This year marks the 10th anniversary of Esquire Philippines. What better way to celebrate than with our annual Man at His Best (MAHB) event. This year, we honor 10 heroes and mavericks from the worlds of film, music, business, art, sports, politics, and more. These are men and women who have inspired us through their work, achievements, and advocacies.
We present Esquire’s Hero of the Year, Maria Ressa.
Maria Ressa, founder and CEO Rappler, is the first Nobel Peace Prize Laureate of the Philippines. In this exclusive interview, she talks about growing up with bullies, standing up to dictators, and how being a journalist today is more difficult than it was before.
As she ponders on her Nobel prize, Ressa dissects the most pressing issues in technology today: Social media and “information operations,” a tactic of war being used on the Filipino people. She compares herself to Cassandra of Greek mythology, who receives the gift of prophecy but is cursed to never be believed.
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ESQUIRE PHILIPPINES: Congratulations, Maria, on winning the Nobel Peace Prize. What do you think the Nobel Peace Prize should mean for ordinary Filipinos? Considering some Filipinos are also downplaying or devaluing your Nobel Peace Prize, what should this mean for them?
MARIA RESSA: I think it shines a light on the Philippines. It means that the world is watching, that’s one. And secondly, for human rights activists, for journalists, for people who are trying to fight for their rights. This tells you the world is watching. In terms of people who are divided, the reality is the insidious manipulation that we are living through on social media divides us. And this is information operations—we have been the target of information operations since 2016. In fact, I would go earlier because if you look at some of the first videos of Bongbong Marcos, they went as early as 2015. So, we are what we are today because of the shifts in reality that happened first in our minds, and then were carried out in the real world.
PHOTO: Jason Quibilan
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I think it’s a boost of energy, a boost of adrenaline for journalists. I feel like I’m only a placeholder. I’m a placeholder for every Filipino journalist, for every journalist around the world, in countries where it’s so much harder to do what we do. I hope this means that we will have the integrity of elections, although, since the Nobel Peace Prize announcement, I’ve made it very clear that the Philippines will not have integrity of elections if we don’t have integrity of facts.
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The very platforms that we are using to communicate with each other, well, the algorithmic bias is against facts.
Research has shown that on Facebook—on social media in general—we have lies laced with anger and hate, spreading faster and further than facts. On Twitter, a lie will spread 70 percent more—it will get retweeted 70 percent more than a fact. So if you don’t have facts, you can’t have truth. If you don’t have truth, you can’t have trust. If you don’t have any of these things, how do you have a democracy? How are you going to have integrity of elections? And we’re not even getting to Comelec and institutions of governance.
ESQ: Of all the Nobel Prizes, the Peace Prize is usually the only one awarded to embattled public figures—laureates who faced challenges, lived in failing states, and were embroiled in controversies. How do you feel about that?
MR: I think there are so many countries that qualify for that but I think the irony is the award is given to the Philippines and Russia.
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We got demoted from being among one of the world’s vibrant democracies to being in the league of Venezuela, of Turkey, of Russia. What that means is frankly, it’s an indication of where the Philippines is today. What we have to face in order to just exercise our rights that are guaranteed in the constitution—certainly it’s significantly harder to be a journalist today than it was when I started in 1986.
Also interesting, that 35 years after People Power ousted the Marcos family, you have Bongbong Marcos now coming in and running for president.
We in Rappler exposed the networks of disinformation that are slowly eroding history, changing history in front of our eyes. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen things like this—but it is the most effective time to do it. He has a pretty good chance of winning. These elections are open for anyone right now.
I think the last part that’s hard—and this is global in scope—is that we can’t tell fact from fiction. That’s partly algorithmic design and algorithmic bias.
Information operations are meant to paralyze you.
Imagine—the world’s largest delivery platform for news is Facebook. A hundred percent of Filipinos online is on Facebook. We’re talking about more than 79 million. The algorithms that determine what comes on your feed are biased against facts. I’d say it’s biased against journalism.
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So that’s what we’re fighting, and it’s not just in the Philippines. Now you come to the Philippines and ask, “How many people have died in this brutal drug war?” That’s the first casualty in our battle for truth—we don’t know, and we watched the police go up to 7,000 people killed by the end of 2016. Compare that to the 21 years of Marcos, you have that at 3,200.
And then, when the international community began to criticize, in plain sight, the police changed it: “Oh it’s only 2,000-plus!” And the rest of them? “We don’t really know.”
And we allowed it.
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Now, Michelle Bachelet of the United Nations Office of the Commission on Human Rights, pegs it at 8,000. Chito Gascon used to peg 27,000 killed in three years. The police have gone back to 5,000. I’m sorry, I’m fascinated by the numbers but this shows you this is a battle for facts. If we can’t get something that simple, if we can’t trust it, then how do you choose? That is the impact of information operations.
Information operations are not meant to make you believe one thing or to take one action, it’s meant to paralyze you. It’s meant to tear down your trust so don’t do anything. In the end, the government gets a free pass.
ESQ: Do you feel like you’ve gained the responsibility of fighting harder for journalism not just for the Philippines but for the whole world?
MR: I don’t think it’s changed. Here’s the funny thing: I, as a person, as a journalist, I haven’t changed from the time I became a journalist, which is a long time ago in 1986.
What has changed is the circumstances. I think part of the reason is because we exposed the way we were being manipulated online. When we showed the weaponization of the internet in 2016, there was a three-part series and I wrote two of three parts. One of the articles is about how Facebook’s algorithms impact democracies. And we’ve seen that now go globally.
This year, Oxford University’s Computational Propaganda research project said that cheap armies on social media are rolling back democracies in 81 countries in the world. I watched that number grow from 27 in 2017. So this is really a global problem.
Do I see my role any differently? No.
I feel like Sisyphus and Cassandra combined. I’m seeing the same things, I’ve been saying this for five years.
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ESQ: Let’s talk about the internet. The information ecosystem is so vibrant: People consume news from alternative sources of information that don’t necessarily adhere to journalistic ethics and standards. How do you see traditional media in this new competition for truth?
MR: I’ll take that apart in two ways. First is journalism. What exactly is journalism? It’s the process that determines that, the editorial process that is expensive. Because you have a reporter, you have an editor, and you may have a managing editor, who may then have legal consultants. Journalism is expensive and that is how you get rid of bias.
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Traditional news organizations used to spend a lot more money on the process, and over time, with the internet, we have had to scale back. And I think what we have seen with the trend is the commoditization of news, and that happened when all of us, every wonderful article that we do, whether it’s an investigative piece that takes eight months or two hours to write would be gauged based on page views. That’s the impact—the devaluation of news. It doesn’t measure impact, it measures page views.
And what I know from daily television ratings is that what rates the best are crime and entertainment. And when we were handling TV Patrol, you don’t want to have a whole newscast that is crime and entertainment—you’re going to dumb down your people and you’re going to play to the worst of human nature.
We used to spend money—I would send a flyaway to Jolo for P150,000 just to send a flyaway, just because it’s important for Filipinos to know that news.
PHOTO: Jason Quibilan
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PHOTO: Jason Quibilan
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The second thing is that the incentives for news have shifted and have changed what quality news is churned. You stick to your quality oftentimes to your own detriment. We protect the public sphere but you get no reward because that’s not what the incentives reward.
And then what happens with Facebook, with Twitter, is that there are these websites that are so easy to set up. You call them “alternative news,” and you’ve seen them. They’ve sprouted in the Philippines, but they haven’t gone as crazy as in the United States: Alex Jones, QAnon. These are things that were banned and taken down by Facebook. These are outright lies and conspiracy theories. Why are they like that? Because they spread the fastest. They make the most money. Some of the pro-Trump websites are about making money, but oftentimes, they are about shifting your worldview.
So let me go back to the algorithms of the internet. Every single social media platform uses one algorithm to grow because they tested it over time and found that it is the most effective way to grow their platform. The algorithm—the recommendation engine—for you to grow your social media platform is using “friends of friends.”
If in 2016, we were all in the middle and we all agreed on the facts, by the time President Duterte won, he used an “us against them” kind of leadership style. He was angry, and “friends of friends” algorithm. If you’re pro-Duterte, you move to the right of the spectrum. If you’re anti-Duterte, you move to the left.
So many people ask what they would do with their family when they believe the lie. Some people think I’m Indonesian! And I’m not! But you know, that is the main narrative that spread and people can have alternative facts, alternative lies.
No democracy survives this.
What does survive are the social media platforms that have made a lot of money from their business model called surveillance capitalism. And that’s part of the real Facebook Oversight Board where we were actively challenging it. We came up as part of the forum on information and democracy last year. We came up with a white paper that is 130 pages long in which we laid out the methodical, structural, systemic solutions—a dozen of them.
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I can talk about this forever because essentially, what has happened now is that our information ecosystem, social media platforms, are behavior-modification systems. And we are Pavlov’s dogs—they experiment on us, if it works, they keep us scrolling, if you’re scrolling on your phone, that’s exactly where they want you because when you keep scrolling, you’re giving more data to the machine learning that is building a model of you, and that model knows you better than you know yourself and serves your most vulnerable moment for money.
This is not sustainable. It is a system that has enabled the rise of fascism all around the world.
ESQ: We thought social media and the internet would democratize the spread of information and truth, making it more accessible to the public. But certain people have gamed the platforms to their advantage.
MR: It’s not just people. It’s also power and money. Again, we go back to the Marcos disinformation networks around 2015. Rappler, when we started in 2012, it was Social Media for Social Good. We encouraged students to join the force for good, and all of that changed around 2014, 2015. We felt it in our politics in 2016.
ESQ: How do we move forward knowing content creators—YouTubers and Tiktokers—have more clout than news organizations nowadays?
MR: Yes! That’s a very good question. What we’ve seen over time in the Facebook ecosystem is when news organizations used to be in the center. They have now been pushed to the periphery. TikTok has taken over. TikTok still isn’t quite as large, but for a demographic, people have gone on board. It’s the newest fad, and that is definitely a black box that is all about maximizing engagement.
I have three pillars and they’re the way I evolved in the last three years where I spent my time: It’s technology, journalism, and community.
When we set up Rappler in 2012, we built communities of action. The “food” we had was journalism. Now that we’re under attack in the technology part, there are three things that I’m doing.
The first is to realize that it is a global problem. For our elections, these Silicon Valley companies, these American companies must put guardrails in place because we won’t have integrity of elections if we don’t have integrity of facts.
Second, tech and data. This is the most important. Data privacy, how do you protect yourself against this? Facebook took down operations from China last September 2020, and it was hardly in the news. It was campaigning for Sara Duterte, it was polishing the image of Marcos, and it was attacking me and Rappler. This is from China!
Understand that geopolitical power play will weigh in on our elections.
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The last two pillars, I’ll just say, are journalism and community. Journalism has to survive, and so we continue doing Rappler, but I also, before the Nobel, I said I would co-chair the International Fund for Public Interest Media. We will raise a billion dollars to help independent media survive in this time period while we’re putting guardrails on tech.
The last part is community. We have to build communities in action. Like in January 6 in the United States, people believed the conspiracy theories and they acted on it through violence. Online violence translates into the real world. Think about what happens, the toxic sludge in the Philippine information ecosystem in social media. We’re trying to create communities that will be able to fight back and help call out facts. It’s not going to spread if you say “facts,” but you know.
ESQ: What do you think of TikTok?
MR: It’s fun, but it’s insidious in a way. If you’re on TikTok.
ESQ: Let’s talk about yourself.
MR: Uh-oh!
ESQ: Do you have a profound memory or experience that you still look back on to this day or that shaped who you are now?
MR: Oh there’s so many. My family left the Philippines when I was 10 years old, and I remember walking into a public elementary school in New Jersey. I was the shortest kid in the class.
The lessons that I learned in fighting a dictator, I learned when I was 10 years old.
When you’re the only brown kid in a class of very tall, very aggressive kids, I was quiet a lot. My teacher actually told me I was quiet for about a year. And I learned to learn, one was to really embrace your fear: Whatever you are most afraid of, you touch it and you hold it so that it doesn’t scare you.
Courage is not about not having fear, it’s about learning how to deal with it.
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I saw some high school friends two or three years ago and they reminded me that I used to stand up to bullies at school. So it’s a hop, skip, and a jump to standing up to Duterte, di ba?
So these lessons from when we were very young we’re essential formed, our values are formed.
And the last one I hope that we learn a lot in the Philippines is something I’ve been saying for years: Silence is complicity. If you see something in front of you, happening in front of you, and you allow it to happen, you’re as complicit as the person carrying it out. These are lessons from, like, World War II.
That was how I learned to stand up to a bully—because I couldn’t! If you’re an empathetic human being and something bad is happening in front of you, you jump in! Help!
And another memory is the Honor Code of Princeton. When I came back to the Philippines and worked at ABS-CBN, I used to say the Honor Code was what we’re after. In every exam, on every paper, you have to write the Honor Code: You pledge on your honor that you will not cheat, and you will turn in anyone who cheats in front of you. Every Princetonian knows this.
It’s a great model for democracy. You see someone doing the wrong thing, you call it out.
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ESQ: Maria, you are celebrated abroad but you are persecuted by your own people in the Philippines, which you voluntarily chose to be your home country, in spite of everything. How do you live with that?
MR: I don’t think about it as persecution. Some people have been misled. I think about it as information operations. It’s the power to exploit the weakest parts of the social media platforms to twist truths.
Think of it this way: we have coronavirus in the real world. In the closed information ecosystem of the Philippines, you have a virus of lies that is released. It could be anything: “Maria Ressa is a criminal.” Here’s a funnier one: “Maria Ressa is Indonesian.”
That “virus” infects real people and it is being pushed forward by information operations that are paid for, that are about power and money.
Information operations is a tactic of war.
The Russian military doctrine includes information operations. For a government or a government official or anyone aspiring to be a government official to use these tactics against its own people is a scorched earth policy. That is just a naked power-grab and it will doom our next generation.
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That’s the way I look at it. Do real people believe it? Yes, absolutely! Real people believe I’m a criminal. Okay, fine, I will prove it in court! This is why I come home—because they can’t prove it in court. I will win this. I just have to like, weather through this time period.
In the end, everything is a threat. It is up to you whether you allow the threat to change who you are.
ESQ: How do you ask your reporters to be courageous, knowing they could also be persecuted? Do you feel that courage is too much to ask from others, experiencing what you’ve been through?
MR: I don't!
Crisis is opportunity. We've always known that, and one of the best things that came out of this is the more we came under attack, the more the mission of journalism became more important.
January 2018, when the government tried to shut us down, they revoked our license to operate—we fought it!
In fact, I was just writing about this, and I realized we forgot to tell our lawyers we were going to do a press conference.
We were advised to just set up another company, but I said “No! I’m not going to set up another company! It's wrong!” You can't let power intimidate you, so we fought it.
We took a photo at the end of the general assembly. You will be so surprised at the smiles of Rappler because in the end, when you're in crisis, you just have to provide direction.
I gave options. I said we're moving into a new phase. We're going to fight this but not everyone will want to be part of that. Everyone is going to have different risk appetites, right? And their parents may be worried. The median age in Rappler is 23 years old, we are 64 percent women. So I gave the option that if you are worried or you don't want to be here, tell us and we will place you, we will help you get a job in another news organization.
Not one reporter took that offer, not one. And I think it's made us stronger because everyone had to commit—everyone—that's powerful.
I don’t know if you remember the image of Pia Ranada at the microphone, with Duterte towering over her telling her to move away from the mic, he even took away her voice, and she was just professional.
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ESQ: Maria, ano ang pinakamahalagang bagay na dapat maunawaan ng mga Pilipino tungkol sa laban para sa katotohanan?
MR: Ito ay laban ng lahat ng Pilipino.
This is it.
If you don’t fight for the truth, if you don’t demand, if you don't demand facts, if you don’t demand accountability, then you give up your future. This is happening globally, we’ll just be the first to fall if we make the wrong choice.
What are you willing to sacrifice for the truth? Because that’s what we really have to do to protect our democracy.
PHOTO: Jason Quibilan
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In this story: Creative direction and interview by Mario Alvaro Limos • Photographs by Jason Quibilan • Makeup by Muriel Vega Perez and Erika Glendo • Shot on location at Manila House Private Club • Special thanks to Rappler’s Cecille Santos, Bea Cupin, and Beth Frondoso; and Manila House’s Donna Ferrer
Man At His Best (MAHB) is Esquire's annual celebration that honors the life and work of inspiring men and women throughout the year.
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