Make Authoritarianism Great Again? with Maria Ressa

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And new episodes Sundays on CBS. Hey everybody, welcome once again to the weekly show podcast my name is Jon Stewart I will be your host we are coming to you what day is today Wednesday morning no yeah Wednesday morning it's going to come out tomorrow I think that President Trump is still speaking he's just wrapping up now He's just now, he's giving out some cars.
And I was, last night, he's so much better at this than, oh, the sweet, sweet Democrats with their protest hatched in some high school theater workshop or wherever it is that they got. hey man, I've got some magic markers in my locker.
Why don't we just write phrases on postcards? And while the president is honoring people who've lost their children and Gold Star families and giving people West Point commendations, I'm just going to hold up a handwritten sign that says, I'm sad. This isn't right.
Oh, we're fucked. It is.
It is. And that's why here's, here's why I'm very excited about today's show.
The guest that we have today is someone whose spirit is indomitable somebody who is vital

and working hard to create the type of world that they think is fairer and more just and all those things and our guest today is doing just that and i think is absolutely outlining a coherent and very clear-eyed view of what is happening and strategies to get back to a more constitutional and free and fair world. And I think, boy, she is the antithesis of writing dumb shit on placards and holding them up.
So I'm just going to get to her because I just love her and I just want to hear her thoughts on all that is happening within this volatile time. So let's just go.
Ladies and gentlemen, there is really, there are very few people that I want to talk to right now, to be perfectly frank. But there is no one I'd rather talk to than our guest, Maria Ressa, whose resilience, whose spirit I just, I so appreciate and love.
Nobel Peace Prize winner, Rappler CEO, Columbia University professor, Maria Ressa is joining us. How are you?

I'm good. Hi, John.
It is always good to talk to you. It is a delight.
Maria, your experience throughout you being in the Philippines and going through the trials and tribulations that they put you through for the crime of saying things you think, you know, terrible, Maria.

I don't know if you know that. Terrible, terrible crime to commit, but saying things you think.
As you're watching things unfold in the United States right now, how are you processing all this? I mean, this is the second time I've gone through it in my two countries, right?

And it's very familiar.

I mean, we saw this first in the elections, even in the speed of the elections, but then

this death by a thousand cuts.

And I think what's worse is it's accelerated.

So, you know, in the Philippines in 2016, under President Rodrigo Duterte, he consolidated

power.

The Philippines has a constitution just like the United States, three branches of government

And In 2016, under President Rodrigo Duterte, he consolidated power. The Philippines has a constitution just like the United States, three branches of government, a Bill of Rights, freedom of the press enshrined in that, freedom of expression.
And what he did after he took office, very similar to this, within a month or so, he went to Beijing and then he pivoted. He just announced, without telling our Department of Foreign Affairs, he pivoted from the United States to China and Russia, shot the entire country.
And then after that, what happened is within six months, the checks and balances of the three branches of government collapsed. And Rodrigo Duterte became the most powerful leader the Philippines has ever had.
And he probably would have stayed in power if the military had gone with him. So to see this happening again.
You know, Maria, I was really, I thought this was going to be a slightly more optimistic view. I didn't know you were going to break it down that quickly.
First of all, it's so interesting because, you know, Trump was very clearly on the side of Duterte. And I did not realize that he had pivoted so quickly to Russia and China in the same way that, in some respects, you know, we've pivoted to Russia.
Was Duterte a sort of political alignment, a front runner of this?

I hate to call it a new world order, but that idea of these illiberal democracies with constitutions being run by unitary executives, is that how the world is carved up in this new order? It has been happening. If we are, we were paying attention, it's been happening.
I mean, you know, really as of last year, 71% of the world is now under authoritarian rule. That's from VDEM in Sweden, 71%.
And that was before the more than 70 elections that happened last year that brought Donald Trump 2.0 into office, right? And then what we're seeing, and again, you'll see this, this is what we live through in the Philippines. Once an autocrat to be is democratically elected, so we are electing illiberal leaders democratically.
Once they're elected, they crush the institutions in their own country, but they don't stay in their own country, right? They ally with different, and what we saw in the Philippines was China and Russia. And then beyond that, I think the next step, and you're seeing this in the United States, it's fast track.
We started calling it the broligarchy.

But, you know, in the Philippines, the first dictatorship, our first Marcos, we called them cronies. Outgoing President Biden talked about a tech oligarchy.
But in every country, whether it's Hungary or Turkey or the leader after the institutions collapse, then brings his allies, creates a new oligarchy using state largesse. Right.
This is feudalism, but more than feudalism. Right.
To the victor goes the spoils to a certain extent. Right.
It begins the kleptocracy. Right.
So I think what's even more alarming in the United States is that it brings together what the match that set the world on fire, which is technology. And John, you know, we've been raising the alarm on this since 2016.
And that has led to where we are today. So Madeleine Albright called it slicing the salami in my country.

What?

Slicing the salami because, you know, you slice a bit of it and then democracy's gone.

Right, right, right.

Right?

No, I, yeah, I see what you're saying.

I know.

Sorry, I'm not so funny in the morning.

We're in this geopolitical realpolitik.

You're talking about how the erosion of democracy and then to throw in a deli reference, I think just threw me off for a second. Oh my God, I made you laugh.
See, there you go. That's all you need.
It's so, you know, the Philippines is such an interesting example in my mind, because you're right, there was a volatility always for the philippines between sort of when it became

a constitutional democracy but also you you lived under martial law under under marcos for so long yeah which you know again it's that idea of like right now i mean trump is not a super popular president. This is not Reagan, but he has Democratic.
He was elected democratically.

And right now he has a reasonable approval rating that you would not think, oh, the American people have rejected this pivot in large measure. I don't think they have.
And so I wonder, when you watch that happen, what is the response from the opposition? I don't know if you saw last night, the opposition appeared to be like they held up paddles with words on them or had a crayon and wrote like crayon and wrote like, this isn't normal. And you're just thinking, well, this just looks like an ad hoc high school theater group.
You know, they're going to show the principal of the school that they want their, you know, chocolate milk at lunch back. Like it seems utterly in disarray.
I think this is the danger of the moment. The world is upside down.
And let me put it in my context first, right? Like the three things that I think Americans need to think about right now is that you're looking for the Democratic Party to do it. It's not them.
It's actually at the front lines right now is the Republican Party. But I would say the two main things you have to keep in mind is that the only way you fight back is with facts and law.
Facts and law. And when we watched, for example, the Zelensky at the White House, when you begin to untangle the facts,

the main one which turned the United States into actually which was the vote the Monday before at the United Nations, where the United States voted against a basic tenet of the United Nations that the United States helped create. right? The Philippines was one of the original signatories of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the United Nations.
And you're talking about there was a resolution at the United Nations that suggested, you know, it's the three-year anniversary of the war in Ukraine. And it suggested perhaps countries shouldn't invade other countries that are sovereign.
And as you said, kind of rule one, it was commandment number one at the United Nations, why it was formed. And just to give the context of what Maria is talking about, it was the most basic of resolutions.
And the United Nations, they're not necessarily, they're certainly not binding. They don't really have any power, but there's a symbolic nature to suggesting that territory is sacrosanct and you shouldn't do it for no apparent reason.
And then go ahead, Maria, you can talk about how that vote went down. Well, the United States voted against it, voted away, voted with, if you think about it for Americans now, right, think about the shift in the way you should be looking at yourself.

It voted with some countries that it once called the axis of evil, right?

Voted with Russia, with countries that invaded and then tried to change the world by saying Ukraine is the aggressor, which is what walked into the Oval Office on that Friday. So on a Monday, the United States turned it upside down.
I don't think we paid enough attention to that. But that's like saying, well, of course, this is the impunity now, right? That's saying, so if the United States was fighting Russia before, now they're on the

same side, which-

Yeah, we flipped teams.

We flipped teams.

It was.

It was, Maria, man, I couldn't agree with you more.

I actually thought, and it did not get the kind of shock through the world that I thought

it would.

The United States voted with, I think the other countries were North Korea, Belarus, obviously Russia. Russia.
I don't know if China voted or abstained. China abstained.
Yeah, they abstained. Even China and Iran abstained.
Right? Even China abstained. Even China and Iran were not willing to go like, oh yeah, no, you're going to invade people.
That's cool. Israel voted.
I mean, does that give you a hint of what this new illiberal lineup looks like? Are we trying to figure out now who are the allied powers and who are the Axis powers? I obviously don't think it's as simple as that. I don't think the United States is suddenly now in that.
And right now it's getting a little dark, but we'll talk about some of the institutional, structural, geographical things that are positive and optimistic for the United States moving forward. And there are some, you know, I don't want to make it seem as though this is inexorable and we're just sliding towards that.
But the Philippines is such an interesting, because you guys were kind of a free agent. Yeah.
You were with the United States, then flipped over to Russia, China, and you are strategically so important. Look, I guess what I'm saying is, and this isn't bleak or not, right? It is, what should American citizens be doing right now, which is that if you don't stand up for your rights right now, you will only get weaker over time.
This is the lesson we learned in the Philippines, because all of these moves that are happening now are changing our world. It's not just America.
It's the entire world. So the rest of the world, when this happened, I think we saw it and we clocked it.
And you can see almost the immediate reaction over the weekend after the White House, Europe kicked in. There's always a grain of truth in what President Trump says.
And the office deserves the respect. You get away with things that I could not get.
So the office deserves the respect. I've always referred to President Trump.
So there's a grain of truth he takes and then uses it to flip the world. So I guess coming out of that, and this is where it isn't bleak, I think you have to embrace it and understand this moment.
How to Stand Up to a Dictator, the book that I wrote, was originally written for Filipino citizens, but it was literally a warning call for everyone because this was triggered by the public information ecosystem that we live in, which rewards corruption. It corrupts us, right? It rewards the worst of us.
If lies spread faster, if fear, anger, and hate spread, that's the way you are, what kind of world do you create? Well, this is the kind of world we create. So the last part I would just say is you have to look exactly at who is America today.
When you're taxing your closest allies, when your representatives are allying with a man who was sanctioned for invading, these are documented. These are facts.
When the facts are being shifted in front of you, what do you do as a citizen? And I think for institutions that are quickly, because not acting, silence today means consent. And the U.S.
will take the world in a whole different place. Sorry, it's not bleak.
It's just, man, wake up. Wake up.
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And we're back. For those who, you know, are maybe being introduced to Maria at this time, you know, Maria walks the walk, stood up when Duterte was in power as a journalist and was arrested and, you know, had her rights removed from her.
And it was, I'm sure it was a really frightening time for you. So in that moment, what gave you the courage, but also the fortitude to see what you were seeing and decide, I'm going to speak out no matter what the cost is? Is that a conscious decision that you make? Yeah, because I am both a Filipino and an American.
And there were moments when in about a year or so, I had 10 criminal charges that my government filed against me. Right.
And when that happened, people said, you should leave. And I couldn't leave the Philippines because, one, I run a company called Rappler, about 100, 120 people.
And I felt like when the moment comes, that's the moment that tests who you are. And I guess that's why I keep going back.
And I felt like if I had run, then my life is a lie. Standards and ethics, which is what journalism is about, right? Standards and ethics.
It's easy to have it when it's easy, but it's really when it's difficult that you have to stand up. There's this great saying in Japan and Indonesia, the nail that stands up gets the hammer.
And when it was during that time, and it was around 2018, and this was very easy, and this goes hand in hand, right? The methodology. First, social media attacks.
You say a lie a million times, it becomes a fact. And for me, the attack was journalist equals criminal.
Hashtag Arrest Maria Ressa was trended on social media. The Philippines, for six years in a row, spent, Filipinos spent the most time online and on social media globally for six years.
And that ended in 2021. So what they trended was hashtag Arrest Maria Ressa in 2017.
What was the impetus for that, Maria? This is like fertilizer for government action, and it's working so much faster in the United States. So hashtag Arrest Maria Ressa was trended by the pro Duterte networks, their networks on Facebook.
And they were accusing you of what? They just were making the connection of journalist equals criminal. Oh, wow.
That's it. I mean, it's the same narrative that President Trump in his first presidency, you know, if you're not with him, you're against him and you're against national interest.
You're an enemy of the people. That came out of Duterte's, my president's mouth as well.
But then what happened? It trended. It's like fertilizer because I was arrested two years later.
But when I was arrested, it set the ground so it was acceptable, right? You normalize this. You normalize impunity.
That's the role social media played. So the lie comes up, bubbles on social media, and then lawfare comes down, top down a year later.
That's what happened to us. So 2016, the online attacks, I was getting an average of 90, 9-0 hate messages per hour.
And then 2017, 2018, investigations. The first attempt to try to shut Raptor down was in 2018.
Within four months, we dropped 49% of our advertising revenue. In 2019, and I will always remember Valentine's Day because that's when I was able to post bail, I was arrested.
And then I just kept getting arrested. I mean, I kept getting arrest warrants.
And the charges are you were being charged with what? With reporting? With facts? How do they turn what you're reporting, your journalism, into the crime? What is the way that they criminalize information in that regard? I really, really hope America doesn't go down this route, but I worry when Doge gets sensitive information. Five criminal charges were tax evasion.
Oh, wow. I've won all of those, right? I've won those.
So they, you were like Al Capone, that they wanted to shut you down because they didn't like the fact that you were exposing layers of corruption. And rather than say, oh, it's criminal to expose our corruption, they tried to find some other dumb shit and grab you in that regard.
When rule of law breaks, it's so easy to weaponize the law. And it's been almost a decade.
What? And out of the 10 criminal charges, I have two left. One already at the Supreme Court, which could send me to jail for seven years, for up to seven years.
I have to ask the Philippine Supreme Court for permission to travel. And this particular case, I can't discuss it in any way, because those are some of my conditions.
But if you go back and look at it, I could go to jail for a story that was published before the law we supposedly violated was written. They wrote a law in response to a story and then tried to arrest you because of the story.
So they retroactively arrested you. So I can't argue this publicly.
Yeah, understood. Understood.
But I will say the goal here is to, one, to make people obey before, because all they need is an example. And you're seeing this, Tim Snyder will say, don't obey in advance.
I say, hold the line. And we actually took that away from the rightist, because the line is the line of your rights under the constitution.
Do not voluntarily give it up because when you do, you're not going to get back. Right.
So again, I go back and look at everything happening in America today. Will those USAID workers get their jobs back? You know, Elon Musk went on and said, oh yeah, we make mistakes.
And you know, like the Ebola prevention, it doesn't go back. Right? Well, that's because everybody, I mean, I think they view everybody else in the world as NPCs.
They're sort of non-playable characters. And so, you know, when your ethos is all these, these are just pieces that we're moving around on a board.
Maria, I want to ask you, you you, you said something really interesting about just obeying in advance and those kinds of things. What do you think of, I've been a little bit shocked at Zuckerberg, Bezos.
He goes into the Washington Post and he says, hey, from now on, our opinion page is not opinion. I have two pillars that I'm completely pretending I abide by, which is free markets and personal liberty or something, you know, basically a more libertarian viewpoint.
And just said, our opinion page is now those two things. That's it.
And I'm sure what he's suggesting is, and they have to be promoting those two things or whatever my vision is. And it's so antithetical to what is actually happening.
This idea that a more top-down society will increase personal liberty for people or create free markets, it's a joke. Yeah.
We're losing our rights each time. So the behavior, we'll call them the broligarchs because they are tech bros.
So that's where it comes from, like the tech bros. This is power and money and just straight out power and money building what I hope doesn't happen, which is a kleptocracy.
And Applebaum calls it an autocracy, but this is power and money. And I think what you're seeing is the obeying in advance.
I think it started with Elon Musk was way up front. And then Mark Zuckerberg followed by taking away fact checking at the start of the year, right? And they're not obeying, by the way.
I think they agree. You know, I don't even think, I think they're, they like it this way.
I think they like a unitary executive that agrees with them that there's only a certain class of people that should control all aspects of society. I would say this, this theory of strong man is something that they're very positive about.
I don't even see it as obeying. I think they've gotten permission to be who they are, that they no longer have the responsibility to pretend that they respect or think about or care about the population writ large in general.
I don't think they're doing it reluctantly. So, you know, I went to school with Jeff Bezos.
We graduated in the same class. What? What? So I think these values that they had, I think they tried, but business money was more important.
And What you're seeing is what we saw in the Philippines. It is currying favor from, as he calls himself, the king.
Because when you do that, look, this is the creation of a kleptocracy. When you do that, when you're only cutting a business deal, when it is only a quid pro quo, a corrupt government is actually easier to deal with, right? It's transactional.
Yeah. Transactional.
Quid pro quo. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Transactional, which is actually, and the United States for a long time was not like that or seemingly had these things in place. Right.
Was not explicitly that. We should be clear, this isn't a black and white.
There's always an undercurrent of kleptocracy. There is actually a stream of that that is how the world works.

And we should recognize that. This is making it explicit and saying, hey, man, this whole ethics

thing, that's a real pain in the ass. So let's just go straight.
Yeah.

And that, again, was something that President Trump paused, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

That blew my mind too, man.

And I know this because I ran a CNN bureau, right? Like you cannot, if you're an American company, bribe someone. You can't.
That's against the law. But that was paused.
So what are we saying now, America? Are you saying, yeah, it's okay, go bribe. And the way it was presented is this gets in the way of our competition.
But corruption is not competition, right?

So I guess, so to go back to what you're saying, I feel like, again, America's values have shifted.

And the question Americans have to ask is, is this the world you want? Is this the world you want your kids to grow up in? But, you know, John, we have to go back. One of the things, and it bothers me because we don't talk enough about this, how did we get to this state? And what role did the tech, we talked about these CEOs.
I do think for a while they tried.

They tried. I think they never wanted to be gatekeepers.
And that's where we're going to

start, which is in 2014. News organizations were both creating journalism and distributing

journalism. And our distribution did not corrupt you.
But in 2014, the gatekeepers changed it. Right.
It wasn't algorithmic. It wasn't your distribution was your distribution.
You wrote things, people were drawn to them. There was no thumb on the scale.
There was none of those kinds of things. We all had the same reality.
You could say they're different opinions, but the facts remained. By 2014, and this is not a coincidence that that was the same time that the metanarrative that's used to annex Crimea by Russia, and then eight years later, Putin used to invade Ukraine itself.
That metanarrative was seeded in 2014. Was that after the Maidan revolution? Is that when it became seeded? Yeah.
Yeah. And I think Putin learned from that.
So there are two ways information operations work. You see the metanarrative and then the virality is hitting it opportunistically every time, which makes it spread further.
And we have all the data behind this. So we watched history change in the Philippines and 2014 was the year, right? When Marcos, the dictator, became the greatest leader we've ever known and set the stage for the election of his only son and namesake in 2022.
So think about that. 2014, the gatekeepers changed.
Oh, wow. Yeah.
We can talk about that a little bit. But let me make sure you know this chronology.
Yeah, please, please. By 2018, which is when technology, they were making money, right? It was all about profit.
By 2018, an MIT study said that lies on social media spread six times faster. This is 2018, before Elon Musk bought Twitter.
It's significantly

worse. Six times faster.
So that's the incentive structure. Lies spread six times faster.
And then our data in the Philippines showed that if you use fear, anger, and hate, it spreads virally. So look at the incentive structure, right? And so what did it do? Our technology, artificial intelligence has been around for 70 years or so.
It isn't new, but it was how it was used by tech companies, big tech. They essentially hacked our biology, went to the thinking fast part of the way we operate.
By changing the way we feel, they changed how we see the world and the way we act, right? When you change the way you act, that goes right to how we vote. So I can also share with you like some of the studies that we've done that show this.
That has led to the 71% of the world under authoritarian rule. And then the big year of elections in 2024.
And 2025 is really when those people take office and the kind of world we're creating. And we're seeing this already.
I would say the last part is that the impact of this technology, and for the first time, the Surgeon General of the United States, the outgoing, the last one, Vivek Murthy, actually released a report on the impact on teenagers and talked about the epidemic of loneliness.

All of this making us far more malleable to the insidious manipulation of our public

information ecosystem.

So the question really is, when you vote, do you have free will? We've passed through that. And so that goes back to the tech bros.
All right. We're going to take a quick break.
We'll be right back. Okay.
We are back. You're saying there is a manipulation that is strategic and purposeful.

Boy, Maria, what's so interesting about this is it reminds me, as you were talking, of advertising in the way that, you know, you think about like the old cigarette companies. And they used to create almost cartoon mascots, you know, Joe Camel and those kinds of things, because they were trying to entice and addict young people.
Yeah. And so they designed, and I'm sure it was purposeful, and I'm sure it was based in science.
Yeah. They designed these incredibly welcoming, you know, Sucian-like characters that would, you know, like children's characters that'd be like, Hey,

you know what you could use right now, Timmy, a couple of smokes, come on, you know, and then it would get addicted. But that same principle, you said it earlier that I thought was really interesting.
They studied, what did you say? Fear, anger, and hate were the three tent posts that drove the most engagement and that incentivized it. And those three things drum up for a populist, a real, I would think, populist opportunity to harness that fear, anger, and hate and use it to consolidate power.

It's an incredibly difficult machine to break

because to a certain extent,

you're saying they've rewired the brains

for these dopamine hits of fear, anger, and hate

and use that to seed purposefully a vulnerability. Am I summing it up similarly to how you're seeing it? I can give you the data for that.
And you've just said it a different way. But here's the part, right? We did a study in the United States as Americans were getting ready to vote last year.
And we took a look at, you know, on traditional media, what were the stories across the spectrum, left, right, and center, and we used media bias fact check to look at this, the top stories that news organizations were doing that, so this would be the highest traffic. We took all those topics, and then we looked at what was happening on social media.
Three major topics that we narrowed down. It was abortion, immigration, and Gaza.
And those topics. So what happens now is the insidious manipulation, and I will call them information operations, because that's what you have been living under.
These things make more money for the platforms. These are psyops.
They're psyops. Yes.
It's what you're talking about. But let's go back to your tobacco.
Advertising was illegal. You couldn't advertise if you were tobacco.
That was my point. Once they discovered what was going on, the government came in and said, you can't do that to kids.
And that was since 2016, John, I have been asking for safety regulations. You know, I was hoping it would come from the United States that Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act gave impunity to big tech to manipulate us.
Which they would, by the way, frame as, oh no, that's just free speech.

Free speech. This is not a free speech.
Which is a very cynical interpretation when you're doing it on behalf of President Trump, who threatens to throw people in jail if they say something he doesn't care for. So let's put a pin in their principled free speech defenses.
And go back to what happened after Mark Zuckerberg took away those safeguards for greater profit and took curry favor with the incoming administration, right? Understand, sometimes it's not that they're cynical, it's that they see an opportunity for money. It's a great deal.
And they also need to protect themselves. I saw this again in the

Philippines, right? And there was a period of time where I was like, I know the CEO, I know he's principled, but if you're living in this environment of corruption, how do you survive this? Right. Self-preservation.
But here, I think they see a great opportunity to make money because the US government pushing back against EU regulations

will mean that the entire world will be far more vulnerable. Oh, God.
So the whole life, boy, if this gets us into something, I'm going to ask this. And I'm sorry to be bouncing around, but Maria, you're bringing up so many interesting and valuable and essential points, but it just popped into my head.
You mentioned

the EU. When you realign with Russia and the illiberal democracies and you weaken the EU,

is the purpose here, the EU is a far more stringent regulatory regime. They sue tech companies.
They have certain restrictions on these algorithms. They have certain things.
Is this all a play to just remove any guardrails on AI and incentivizing tech and all those different things? Is it not really about democracy versus, I don't know, autocracy? Is it really about like, I don't like that you don't let me do whatever I want to do with my company? The death of democracy is a byproduct of letting tech remain the most unregulated industry globally. Wow.
Right? This is move fast, break things under Mark Zuckerberg was their mantra. And he did break democracy.
That I lived through this. I showed the data in the Philippines.
Facebook, Twitter, though you saw the effect in the Philippines is probably a great petri dish for that because it's smaller. It's like when they do studies on fruit flies, it's something they can study more easily because it's a clearer picture.
And that was exactly what the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower called the Philippines. He said it was the petri dish.
Oh, wow. Remember Cambridge Analytica in 2018, right? That's right.
When Chris Wiley, when I spoke to him, he said that the Philippines was the testing ground. If these tactics of manipulation worked on us, then they ported them over to you, right? The real target was the United States, but we were the Petri dish.
You were a test kitchen. Yeah.
They were like, oh, let's see how the McRib works in the Philippines. And then we'll see if we can throw it out there in Lima, Ohio.
So you have to understand why we were the testing ground because we were, so our history, 300 years in a convent, 50 years in Hollywood. We were colonized.
It is funny that way. But look, we were colonized by Spain for 300 years and by the United States for 50 years.
And so almost every digital product, even with Yahoo, they tested in our country. We speak English.
And then, again, to hear the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower say this, and look at the facts, the most number of compromised accounts for Cambridge Analytica were Americans. The country with the second most number of compromised accounts was the Philippines.
Wow. And by the way, Cambridge Analytica, for those who don't know, it was an absolute right-wing ideological psyop.
Right. And by the way, Bannon's been very clear about that.
He might be the only guy in all of this that I sort of respect because he just says, this is actually what we're trying to do. And they go about and do it.
There is no pretense to any of it for him. Yeah.
And of course, he's now speaking up against Elon Musk. But wait, so I want to tell you just one thing, because there was a period of time when we thought there was something that we could do, right? Dmitry Muratov, who also won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021 with me.
In 2022, we came up with a 10-point action plan, and this was largely directed to the EU because they were putting together the Digital Services Act, the Digital Markets Act. America was really kind of lost.
The American exceptionalism gets in the way, right? You don't realize that you're the target. And now, oh my God.
Anyway, let me, so let me talk about,

let me summarize the 10 point action plan

into three buckets.

I feel like I'm watching A Beautiful Mind.

I'm just watching Maria Ressa draw the connections

and do all that and bring up the board and yeah.

John, I want you to take these facts

and make them funny

because no one is listening to them.

I'm doing my damn best. I really am.
It's just hard. The three buckets that we, and we sent this out in 300 Nobel laureate civil society groups.
This was signed, right? Number one, how do you fight back against the manipulation online, right? Because there were no laws at that point. The first is stop

surveillance for profit. Surveillance capitalism wasn't, that's the business phrase, the business name for what the tech companies were doing.
Information mining and all those things, right? And then manipulation of us, right? So stop surveillance for profit. The second one is stop-coded bias.

Because colonialism didn't die,

it only moved online.

Wow.

And so if you are marginalized in any way in the real world, if you are a woman, LGBTQ plus, if you're an ethnic minority, you're further marginalized by the code. Right.
So that's to stop coded bias. And it was largely Silicon Valley.
Then we had TikTok come in, or actually it grew during that time period. I was a lot in the EU.
The third is journalism as an antidote to tyranny. Boom.
Bars. You don't trust journalists today because we have been under attack since 2014, pretty much repeatedly.
And then what happens is the incentive structure for the distribution system of the journalism handcuffs us. So you do the crappy stuff to get distribution.
To get the clicks, man. Yeah.
It commodifies journalism and it isn't the best. Crappy journalism spreads the fastest.
Sorry. Anyway, please think about those things, right?

And then in the middle of all of that is you, your child.

This is a safety issue.

This is what tech companies do, the social media platform.

This is even before generative AI.

I was going to say, it's about to get turbocharged.

The inshittification of the internet is happening right now, right?

That's a

Cory Doctorow phrase. That's got to be a bumper sticker somewhere, but that's inshittification.
Excuse me while I scroll through my inshittification feed. It just means that we cannot tell fact from fiction.
And when you have no facts, the only government that can survive is a dictatorship. oh, Lord.
You know, Maria, I'm wondering, and by the way, you've laid this out, I think, beautifully. And I think in some ways you've given us a little bit of a way to see the matrix, if that makes sense.
You're showing us the code and how it's used by political actors to try and consolidate and gain power and continue to consolidate. You know, new media structures have always created volatility, whether it's the printing press or radio or TV or those kinds of things.
Is there a chance? You know, two questions. One, will the human brain adapt in some respects to this in-shittification so that it won't have the same powerful manipulative effect? Not to say that they won't always try and get ahead of it.
And number two, can the in-shittification be turned into in nicificationification? Can it be reverse engineered for a better outcome? And two quick answers. I think the first one is that this system that uses our thinking fast, that manipulates us, what it has done is broken down trust.
You know is an algorithm. It's a friends of friends algorithm that created more profits for the company.
They A-B tested this. So when you don't have trust, you can't tell fact from fiction, then you don't trust anyone, which means civic engagement dies.
And the friends network is what you trust. If it's sent to you from someone in your network, whether on Facebook or Twitter or whatever it is, they've got trust.
But the institution that would generally have some editorial authority does not have trust. And your friends and family actually are far more easier manipulated than the institutions which did have standards and ethics at some point, right? Like gatekeeping institutions who are legally liable.
I think that's what we're missing. But let me just, the Friends of Friends algorithm, this is what happened in the Philippines in 2016 after Rodrigo Duterte was elected.
We didn't debate the facts, we had a shared reality. But after, when the Friends of Friends algorithm grew the social media platforms, they realized that if they recommend Friends of Your Friends, you're more likely to click, to join, to grow your own network.
So in 2016, if you were pro-Duterte, you moved further right. And if you're anti-Duterte, you moved further left.
This is where the politics and culture move. And over time, this chasm grew.
So people tend to think about it as political parties. I tend to think about it as facts.
We have to go back to a fact-based shared reality. These three sentences I've said over and over, if you don't have facts, you can't have truth.
Without truth, you can't have trust. Without these three, you don't have a shared reality.
You can't have journalism. You can't have democracy.
You can't solve any problems, which is what the world, I feel like Cassandra and Sisyphus combined, John. I mean, it's like.
Boy, you could not pick a child of Cassandra and Sisyphus.

That is going to be a very stressed out household. Yeah.
But I see where you're, where you're coming from there. And I also, it's very interesting to watch because this fact-based universe that you're talking about is not as profitable given the incentive structure that you're saying there.
And so you find the institutional places where you would go to trust these news organizations are losing that battle a bit. You know, we always talk about, I view it through a legal kind of framework.
If it was, they say, well, what should the press be doing? And I always say, well, rather than chasing those other incentives, people say like, oh, we're living in two different realities. I think you put it best.
There's reality and we all live in it. Yeah.
So in my mind, journalism is simply this now. They are the people's lawyer to litigate the boundaries of our shared reality.
And that is

simply it. That is all you exist to do is litigate that reality.
Because as you said, a legal structure has evidentiary standards. And if you can't meet the evidentiary standards, because journalism is trying to keep up with the circadian rhythm of social media, it doesn't give them time to prepare their litigation and arguments.

But I would say, and this would be advice for American journalists from folks who've lived through it, you go back to facts.

By the way, I'm hearing a siren in the background, Maria, and if that's coming through,

I am very worried about you all the time. And now I hear a siren and I'm like,

what is she saying that is causing? Are they coming now?

Oh my God. Well, again, I hope America doesn't go here.
So facts are critically important

because when you're anchored in facts, we're in our shared reality. The second one is rule of law.
We've been fighting for this globally now, right? Impunity cannot be normalized because when you normalize impunity, that's the slicing, the salami, that's the death by a thousand cuts. But let me answer your second question you asked, which is, so what do we do tech-wise, right? Yes.
Three years ago, and you used Matrix. Three years ago, I realized that begging the tech companies to do the right thing was getting nowhere.
That's after being faced with legal students that was about to send me to prison for 100 years, 103 years exactly, right? And I actually went to them and as people, they were like, well, I'm sorry, Maria, you're a public figure. It's against the law, some of the things that are there.
This is a safety issue. Anyway, so what we did three years ago is we began to build a public tech stack.
Democratic governments also abdicated responsibility for the virtual world. Because the real laws in the physical world

should have just been mirrored in the virtual world because only one person lives in both worlds, right? So we went to something called the Matrix Protocol, which is something that literally it's called the Matrix Protocol. If you're interested in this, right? It's governments and militaries use the matrix protocol because it is

deceptive. Protocol.
If you're interested in this, right, it's governments and militaries use the Matrix Protocol because it is desegregated, it is safe, it has data privacy. And so little Rappler in the Philippines began to build a Matrix Protocol chat app where we can take our community and communicate with each other safely.
What are the tenets of the Matrix Protocol? What would you have to abide by to exist in the Matrix Protocol? It's kind of like blue sky, right? People are gravitating to blue sky. Blue sky uses something called the AT Protocol.
But instead of individual realities, which a basic tenet of tech is personalization, right? Everybody can design their own experience and get, yeah. Yeah, except in reality, if you have 20 people with different realities, that's called an insane asylum.
True. That cannot be in the real world.
So the matrix protocol allows us to actually have a shared reality. And we've rolled it out at December 2023.
We're getting ready. Our community is now on this chat app.
And what we're looking at is a global federation of news organizations. I think this is the only way we'll survive.
You know, having said that, again, I call on democratic nations. Where is your public tech stack?

You build libraries, but you don't protect us.

It's like putting lead in the paint again.

It's a safety issue.

And then, sorry, the last one you asked, so what do we do?

Building now is painful because events are moving so quickly.

Are we going to fall off the cliff, right?

Will what is happening to America? it's transforming the entire world already. And Americans have to really decide, and this is where it goes to what can you do, right? When the tech has allowed geopolitical power to manipulate at the cellular level of a democracy, meaning you listening, you, Jon Stewart, can be specifically targeted.
I believe I've seen that. I think I know what you're talking about.
Well, thank you. You keep going.
But the point here is that now you also have the opportunity to stand up and fight for the world you want. And I don't think it's going to be in the corrupted environment.
You know, the mayor of Paris at the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, this was a year ago or two, she said, you know, she got out of Twitter, then X, because she called it a sewer. So now you have to figure out what civic engagement, the kind of person you want to be, right? And the question in how to stand up to a dictator is to every person.
It is, what are you willing to sacrifice for the truth? For the truth. This is it.

And for Americans in particular, if you become an ostrich and avoid the news, you will lose the rights for your kids.

Right.

This is it.

And that's probably part of the strategy, I would think, Maria, is to exhaust you to the point where you just feel like I'm going to disengage.

I mean, to be frank, the whole strategy here, and I think, boy, have you nailed it in terms of its purposefulness, is to disconnect the people from power and to have power be unencumbered. I think the part that is dispiriting for people is, once again, it's up to individuals sort of in the same way that

they do with global warming. Like, well, if you just conserve, you'll do better.
I think we need, we need to battle on the same playing field. I think we need powerful top down.
And that's why I think news organizations have infrastructures and they are well positioned to be real tent posts in this battle for our shared reality. And that's why I think I get so frustrated watching them fall prey to these other incentives.
I think it starts there. I mean, right now, the Democratic Party is in utter disarray.
They don't even have a playbook, it doesn't appear to be to me. So I look to these other places with infrastructure and communication abilities.
Yeah. But there are a couple of other structural things in the United States I want to talk about real quick beyond that, which is, you know, we are a much harder.
The Philippines is a smaller. It's sort of like when in America, a liberal might say, if you look at Finland's health care system, we could just apply that, you know, smaller, more homogenous areas, harder to do.
We are a vast country with a ton of people, however badly they think multiculturalism is for the fabric, it's here to stay. We are not easily categorized within there.
Is that in any way, Maria, a bulwark against the kind of capture that you're talking about? Or does this cut beyond those structural advantages that America might have? Oh my gosh, it's such a complex question. How do you answer in a few? The quick answer here is learned helplessness, this move fast, that's what's happened, right? And the longer we normalize these things, the harder it will be to come back.
So, you know, my friends and I talk about this a lot. If America were to turn fascist, what does that look like? It's actually white supremacy, right? So sort of, so it's a throwback, it's retro, it's back in fashion.
So this country has had those roots, right? And actually, you know, it's ironic that make America great again is the

slogan because in the 70s, Ferdinand Marcos, our first dictator, his slogan was make the Philippines

great again. Victor Orban in Hungary in 2010, when he took office, his slogan is make Hungary

great again, right? Like this is not new. No, they want a global string of nation states that

Thank you. is make Hungary great again, right? Like this is not new.
No, they want a global string of nation states that pretend to be singular, but are actually working together to this one more illiberal goal. Right.
So to your question, our institutions get weaker every day if they do not exercise their power. And on the three branches of government, right, we're now leaning on the justice part, but that moves, that is the thinking slow part of the checks and balances.
So the question to American politicians, American legislators, the people we elected really is, they're determining the world that we live in in. And I guess, so you're saying it goes right back to the people.
Yes, it does. But part of it is because we have been sleeping through the last, I'd say, 20 years.
We assumed democracy would last forever. Boy, did I get a waking up, a wake up call in the Philippines, right? There's one more thing,

and we talked about this really briefly up top, but in the Philippines, my president, Rodrigo Duterte, would have stayed in power longer if the military backed him. He literally increase the pension of retired military generals three times.

Wow.

And again, you're seeing movements decapitating heads of agencies that should be independent, right? So the question here is, the longer these institutions do not act, and you have a compliant head that is selected based on loyalty. And I'll talk about the Philippines so I don't get myself in trouble in the United States.
Ignorance and arrogance plus loyalty. This is how it collapses.
And America is bigger. And Americans believed, you know, you were exceptional.

You're American. So kick in, I guess is what I'm saying, John.
Right. Kick in or atrophy.
I mean, the things that are exceptional atrophy us. And I think the greatest trick that has played upon us is this is all being sold to us as American exceptionalism.
Yes. It's the what actually made us, uh, exceptional in any way, which was those constitutional principles and, and, uh, you know, human rights that underpinned all of the documents that, that created it, that, that sort of enlightenment era.
Yeah. The melting pot.
My family fled. I mean, I moved to America in 73 after the martial law was declared in the Philippines.
Marcos was in power for more than 21 years. This was, I don't know.
I'm sure you've seen the Statue of Liberty packing her case, right? All of the memes. Sure.
Anyway. Oh my God, please.
Maria, I got to tell you though, I just so love you. I love talking to you.
You're so smart. You see so many different things, but you maintain just this incredible spirit and energy that I can't help but be inspired by and feed off of.
And I do, you know, it's funny, even when you lay things out that I think, oh God, that that's purposeful and dark. I still you give me great strength and hope.
You really do. And I so appreciate it and appreciate you coming on and talking to us early in the morning.
No, thank you for all you do, John. Please make it funny.
My pleasure. Make the facts funny so people listen.
I'm trying, Maria. Maria Ressa, Nobel Peace Prize winner, Rappler CEO, Columbia University professor, and just all around shining light.
Thank you so much for joining us, Maria, and I hope to talk to you again soon. Wow.
I'm telling you, man, she is, that is just, I want to say Sunny D, just a glass of like, I talked to Maria and I just feel like, yes, yes. She's like the best Peloton instructor for reinvigorating the idea of shared reality

and that being the secret to reconstituting an effective ground-up infrastructure for fighting this illiberalizing of our world and the in-shittification that we find ourselves in. Maria Ressa, fantastic.
That is our show. There is no show next week.
We will be back the week after. But so appreciate all those who continue to listen to the podcast and watch it and those other things.
I hope if you get a chance, please check out Maria's books. Boy, she lays out beautifully that this is all a strategy, that it is purposeful, that it is designed, and the outcome that we are experiencing is the outcome that has been ordained by that design.
And if it's been designed, then it can be fought. And so I'm just very grateful to her for coming on today and really appreciate it.
As always, lead producer, Lauren Walker, producer, Brittany Mamedovic, video editor and engineer, Rob Vitola, audio editor and engineer, Nicole Boyce, researcher and associate producer, Jillian Spear.

And as always, our executive producers,

Chris McShane and Katie Gray.

Thanks so much for listening

and we'll see you guys next time.

Bye-bye.

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