, right? It's like you have an empty slate. And then you understand it in a whole different way versus having preconceptions and stereotypes. Later, the stereotypes become shorthand. But the discovery, that's what journalism was for me. And it was incredible. The other thing that it did was, you know, it came with a set of standards and ethics, which really infused the person I became. So it was, and I guess, so I walked into the government station, I worked with the government station for a year or so. And then the this private station, the largest in the Philippines later on ABS-CBN, which I would come back to head after I left CNN. But I did that for a year or so. And then we set up our own startup.

But in the 80s, you don't call a company a startup. You know, I wanted to, and again, look at how the U.S. influenced me. I wanted to have a version of 60 Minutes. We didn't have a 60 Minutes in the Philippines at that point. And so we created it. And I was in my 20s. Yeah. And that was pretty incredible, you know.

We're going to take a short break, and we'll be right back with more of the Axe Files. And now, back to the show. You talk about learning and you talk about storytelling. I know when you went to Jakarta, and part of the time you were there was after 9-11, and you were doing a great deal of investigating, and you wrote a book about this, about Al-Qaeda and some of its activities in Southeast Asia. Tell me what you learned about democracy from your early explorations in the Philippines through your time in Jakarta covering the whole region. What lessons did you draw that would be useful to you moving forward? Oh, what a fantastic question. But wow, let me step back. I mean, look, I felt like I had a front row seat

to history because I covered the pendulum swing, you know, from dictatorship to democracy happened in 1986 in the Philippines. It was the end of almost 21 years of Marcos's rule and the people power revolt that ousted. And of course, 36 years later, Ferdinand Marcos Jr. and the people power revolt that ousted. And of course, 36 years later, Ferdinand Marcos Jr. is now a front runner for president. But in 1986, people power happened and it sparked, it seemed like this global movement, right? Because from here to Korea to, I mean, all the way to the Velvet Revolution, I mean, Vacáclav Havel credited the Philippine People Power Revolt with that.

And the Berlin Wall falling. The Berlin Wall fell in 89. I mean, I think that I learned several things. Traveling through the countries in Southeast Asia, I covered the transition of kind of authoritarian one-man rule from authoritarian one-man rule to democracy of the Southeast Asian countries that I still cover today. The Philippines, Indonesia, the end of almost 32 years of Suharto's rule. Singapore, the end of Lee Kuan Yew and his transition. Mahathir, Prime Minister Mahathir in Malaysia, who then came back as Prime Minister a few years ago. So look, it was incredible. I felt like, what did I learn? It's a pendulum swing.

You know, if you have authoritarian rule and you let it go, the pendulum swings wildly, trying to find equilibrium because you have a people who have been oppressed or repressed. You have an educational system where speaking up, where demanding your rights gets you in trouble. You have media that is used to censorship. So in that time period from 1986 to 1995, the fall of Suharto was 1998, I knew that repressive rule stifles individual growth, stifles education, creates a seeming sense of forward progress for the nation. But as we've seen, power without any checks and balances tends to also be bad governance because without these checks and balances, it's almost human nature. What's that phrase?

Absolute power corrupts absolutely. So that was kind of like the end of the 32 years of Suharto's rule. And then what was interesting is after that ended in 1998, we had four new presidents in four years. And then you had, like, I think in that time period, all the way until 2000, every week I would be going to a different city in Indonesia's then 27 provinces, and there would be repressed violence that erupted in open violence. And that would be economic violence, sectarian ethnic violence, religious violence, and fights for independence. So when you oppress to that point, you let it go, it pops. Indonesia has moved from that. But I guess the last thing I'll say is the role of a free press. That's exactly where I was going. Yeah.

So by 2000, I was covering Southeast Asia, North Asia, South Asia. And one of the things I realized is that the quality of a democracy is deeply connected to the quality of its journalists. And these are the times when it was much simpler. Life was simpler. The checks and balances worked. We all believed democracy would continue growing, Francis. And in every country I went to, when journalists couldn, for example, is still under military rule. I mean, we've had, gosh. So anyway, let me go back to the quality of a journalist, the quality of the Philippines as my home. Because in 2003 or 2004, I had had my fill of breaking news. You know, when you're a reporter for CNN, especially during that time period, your life is not your own. I mean, I went through a period of time.

You're saying that in Ukraine right now. Your life is not your own, you know. And actually one, and I hate to say that, you know, Americans at least now are real recognizing again, what journalists do, you know, this is what the mission of journalism has never been as important as it is today. But so having said that, when I was trying to decide where home was, part of the reason I chose the Philippines was I looked at our two countries, America and the Philippines. And where the role journalism played, I felt like America at that time period was, you know, your institutions were already built. And in many ways, journalism was covering kind of the decay. That's the way I looked at it from outside. Then I looked at the Philippines and I saw, my gosh, this is a country that was still building its institutions.

And so that's part of the reason I decided to take this job to head the largest network in this country because I felt like I was old enough to have real experience and yet young enough to not worry about working. So I could still work 24-hour days. And I had this great ambition that we could create a world-class Filipino network that would, and we did. I mean, we had a Filipino diaspora that we, that we served. And so that's why in at the end of 2004, I decided to take a job in the Philippines, make this my home, I hit my deadline of, of making that decision at 40 years old. The connection to the US is always there. I'm a citizen of both worlds. But I felt like as a journalist, well, look where I am today, but I felt as a journalist that I could do more in the Philippines. And I think the one thing we had growing up as a journalist in Southeast Asia, working for an American network, an international

network, and then coming back to the Philippines to head the largest network, I was very, very aware of the critical role journalists played. And a lot of the discussion and the network, I was very, very aware of the critical role journalists played. And a lot of the discussion and the debate that I was watching in America, a lot of the things that were destroyed by technology and the incentive structure of technology platforms and its impact on journalism, these things were not murky to me. It's very clear because in the Philippines, when I came back, because our justice system was so weak, because governance, because we had endemic corruption and weak institutions, the media was the one institutions Filipinos went to for justice, right? At the very least, they can speak, they can ask for justice, and they can

elevate their story, their cause, their problem to the people. Which is absolutely critical to any functioning democracy. I speak now as a former and quasi-now journalist, but the role of journalism is to shine a light in dark corners and without it it's very hard for democracies to function we're going to talk more about that in a second but tell me about why you left this job running a thousand journalists or whatever the number it was some fantastic number in the largest network in the philippines to start rappler uh in 2011 2012 in that period so at that, almost all of my experience was with big corporate news. And when I was running ABS-CBN, it was fantastic. I mean,

you know, I went from being a reporter to being able to set policy. I wanted to try to build, and we did. And it was a perfect time. We put in standards and ethics manual. We brought in and reinvigorated our journalists. But the reason I left is precisely why big news groups anywhere around the world have a hard time pivoting quickly to technology. The very things that made a traditional news group successful, which is workflows, which are efficiency, that's how you manage a large traditional news group, you make it efficient, right? But efficiency is the opposite of what the internet was demanding at that point in time. At that point in time, you put your third string on the internet,

your youngest or your people who aren't going to be able to make quick decisions on your primetime newscast. You put your best people on your primetime newscast. So I was realizing at that point that the internet was a massive force that could revolutionize everything. And I believed for good. So turning ABS-CBN, a large corporate news organization, was like trying to turn the Titanic, you know, and it really felt that way. And I could see it, you know, it would take, you know, if you have a new idea, it would take six months to make it a reality. In Rappler, we have an idea by next week, it's a reality. And so this was part of it. It was just an experiment. At a certain point, I think it was around 2010, 2011, I had left to write my second book. It was called From Bin Laden to Facebook. Yes, I want to talk about that next. Sorry, now you're really going in my life. Thank you, David. Just trying to sell some books here. No, but the reason I left ABS was because

running it efficiently as a news manager. I had done all of the reforms we had put in place, the standards, created a standards and ethics manual. And then I realized if I kept managing this group as the news head, it would be a P&L statement. And to keep a P&L statement, a profit and loss, then it's not quite the journalism that I want to do. And then I saw the internet. And I was like, okay, that's where we experiment. And my colleagues and I actually, former colleagues from ABS-CBN, we were talking about it. And we decided to just take a risk, you know, because we figured, you know, what, if it doesn't work, we'll spend a year of our lives experimenting. And then we can go back to where we are, we can go back, we can, you know, we can

go anywhere else we wanted to do and just be traditional journalists. But who would have thought if it worked? Oh my gosh, and here I still am. So Rappler turned 10 in January. We're 10 years old. Yes. And what an impact you've had. You talked about recognizing in the internet and in digital digital the ability to have a great impact. And I'm sure that's particularly true with younger viewers and younger participants. But you also talked about the darker side of the Internet. And so let's go back to that book that you wrote in 2012, because the name is meaningful from Bin Laden to Facebook. Talk about that. Talk about the title of that book and the essence of it.

In many ways, many strands of my life converged. I spent the last few years, since 2001, after 9-11, I really focused on the spread of this virulent ideology of al-Qaeda and how it took homegrown groups in Southeast Asia and pulled them together into this global jihad against the West. Jama'at Islamiyah, which was essentially al-Qaeda's arm in Southeast Asia, had all of these plots that were infused with that virulent ideology. That was how I learned about radicalization. That was how I learned about how one person can behave very differently. But when you put that person in a group, you know, it's not just peer pressure.

It's a person in a group. And the larger the group, the more pressure it exists. A group exerts pressure on each one of us. So, you know, in looking at how Al-Qaeda and Jama'at Islam to the point of understanding the impact on large groups of people, emergent human behavior. I went further. I worked at the core lab at the Naval Postgraduate School to kind of look at how we're able to track this on a map. I learned how to map this. And again, you're looking at terrorists, right? But imagine, while we were doing that, I started thinking, oh my gosh, this kind of radicalization,

this spreads. There's a great book by a Harvard professor, Nicholas Christakis. It's called Connected. He talked about the three degrees of influence rule, which was, they had this huge database, the Framingham, Massachusetts, the Framingham study, right? It was a heart study. And then what they did is they were able to show that emotions spread through three degrees of influence, any emotion, right? So anger, happy. If you're angry, happy. If you smoke, behavior spreads through three degrees of influence. Even loneliness.

You would think if you're lonely, you're not actually connected to anyone else. But if I'm lonely, my friend has something like a 54% chance of feeling lonely because I am. My friend's friend has like a 25% chance of feeling lonely because I do. And then my friend's friend's friend, third degree, has a 15% chance of feeling lonely because I do. So anyway, so I was looking at all of that. And then I thought, oh, my gosh, why can't we use this for good? Right. And that was the work I had done with CNN, and then I dove deeper in Southeast Asia. And one of the things that was fascinating was in 2011, a Filipino jihadist in Mindanao put up a YouTube video. In Arabic, he says he tries to recruit jihadists all around the world to come to Mindanao, an island in the southern Philippines, for jihad. And that was the beginning of this.

And actually, the book came out right around the time that ISIS was making. And you could see it. Our groups are homegrown groups in the southern Philippines, not only asked in Arabic for jihadists to come here, but they also adopted the same techniques because the internet was doing this. And in, my gosh, when would this be? Shortly after that, I think the Eastern Vilaya of ISIS, groups had claimed that they had set up in the Philippines. And then, of course, you know that in 2017, jihadists did take over a city in the southern Philippines in Marawi and essentially devastated it. Martial law was declared by President Duterte. And then the people who live in Marawi still haven't been able to return to their homes. We're going to take a short break and we'll be right back with more of the Axe Files. And now back to the show. So Facebook became the platform on which Rappler really was built, grew.

You became this really trusted and important news source in the Philippines. You were doing your job, as I said, shining a bright light in dark places. That included covering the government and sometimes covering government corruption. And along comes Duterte in 2015, 2016. He was a mayor. He was a populist. He was running on a virulent anti-crime platform. You interviewed him as a mayor back then. Did you see him as an emerging force?

Did you see what was coming? In the late 80s, I think that was the first time I interviewed him, he had a reputation of vigilante killings, right? This was how crime was controlled, how terrorism, in quotes quotes was controlled in Davao city, which is a city of about a million people in Mindanao. Um, I interviewed him again in 2015 before he declared he would run for president. And he told you he killed people. He did. But the first thing he did was to remind me of that interview we did in the late 80s. And, you know, it wasn't flattering story. It wasn't because it was, again, the same ideas of, you know, strong man, but he remembered it. And, you know, he had, by that point, people of his generation knew my work

with CNN. So we kind of chit chatted, and then we did the interview and yes you're right in this interview on camera before he declared he would run for president he admitted that he killed people like very nonchalantly and admitted that he killed three people in particular and you know i asked i asked him all about all these contradictions that he was supposed, if he were to run for president, he would uphold the Constitution. But then how can he then admit that he would kill people? But I think the key part of his philosophy was that the way to lead in the Philippines was through fear and violence. And I followed up. After he became president, I was still one of four journalists

he gave an interview to in December after he took office in December 2016 in the palace. And he just, again, this is his philosophy. He believed that Filipinos are unruly, will not follow rules unless there's a strong leader who leads with fear and violence, which is exactly what he did.

And by the way, he did fulfill his promise of killing. Right, which you cataloged extensively. But there was obviously a market for that as well. There was the whole notion of eradicating crime and drugs, was there not? Yeah. Well, you can look at this again, right? Before then Mayor Duterte ran for president, the top concern of Filipinos in every survey are jobs, number one. Jobs, number two, health. During the campaign of Mayor Duterte, the number one jobs number two health um during the campaign of of mayor duterte the number one concern became drugs so you could see it duterte was also the first to use social media effectively

and win the office right and it wasn't we should point out that every everybody in the philippines is on facebook a hundred percent that's correct that That's correct. And, you know, up until January this year, this was the sixth year in a row that Filipinos spent the most time online and on social media globally, you know, this year it's over 80 million Filipinos on Facebook. But if 100% of Filipinos are on the Internet and 100% are on Facebook, sorry, 100% of Filipinos on the Internet are on Facebook. So Facebook is essentially our Internet. And that was part of the reason we focused on you because as you began to, you know, rigorously expose these extra constitutional killings, these essentially vigilantism on the part of the government, he became more and more agitated about your coverage. coverage he expelled or tried to expel uh what your reporters uh from the palace from covering him and you you suddenly found yourself uh on the receiving end of a social media sort of hate campaign uh talk about that and your your realization of what was happening, because that's really central to everything that you're doing now in terms of trying to expose the dangers to democracies and to journalists trying to cover democracy and to truth, which is the core of it all, of these campaigns. Again, I guess it's like a front row seat to the worst of what social media can do. You know, it's a front row seat to history. Again, you don't know all the attacks until

you're the target of attacks, because that's the way social media is set up. And in 2016, when we did this three-part series of the weaponization of the internet, I began to receive an average of 90, nine zero hate messages per hour. As a traditional journalist, I was shocked, right? And I thought, oh my gosh, you know, in fact, it did what it was supposed to do, which was to pound my spirit, to pound me to silence for two weeks, only for two weeks, which was the time it took me to figure out what the heck was happening, right? Because if you're the journalist, you have to then say, you know, maybe I am doing something wrong. Did I do something wrong? Because who knew? At that point, it was so new. I didn't know whether it was real

or not. And so we looked at it. And by the time we got the data, so it took me that long. That's when I realized, okay, this is a campaign. This is being used to pound me to silence. Okay. So what did I learn in that time period? Information operations. This is what the social media platforms enabled and targeted information operations. I think the reason why I am so adamant is because not only is this data driven, but I had three roles, three roles in Rappler that one person normally wouldn't have, right? So I was running the company.

I was building, meaning I could see the business model, right? So I could see the impact of the technology platforms on the business of news. I was building the technology of Rappler. And then the last part is because I'm a journalist exposing this stuff, I was also the target of it. And these are the things I learned. I learned that women in general, and this is our data showed this women in the Philippines were targeted at least 10 times more than men. is on a scale that we have never seen before. And this was with UNESCO. UNESCO and the International Center for Journalists actually did a big data case study of the attacks against me. And almost half a million.

Awful, misogynist, violent, terrible stuff. It was dehumanizing. I mean, that was the end goal. And that dehumanization allows two things, right? So first, the findings were 60% of the attacks were meant to tear down my credibility. I suppose that's a backhanded compliment for the people running the information operations. So 60% to tear down my credibility. 40% were meant to tear down my credibility 40 percent was were meant to tear down my spirit you know

things like my head on on human genitals right it was pretty if you first and you don't know you're kind of ashamed you know it took me a little while to begin to speak about this because some of it you you the first step, especially for women, I think, is to think, did I do something wrong? And so it took me almost a year before I realized, oh my God, it's not just happening to me. It is happening to all. That's when I began to speak publicly about it. All right. So what does that mean? This is death by a thousand cuts of our democracy, because what I saw firsthand is the replacement of one narrative, i.e. my ability to do a story, to pound me to silence, and then replace that with another narrative, a false narrative. And in this

case, it was journalist equals criminal, right? I'm not a criminal. I'm a journalist. And yet when you pound a million times journalist equals criminal, not only does it tear down the profession of journalism, but it makes you doubt me and journalists, right? So it's insidious. I mean, when you trace these, you did really in-depth sort of work in terms of tracing the provenance of these conspiracy theories and these attacks, and they clearly were orchestrated and they were connected. And a lot of them were generated by bots, but they had the viral impact that was sought. And I presume that you ascribe them

to the government itself, to Duterte and his supporters. Yes, we can see the networks. That was the other part, right? And they were Duterte networks and Marcos networks working hand in hand. So, I mean, I guess those are the aligned interests. But look, the Philippines is strange. I mean, in the United States, there were a lot more bots that were used. But the Philippines, even before 2016, had a larger, this is in the Facebook disclosures to regulatory agencies in the United States. The Philippines has a higher than average number of fake accounts. So there were fake accounts. And then the third part, and this we shared with

Facebook, you know, it's these are real people, some of them, some of them are paid in quotes, and I'll put that in quotes, right? Some of them are working for government. So this whole thing of like real harm done by real people, this was a concept Facebook wasn't even willing to accept in 2016, right? So when a real person lies, is that person liable, right? If they're part of a coordinated information camp operations against someone, is that person liable? And will the platform take action on something like that? Look, it took almost five years. By December last year, Facebook came out with a policy called brigading. When real people attack like a dog whistle, when they attack a real person, those are real harms. And so this whole idea that this is only bots or they're not real,

this is all very real. Anyway, sorry, I diverged from your question. No, no, but you know, as we, you must have, by the way, when you watch what happened on January 6th in Washington, that must have been very familiar to you. It was when Silicon Valley since came home to roost. And I hated seeing it because it was the logical conclusion of the policies that were in place of what was, this is, you know, David, you heard me say, it's like an atom bomb exploded in our information ecosystem, but let me phrase it another way. It's like there's somebody nudging every single person on these platforms to hate, to anger. These things pop into the real world. They change who we are.

Explain why this model works for the platforms. It works for the platforms because it makes them the most money. So this is, so, you know, all of it is the model, what the platforms want you to do, the tech platforms, is to stay on your phone on their platform scrolling. What keeps you scrolling the longest is when you get angry. And when you get angry, you also share the most. So when you do that, but is that good for you? It's the right question.

It's the right question. It's not, right? So this is what happened. And every study has already shown this, is that the kind of content. So this is an MIT study in 2018 that showed that lies laced with anger and hate spread faster and further than facts. So just think of that, right? That these platforms actually give the lie preferential treatment for distribution. Okay, now when you don't have facts, you can't have truth, you can't have trust. Well, there goes democracy. Yes. You know, Donald Trump did an interview with Leslie Stahl back in 2016 after he was elected. And before the interview, she asked

him why he kept attacking the media. She said it was tiresome. Why was he doing it? And he said, because I don't want people to believe you when you say bad things about me. And in a sense, that's the essence of it, isn't it? That if you impeach the trusted sources of information and facts, then you get to tell people what the facts are, that you can create alternative facts, which is a phrase that his people used. Exactly. The Internet phrase is gaslighting. Right. If they're corrupt, they say you're corrupt. If they're lying, they say you're lying.

And the goal, of course, what happens then is nobody, our people in a democracy have no idea whom to believe, right? Because you tear that apart. But you ask, you know, why do the platforms do this? Because their business model, a business model called surveillance capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff wrote a 750-page book about this, right? Essentially, they take our private experiences and then use machine learning to build a model of us. Those models know us better than we know ourselves. Those models are then all collected and organized by artificial intelligence. So let's say that that is the mother load. The companies then say they own your data. And then that data is what is used by the

algorithms of amplification to decide what content you get. What you get. Yeah, what you get. And so it pushes this inflammatory material your way, regardless of whether it's true or not, because that keeps you online. So in that sense, their business model conspires with the aspirations of autocrats who want to rally their forces, divide their opposition, and undermine the media. Let me ask you, though, about, just returning to your experience, because if that were the only thing that was going on in your life and in the life of your media world, your media ecosystem there, it would be bad enough. But you've also been targeted by the government, you and Rappler,

and you've now been, I guess, issued, what, 10 arrest warrants on various charges, some alleged tax evasion, some cyber crimes. You were convicted of a cyber crime, although the law that you were convicted of wasn't even in place when the story that you didn't even write was written. Am I getting the facts right on that? Yes, you are. I think that's a case you're appealing right now. Yes, exactly, exactly. What was the third category of cases?

Cyber crimes, tax evasion, oh, and foreign ownership. Exactly. What was the third category of cases? Cybercrimes, tax evasion. Oh, and foreign ownership. Correct. Right. So none of these are true, but it has, you are now, as we speak today, you are subject to, if you were to be convicted on all of these charges, to 100 years in prison. There are long prison terms associated with many of these charges, 100 years in prison. There are long prison terms associated with many of these charges, including the one you were convicted of, that you're now appealing. How do you cope with that? And you've been traveling from the Philippines. You have to ask the government for permission to leave each time. I understand once your mother was ill, there was some reluctance to let you go. But why do you come back? Why do you come back

knowing that your freedom could be taken away from you? It's like a high stakes game of chicken. You know. Except it's not a game, it's your life It is my life But the reason it's easier to think about it like that Is that if I veer off, I lose If I lose, Rappler loses If Rappler loses, the chilling effect is already Siberia But that means no news group in the Philippines will stand up for it, right? The cascading failure is far worse than the threat that's hanging above me. I can deal with the

threat because I've got to believe that the weaponization of the law has got to end, right? That there will be accountability and maybe I'm foolish, but look, I think, so there are two things that I wanted to just, you know, from, to finish what we were just saying, you know, what the internet does, because these all feed into each other. What the internet, what social media does is to actually like take all your emotions and it's insidiously manipulating you, but the motion of moral outrage is what's kind of pushed out of you in this age of abundance, right? Moral outrage is what's pulled up. And then what does moral

outrage become? Mob rule. So to go back to what we saw on January 6th, right? There is no difference between mob rule in the virtual world and mob rule in the real world. This is the worst of human nature. It is like being infected by a virus and being sick and having your worldview altered, right? Your worldview has changed and it takes far more to cure you. And I don't mean that in any weird mind way. It's just, it takes far more to cure you. And I don't mean that in any weird mind way. It's just, it takes far more to return you to reality than it is to let you use your cognitive bias to then say, I don't trust anything else. You're just manipulating me after you've already been manipulated. So that's the state of our world. I understand. And we should point out that this is the business model of these platforms. They're neutral when it comes to these issues because they're built to make money,

or at least the companies are built to make money and they're making lots of money. And so it's going to take regulation. It's going to take governments to step in and create standards that they have to follow and enforce those standards. But I don't want to leave. You switched the subject from you. I come back. Yeah, no, no, no. No, no. I saw what you did there. You're so funny. But listen, I mean, I worry about you. Everybody worries about you. I saw when you returned,

I watched the film A Thousand Cuts, which I recommend to everyone, the documentary about you. And I saw I was so compelled by the young journalists who work for you. I'm sure some of what draws you back is a little what keeps Zelensky in Ukraine, which is people are watching you and you're the leader. And so their courage is reliant on your courage. You know, I also was struck speaking of Ukraine by the fact that you won the Nobel Prize in 2021, the Nobel Peace Prize, deservedly so, in conjunction with a Russian journalist, Dmitry Muratov, and really on behalf of valiant journalists everywhere, he was just attacked on a train in Russia for the work that he's done. We all know what's going on there. Where is this all going? You've got an election in a few weeks in the Philippines. Marcos is leading now. He is hoping to succeed. Duterte is running with Duterte's daughter as his running mate. It seems like a continuation of what we've had. Give me hope for you, for democracy in the Philippines, and for journalism everywhere. Oh my gosh. Well, first, thank you for all of the, I mean, for encapsulating it. I think that several strands, you know, the first is that you should have hope because R live in today, it's like I'm Alice in Wonderland.

I fell into the rabbit hole and I'm just walking through. And the queen is saying off with her head, off with her head. And you just walk through and you just hope that you come out of the rabbit hole on the other side and that the world is normal. Right. Do you allow yourself to think about what might happen that you might end up spending a long period of time in prison? Yes, yes. And it's part of the reason Amal Clooney and I have a team of lawyers that are prepared. And I always, again, I'll joke because it's easier to joke than it is to actually go spot on. I joke that if I do go to jail, please make sure no longer than a year. I have done nothing wrong, But you have to be prepared

for worst case scenarios. I think the way I've dealt with this whole time is just like, okay, let me imagine the worst thing that can happen. Let me prepare myself mentally for it, emotionally for it. And then if it happens, then I'm ready. And if it doesn't happen, here's the upside. You're actually happy. I mean mean if the worst things don't happen right so that's a coping mechanism yes i know uh but it is what it is right like i feel like what we have done though is we have a company of about 100 people the median age in rattlers 23 years old and i am 58 just so you know you know know, I'm much older than I am. But a young 58, yes. Yes, but look, our reporters are incredible.

Yes, yes, they are. That was manifest in that film. I want to thank you and them and journalists everywhere who are risking so much to tell the stories that need to be told. And you are soldiers of democracy. And there are those of us who need only to vote, right? Who need only to express ourselves in public forums and take advantage of the democracy that we have in order to bring about change in the social media space and change and strengthening these institutions. And for us, you ought to be an inspiration. You're willing to risk everything.

And all we have to do is engage. And I hope that everybody who listens to this podcast takes that from our conversation. We are inspired by you and your colleagues and just wish you all the best. I mean, thank you. But I think that it's, that's the question. And I left the audience with this, which is, you know, this is that time where it's a person-to-person defense

of our democracy, right? A vote, our vote for president, we're going to elect 18,000 positions, including the president and the vice president. So the Philippine constitution is patterned after the United States. We have a bill of rights. And on May 9th, what will happen in this country will be emblematic of all of the ills. And if we squeak by,

which by the way is what the United States did in your last elections, you squeaked by and your institutions are stronger than ours. So if we squeak by, I mean, think about what's at stake on May 9th for us, right? We have a candidate who's leading in the surveys, but he's leading because disinformation networks have systematically changed history in front of our eyes. Turning Ferdinand Marcos, the leader who declared martial law and created a kleptocracy, stole, according to the Philippine government, up to $10 billion in 1986 numbers. Ferdinand Marcos was ousted in People Power and his son, Ferdinand Marcos Jr. His namesake, yes.

His namesake is now poised as the front runner, right? But like Zelensky, we're seeing something interesting happen again. And it began at the beginning of March. The woman who comes in a distant second is again a widow, and this time a lawyer, the vice president of the country. And I interviewed her. And she said that, you know, she felt this passion. And what we've seen, at least, is crowds now coming, hundreds of thousands coming to her rallies, people going door to door. That doesn't happen in the Philippines. And she said, why didn't this happen earlier? And I think kind of like Zelensky, the response I had was, well, it's the leader, right?

Why didn't you lead earlier? And this is, I think I was saying this when we were together. So it's, what is it, chicken or the egg, right? What are voters? But let me end with one last thing, which is really critically important here. Filipinos who are going to the polls, French, France is going to the polls right now, right? How are we going to vote if we don't have the facts? That's the original sin. And that sin is being committed by American companies, that these tech companies that are making a lot of money using a business model that insidiously manipulates our emotions so that our reality is changed. That's kind of unconscionable. It is and dangerous, as you point out, for our democracy. Maria Ressa, God bless you. We are with you and the people of Philippines. We know that what happens there, like pandemics,

we are connected. What happens there happens elsewhere. We've experienced it. We will be watching closely and we will be rooting for the forces of democracy and we will be rooting for you. Thank you. Thanks for having me, David. Thank you for listening to The Axe Files, brought to you by the University of Chicago Institute of Politics and CNN Audio. The executive producer of the show is Allison Siegel. The show is also produced by Miriam Finder-Annenberg, Jeff Fox, and Hannah Grace McDonald.

And special thanks to our partners at CNN, including Rafina Ahmad, Courtney Koop, Ashley Lusk, and Megan Marcus. For more programming from the IOP, visit politics.uchicago.edu.