Ressa references Swedish research institute V-Dem and their report earlier this year, which revealed that we are electing illiberal leaders democratically. By January 2024, 71 per cent of the world was now under autocratic or authoritarian rule. This marked a 48 per cent increase compared to ten years prior.

“I always used to say, we get the government we deserve. But the question here is, do people even have agency to make the selection, or are our emotions being weaponised against us?” she questions. 

Read Maria Ressa's profile on Asia's Most Influential

Glimmers of hope

The year of elections has not all been doom and gloom. There have been “celebrated” successes for democracy, says Ressa, motioning air quotes. They have provided her “some hope”. She cites Poland, where women and youth were galvanised to act when the incumbent rightist government put an abortion law in place. “They went out and redefined what civic engagement is,” says Ressa. “Because, today, in order to reclaim our rights, in order to be able to get the will of the people or to even reclaim our individual agency, we have to move out of the virtual world into the physical world and redefine civic engagement.” 

Taiwan, too, offered hope when pro-sovereignty candidate William Lai was elected President in January, though “we knew they were going to stand up,” says Ressa. She cites how Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s minister of digital affairs, built deliberative technology—tools and platforms designed to facilitate democratic decision-making—on the Matrix protocol, an open standard for secure, decentralised communication, to give power to the people.

High stakes

Despite these glimmers of hope, the stakes for the US election were higher than ever.

“2024 behaved as expected. We haven’t fallen off the cliff yet,” said Ressa prior to Trump’s re-election. “I think what I didn’t count on was Elon Musk buying Twitter [now X] and bringing a new sub-basement level to the kinds of safety measures that the social media companies had in place in 2020. So, Americans are voting on November 5 with fewer safeguards. And, in fact, Facebook began choking traffic to news sites around the world by January 2023, with a drop of about 50 to 85 per cent depending on the news site. So, as people went to vote this year, you’re getting less facts, more division, more fear, anger and hate [which studies have shown spread faster than facts]. If we survive, it’s because of the resilience of people, and it’s because people moved out into the physical world.”

Instances where individuals take over media, as Musk has done, demonstrate attempts to control narratives and limit transparency, and this is one factor that Ressa identifies as a sure sign of a weakening of democratic principles as authoritarianism or fascism take hold. Erosion of the rule of law and the spread of disinformation are others. Ressa has seen these happen first hand in the Philippines. “In a weird way, the Philippines went to hell earlier than the rest of the world. And from hell, we’re now in purgatory, while the West is going to hell, so we’re a little bit ahead of the curve,” says Ressa. “We know what works in this time period, which is to hold the line.”

Holding the line

Ressa and Rappler are holding the line in three ways. The first is through technology. 

“About a year and a half ago, we lost faith in big tech,” says Ressa. While Rappler still partners with the big tech companies, including most recently being one of ten groups chosen out of nearly 1,000 by Open AI to test their large language model (LLM) for democratic consultation, she says, “I’ve just been lied to too many times. And, so, we began to build deliberative technology.”

The result is Rappler Communities, a model of how Ressa believes news organisations can survive. Her vision is for a federated news ecosystem, where multiple news organisations and platforms work together to share, verify and distribute news, and where communities are anchored to news organisations but can come together on the Matrix protocol chat app where the discussions necessary for democracy can take place. Ressa rolled out Rappler Communities quietly in December last year. “Part of the reason it was quiet is who knew if we’d fall flat on our faces?” says Ressa with a laugh. “Journalists building tech is not the same as big tech companies building tech—because we have standards, and profit isn’t our main motivation!”

Ressa’s goal is to have scaled enough by the time the Philippines’ elections come around in May 2025 “so that we have a community where real people can have real conversations without being insidiously manipulated.”

The second way is upholding journalism. In 2019, Ressa helped found the International Fund for Public Interest Media, through which she is raising money to increase spending on independent media, “because we’re seeing not just big tech social media platforms being used to attack the credibility of journalists, but it’s also used to drain advertising. The business model of journalism is dead and that’s led to all the layoffs globally.”

The third is through community. “That’s the critical part,” says Ressa. “We don’t create content in a vacuum. We build communities with the content. We made those big mistakes when we put the share buttons of social media companies on our websites and gave them our communities for free. And in exchange, our Faustian bargain was that they would give us news distribution, but they never promised it would last forever, although we thought that it would. So, when they began to choke it, here we are today.” Through Rappler Communities Ressa aims to reclaim community. 

The role of AI

As AI proliferates, we are being presented with additional challenges. Ressa is sceptical of its role for news organisations. “All the tech companies are saying, Don’t get left out. And Rappler loves the tech, so we’ve tried it” she says, “But, the part that they’ve neglected to say is that this concept of punching in more and more data so that it will at some point stop hallucinating hasn’t been proven yet. This whole concept of LLMs being able to be all things to all people certainly isn’t true right now. And if you are a news organisation you can’t be wrong. A 16 per cent error rate isn’t acceptable, and in that sense, I’d rather have real people doing this. Maybe it’ll get better. Maybe it’ll go to that 5 per cent error. But that 5 per cent error still isn’t acceptable if you’re a news organisation or, even worse, in war, which is where they’re using the same technology. Think Project Lavender in Gaza or drones in Ukraine. You cannot be wrong. Yet, we’ve raced ahead and governments have accepted some of this. The world is upside down because we’ve embraced unsafe technology with no guard rails. Every day that democratic governments do not reclaim their rights from big tech companies—from this coup that is happening in front of all our eyes—these governments will lose more power.”

Navigating uncertainty

So what can we do? France and Brazil are two examples of governments reclaiming their rights—when the former arrested Pavel Durov for allegedly allowing criminal activity on Telegram, the messaging app of which he is founder and CEO, and when the latter shut down X for refusing to remove misinformation related to political figures in a threat to democratic stability.

For individuals, Ressa says, that we need to “Be aware. And demand better.” And for news organisations, it's about collaboration. “With a federated news ecosystem, we can survive together. One news group alone doing this, we will die. And we just may,” she says. “We at Rappler, after coming up to purgatory, we have survived and we’re building the tech, because journalism is going to be critical in any democracy. We get our power from the people. We have to understand that we deserve better and we can do something about it.”

So, is Ressa optimistic? “It depends on which day you ask me. Maybe after November 5, I’ll be more optimistic or more pessimistic. But death by a thousand cuts means there are ways we can still save ourselves.”

Front & Female Changemakers celebrates the extraordinary journeys of inspiring women who have emerged as powerful changemakers in a range of fields, offering a glimpse into their lives and showcasing their courage, vision and relentless pursuit of change and progress. From social entrepreneurs and business leaders to educators, artists, activists and scientists, Front & Female changemakers exemplify the ability to challenge the status quo and demonstrate the power of women to effect change.

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