This article is from a special report on the Athens Democracy Forum, held in association with The New York Times, where experts gathered in the Greek capital last week to discuss global issues.
Maria Ressa, the Filipino American journalist who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021, remembers what happened in the Philippines when free speech was threatened, the rule of law was bent and challenges to the reigning power came under attack.
Delivering the Aristotle Address at the Athens Democracy Forum on Oct. 2, Ms. Ressa warned that a similar erosion of democracy was now happening elsewhere. And she made a reasoned but emphatic plea to the audience of cultural and political leaders to stand up and defend democratic values.
“Jump in, act now, before it is too late,’’ she concluded at the end of her speech.
Ms. Ressa’s history of standing up to abuses of government power at her own peril has made her a leading voice in efforts to preserve liberal democracies at a time when they are in jeopardy around the globe. A prime target of her criticisms is Big Tech, which she says is perverting efforts to establish truths and facilitating the rise of autocrats.
Her own ordeal began after the 2016 election of President Rodrigo Duterte. Rappler, the digital media company she had founded, published stories about how the Duterte regime was weaponizing the internet and silencing those who tried to hold it accountable, Ressa explained.
The Rappler website was then hit with an orchestrated online attack (at one point, Ms. Ressa said that she was targeted by an average of 90 hate messages an hour).
Ms. Ressa was then charged with 11 criminal counts. She has since been acquitted of most of them but, she said, she still needs approval from the Philippine Supreme Court to leave the country whenever she is there, recently to address the United Nations General Assembly in September and the Athens Democracy Forum. She has been living in the United States, teaching at Columbia University, since 2023, saying in an onstage interview after her Athens speech that she saw that teaching as “ground zero” for her pro-democracy efforts.
In her speech, Ms. Ressa again warned, as she had at the Nobel Prize ceremony, about the perils of technology. “An atom bomb exploded in our information ecosystem,” she said, “and it has silently destroyed, and continues to destroy, the foundations democracy requires to survive.”
She said algorithmically engineered technologies have turned platforms into “weapons of mass destruction to democracy,” unleashing a torrent of “toxic sludge” online, spreading messages laced with fear, anger and hate.
“Without facts, you can’t have truth; without truth, you cannot have trust,” she said. “Without these three, we have no shared reality. You cannot have journalism. You cannot have democracy.”
In recent interviews, Ms. Ressa has said the troubling signs of democratic erosions in the United States reminded her of what she saw in the Philippines. “I am suffering from both déjà vu and PTSD,’’ she told the comedian and TV show host Jon Stewart last month.
In both cases, she noted, the damage to democratic norms became apparent soon after the presidents’ elections. “It happened in the first hundred days,’’ she said, referring to President Trump’s flurry of executive orders claiming White House powers and privilege.
In the Philippines, the process was more deliberate and concentrated, she described in her 2022 book, “How to Stand Up to a Dictator.’’
“Within six months of Duterte’s taking power in the Philippines, the checks and balances of the three branches of government — executive, legislative, and judicial — collapsed through a system of patronage, blind loyalty, and what I started calling the ‘three C’s: corrupt, coerce, co-opt,’” Ms. Ressa wrote in her book.
Born in the Philippines, Ms. Ressa, who is now 62, moved to New Jersey as a child and graduated from Princeton University. She became a journalist when she returned to the Philippines in the 1980s, first working for a Philippine broadcaster, then later at CNN, as a reporter covering Southeast Asia. In 2012, she founded Rappler, which quickly became a popular and influential investigative news site in the Philippines.
She was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize with Dmitri A. Muratov, who was the editor of the Russian independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta, then under attack by the government of President Vladimir Putin. Since then, she has repeatedly spoken out against the dangers of turbocharged misinformation, not only for truth but for democracy.
“You tell a lie a million times, it becomes a fact,” she said in January, speaking at a gathering at the Vatican. “If you make people believe lies are facts, then you can control them.’’
She has called for an end to the impunity enjoyed by social media and information platforms, whose algorithms, she said, were “a conscious design choice meant to get you scrolling” for the profit of big technology companies.
“The mother of all battles is information integrity — seeing the difference between fact and fiction, creating a shared reality,” she said in Athens. “If we win that battle for information integrity we can win the rest. But if we lose that, we lose it all.”
The steady advance of technological developments has only increased the danger, she said, as does the continuing concentration of communication power in the hands of a few. Ms. Ressa warned of a powerful cabal of tech giants she called a “broligarchy,’’
“Will we be governed by rule of law, or by dictators and kleptocrats?’’ she asked. “Will artificial intelligence augment human potential or replace human judgment?”
The answer, she said, is to bring information technology under public control, and make it accountable. “Platform accountability is not censorship; it’s democracy’s immune system,” she said. “We need public trust technology, a matrix protocol to bring trust back. This is a public safety issue.”
The situation in the Philippines has improved since Mr. Duterte’s presidency ended in 2022. It is still not ideal, but as Ms. Ressa has put it, the country has moved “out of hell, into Purgatory.”
Ms. Ressa cites the Duterte case as proof that civic society can fight back. In March, Duterte was arrested, extradited and charged by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity. “The rule of law prevailed,’’ she told the U.N. General Assembly.
“I am not in jail,’’ she said in Athens, to applause from the audience, adding, “And where is Duterte? In detention at The Hague.”
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