Why does someone risk their life, their freedom, to fight for the rights of others?
That kept going around my head while on a video call on December 19 with eight women Nobel peace laureates, brought together by the temporary release from prison of 52-year-old Narges Mohammedi, Nobel Peace Prize, Iran, 2023.
Hello, I’m Maria Ressa, and I’m one of the 4 co-founders of Rappler. I received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021, making Rappler the only fully functioning Nobel newsroom today. During this emotional call, Rappler was having our Christmas party, and I actually showed Narges and the Nobel women our office and our team, who at that moment were singing “Defying Gravity” (the theme of the night).
Which is exactly what Narges has been through: “arrested 13 times, convicted five times and sentenced to a total of 31 years in prison and 154 lashes,” said the Nobel committee. Jailed in Iran’s notorious Evin prison, she was released for 21 days in December for an operation to remove a tumor. When she was wheeled out, she carried a picture of Mahsa Amini, and yelled, “Women. Life. Freedom.”
Despite the looming end of her freedom, Narges was smiling and resolute. We spoke about gender apartheid, mass executions, protests, wars — how could we not with Jody Williams (1997, United States), Shirin Ebadi (2003, Iran), Leymah Gbowee (2011, Liberia), (Tawakkol Karman (2011, Yemen), Malala Yousafzai (2014, Pakistan), and Oleksandra Matviichuk (2022, Center for Civil Liberties, Ukraine) on the call.
BUT we also spoke about perseverance, about helping each other, about commitment, about love. When you’re on the front lines, you celebrate every win.
World is worse than you think
It almost seems like these qualities underlying the courage of the women on the call — hard work, empathy, the values behind the world’s major religions (in Christianity, “do unto others as you would have them do unto you”) — have gone out of style. Everyone wants quick rewards, the dopamine high of popularity (leading to populism at scale).
The world is turned upside down by the perverse incentive structure of the technology that connects us all: when lies laced with fear, anger and hate pound open the sensitive fracture lines of our societies, for profit. That system of “engagement” and microtargeting is the most powerful tool of manipulation of those seeking and maintaining power. When politicians use it, it’s information operations; when nations use it, it’s information warfare — and it is reshaping the world.
It’s worse than you think: the new “axis” — Russia, China, Iran and North Korea — are united by their grievances against the West, especially after sanctions largely failed after Russia invaded Ukraine, and helped bring them together. With the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, Sudan, Myanmar, and our ongoing near-daily confrontations in the West Philippine Sea, it’s increasingly clear that conflicts around the world are interconnected. Look at Syria, Serbia, Venezuela, or North Korean troops fighting for Russia in Ukraine.
Another complication: Russia, China, and North Korea already possess nuclear weapons, while Iran may only be weeks away from a nuclear breakthrough if it were to aggressively pursue it. Are we already in World War III?
Elections are manipulated
My latest book, How to Stand up to a Dictator, has been translated into about 25 languages, including Mongolian, Georgian and Romanian. I was in Tbilisi, Georgia, earlier this year and listened to its citizens prepare to fight a Russian-style foreign agents law. As I write this, more than 200,000 Georgians have been out on the streets for nearly a month demanding new elections, protesting for its democratic values. (Add Venezuela, Mozambique, and many others in these electoral protests.)
Shortly before that, in Romania, its Constitutional Court voided elections after a little known candidate without a political party and supported by the Kremlin’s information operations on TikTok took first place in its run-off elections. This is the first and most decisive move any nation has taken against the information warfare social media has enabled since 2016.
As I have said repeatedly for years now, we cannot have election integrity with the manipulation of our emotions enabled by social media. Nerve’s latest report before the US elections shows exactly what can happen: the manipulation of the youth, the weaponization of race and gender, among them.
This new “axis” — what Anne Applebaum called Autocracy, Inc — is not united in any political ideology – only pulled together in its thirst for power and money. It begins in the public information ecosystem. The global trend in 2024, the super-election year (74 national elections globally, with the last one taking place December 29 in Chad) shows democracy losing: we started the year with 71% of the world now under autocratic rule, and while some in media see election results as a failure of incumbents in 10 major countries (the first time this has ever happened in almost 120 years), those of us who have lived through this (and survived) see this as the success of insidious voter manipulation on social media.
What Rappler is doing
Over the last decade, we at Rappler have dealt with and become frustrated by analysis paralysis. The attacks we lived through and our data analysis since 2014 pushed us to the forefront of the fight for information integrity.
Our journalism remains the same: investigative reports that hold power to account. Read and watch our best in 2024. We learned that the form and substance of journalism is not enough. It needs to be coupled with the best of what technology has to offer — to reimagine what technology could do without surveillance capitalism.
What would a public interest tech stack look like that brings trusted information to our communities, the citizens in our democracy? If we succeeded, could we stitch together a global community — with news organizations as tent pegs in a global federation?
In 2020, we launched Lighthouse: its movements feature allowed us to bring some partners and NGOs into our tech stack. In 2022, we began creating a PH-wide data lake with an ontology, knowledge graph, and vectorDB to allow generative AI to automate creation of pages anchored on facts. In mid-2023 after OpenAI launched its chatbot, we zoomed GPT-4 onto each story page and created a 3 bullet-point summary of every Rappler story.
Around that time, we were one of 10 from 1000 global groups selected by OpenAI to use its chatbot for democratic consultation (aiDialogue). Working with the Quezon City local government, we began to finetune AI use for public consultations. It was exciting to think of the ability to widen democratic participation in a more systematic manner.
Finally, a year ago, we launched Rappler Communities, a matrix protocol chat app that allows real people to have real conversations in a shared reality essential for any democracy. At this existential moment for news, we’ve created an MVP not only for survival but which we believe will allow news to thrive with a sustainable business model in a global public information ecosystem anchored in facts.
Don’t be overwhelmed
Our times demand you act. Choose and build the world you want.
We can’t begin to work on solutions for climate change unless we agree on the problem. Leaders can’t govern until we begin to bring nuance and complexity back into the public domain. The good in each of us can’t emerge until we restore an environment of trust. That can’t happen if each of us is being insidiously manipulated.
So download and join our community: first in the Philippines, followed by Indonesia, South Africa, and Brazil. Try our new RAI — what generative AI looks like if you want to anchor in facts! If you’re a news group that wants to join, let us know. If you’re a funder who wants a systemic solution, help us build.
I’ve learned a lot in the years we’ve been under attack. In 2019, we created the International Fund for Public Interest Media to help bring new money to news groups. In 2021, we created a whole of society distribution system for facts — #FactsFirstPH in partnership with the Google News Initiative (parts of which were replicated in other parts of the world). In 2022, I became the vice chair of the leadership panel of the UN’s Internet Governance Forum to try to understand the multilateral system, and in 2023, I accepted the chair of the World Movement for Democracy to understand how human rights and civil society groups work together. Each of these taught me lessons in governance as well as showing me why our world today is broken.
The year ahead
We’re at a global inflection point, and 2025 will push us to a tipping point for violence, for fascism. Or not. It depends on what each of us does now.
So don’t be overwhelmed. Don’t be depressed. Don’t disengage.
Instead, take the four action points I recommend from the last speech I gave in 2024, my first in a Jewish temple in front of Muslims, Christians, Palestinians — a truly interfaith and diverse community of young and old alike. Religion and faith are crucial parts of our world views. It’s why I will return to the Vatican in January to help Pope Francis kick off the Jubilee, which happens once every 25 years.
Hope for a better future comes from action, from perseverance. And faith. That’s what the Nobel Women showed me. That’s why we risk our freedom and dedicate our lives to fighting for all our rights. – Rappler.com