Maria Ressa: ‘It would be great if we didn’t have to fight our government’
The crusading Filipino journalist on debunking disinformation and taking on President Duterte
When plainclothes police officers burst in to Maria Ressa’s newsroom to arrest her back in February, her young reporters responded exactly as she had drilled them: they whipped out their phones and filmed her being escorted away, broadcasting live to their 10m readers. It was a vintage piece of heavy-handed intervention by the government of Rodrigo Duterte, the authoritarian president of the Philippines. It was also a vintage piece of cutting-edge digital journalism by one of the sharpest editors of our illiberal age.
Ressa, the chief executive of the news website Rappler, is the most prominent journalistic gadfly of “Duterte Harry”, as some of the president’s critics call their strongman leader. The warrant for “cyber-libel” was served at 5pm, too late for her to post bail. So she had to spend the night in a cell. It was just one of an array of charges heaped on her and her fellow editors. She has already spent, by her own reckoning, more on bail money than Imelda Marcos, the late dictator’s ex-wife recently convicted for graft (a conviction she intends to appeal).
But the sparky 55- year- old editor shows no sign of stress as she arrives just after noon at an upscale Japanese restaurant close to her newsroom in the bustling heart of Manila. Rather she is her usual geekily ebullient self.
“We’re building!” she exclaims, when I ask how she spent the morning. She has barely sat down in our bamboo-lined booth before she launches into a description of the new platform her team is developing, her eyes alight. Despite everything, I ask?
“Oh gosh, yeah! . . . It would be great if we didn’t have to fight our government. But in the end, if you only play a defensive game, you miss the point.” One of the difficulties of this period, she adds, is that the business is thriving. “So I am thinking, ‘How can we grow this business?’, even as I am thinking about how the hell I can avoid being arrested.”
Ressa’s ordeal is a defining struggle of our era of press-bashing populism. On the one side are Ressa and her three female business partners, striving to speak truth to power while staying afloat in the frenetic world of digital journalism. On the other is the Philippines’ most powerful leader in decades, who enjoys overwhelming popular support, trades in obscenities and violent threats, and commands millions of combative social media supporters.
In three years in power, Duterte has amassed near total control of the executive, legislative and judiciary in one of Asia’s oldest democracies. His small liberal opposition was wiped out in recent midterm elections to the Senate. By the estimate of Jonathan Miller, author of a recent biography of the Philippine president, he has presided over more deaths of his own people than any leader in south-east Asia since Cambodia’s Pol Pot.
Ressa has, by her own count, had to post bail eight times since January 2018, when the Philippine Securities and Exchange Commission first gave an order to shut Rappler. The site has made a name for itself with coverage of Duterte’s lethal drug war, his use of online trolls to maintain power, a slew of corruption scandals, and the government’s pivot toward China.
The editor is a recognised face in the Philippines, but today her presence goes almost unnoticed by the other lunchers. As we order — a bento set with sashimi, California maki, tempura and beef teppanyaki for her, and one with sashimi and grilled fish for me — we discuss the news, in particular the demonstrations in Hong Kong. These are, we agree — and we are talking before the violence that has overshadowed recent protests — a display of the “People Power” that toppled Ferdinand Marcos in 1986, and rare inspiration in a world where democratic accountability seems in retreat.
“I don’t think we have wrapped our heads around how much technology has allowed the manipulation of individuals and democracies,” Ressa says. She was one of the first to warn of the dangers of the symbiosis between illiberal politicians and platforms such as Facebook and Google, which she says are “accelerants” for disinformation.
“Propaganda has been around forever, but never before have you been able to do it at this scale,” she says. “Exponential lies have become facts.”
Ressa, who is a US and Philippine citizen, is one of the smartest people I have met at analysing the way that “information warfare” tactics used to spread lies and manipulate voters in one country have been fine-tuned and unrolled across the globe. Way back in October 2016, a month before Donald Trump won office with (we have since learnt) a following wind from Kremlin-supported trolls, Ressa led an acclaimed Rappler series on disinformation. Its focus was Duterte’s “weaponisation” of the internet. The same methods devised in Russia, then deployed in Ukraine in the “hybrid” invasion of 2014 — where disinformation was deployed alongside weaponry — were swiftly brought to the Philippines, and spread via Facebook and other social media platforms.
“We were the first to say, this is a global effort and this is a scary effort,” she says. “And if the social media companies aren’t going to be the gatekeepers, then we have a huge problem.”
After the series’ publication, Ressa herself became the target of dozens of online hate messages per hour. It was a foretaste of bigger trials to come: the administration’s onslaught of litigation against Rappler, in which the site “has lost every single appeal or motion”, she says.
“Every single one.” So what, I ask her, gives her any grounds for optimism?
“It depends on the people, not the president,” Ressa says, choosing her words carefully to avoid new accusations of impugning the judiciary. “It depends on the men and the women of the judiciary. I really can’t believe that 100m Filipinos don’t have integrity.”