 Good afternoon. I am Abraham Ignacio Jr. Librarian for the Filipino American Center of the San Francisco Public Library and one of the organizers of the sixth Filipino American International Book Festival. The Biennial Filipino American International Book Festival is produced by Philippine American writers and artists, also known as Pawa, and the San Francisco Public Library. It is the only literary festival in the US dedicated to Philippinex writers and Philippinex books. We are pleased to present today's event with our community partner and co-sponsor, Lidquake, the longest running independent literary festival in San Francisco. On behalf of the Philippine American International Book Festival, welcome to our special conversation with Maria Ressa. This Ressa is CEO, co-founder and president of Rappler, the Philippines' top digital news site. She is the current Nobel Laureate and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for 2021, the first Filipino in history to do so. She was born in the Philippines, grew up in America, and studied at Princeton University before working as a journalist in Asia for over 35 years. Rappler is renowned for its fearless reporting and uncompromising journalism. This has earned Rappler and specifically Ms. Ressa the enmity of the powers that be who are trying to shut it down through cyber libel lawsuits and other technicalities. Maria's early and leading role in exposing the spread of digital disinformation and calling out big tech for enabling this phenomenon has earned her recognition as the times person of the year 2018, the times 100 most influential people of 2019. Her forthcoming book, How to Stand Up to a Dictator, is the story of how democracy dies by a thousand cuts and how an invisible atom bomb has exploded online that is killing our freedoms. Thank you, Maria, for gracing us with your presence. Interviewing Maria today is Mr. Benjamin Pimentel, who previously reported for the San Francisco Chronicle and Dow Jones Market Watch. He now is a senior reporter for protocol, covering the mysterious workings of crypto, fintech and bio and blockchain. Benjamin is the author of UG, An Underground Tale, a biography of Edgar Hobson, a leader in the fight against dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos. So without further ado, let's start the conversation. Hi, Maria. Hi, Boying, how are you? Maria, the last time we talked was two years ago at AHA. That was live. So we had live audience. I want to give you, so this is going to be broadcast on Sunday, the last day of the festival. So I want to give you a chance to say hello to people who will be attending. Sure. Hello, everybody. Thank you so much for taking the time to be with us today. So let's start with it's Nobel season. They just announced the Nobel Literature winner, a writer from France. And it's only been almost a year when the week when it was announced that you had won, which big deal, of course, for the community. But a lot of things have happened since then. A new president in the Philippines, the end of the Duterte era, the new twists and the legal challenges faced by Rappler. I want to ask you beyond the Nobel Prize, what has been the high point of your year, of the past year, and what has been the low point? Oh, my gosh. Lots. I feel like, you know, since, since 2016, since the Duterte administration really began to attack journalists. There is a roller coaster, extreme highs, extreme lows. And I mean the Nobel Prize was an extreme high that none of us in Rappler ever even found them. Then I think, you know, I went to, I was just in Oslo near the tail end when we released a 10 point action plan for what to do, right? Like, and I went to go see that the screen is, there's a, there's an exhibit there and I was like, Oh my God, that's still the way I feel it's, it's, it's shocking. Extreme high, extreme low, extreme high, the Nobel Peace Prize. Extreme low of course is that I'm, I'm a step closer to prison, real prison. Two days before the end of the Duterte administration, we lost our appeal at the court of appeals, and Rappler could get shut down any day. I mean, it's not as if there wasn't an amicably sword hanging over our heads, but all of a sudden, you know, it like, it went on overdrive. And, and the world has changed significantly. There's the Ukraine war. Well, Russia doesn't want you to call it a war. So my co recipient, Dmitry Muratov, in that, in that year has had to shut down the Viad Veseta. He was first forced, I mean, within four months of us getting the award, Russia invaded Ukraine. You know, same meta narratives that it used when it annexed Crimea in 2014, those are the same. We've been talking about this for years now, you know, those are the same information warfare that was used to seed these meta narratives that really it was Russia coming in to rescue Crimea when that was the complete opposite. You know, we're really living in the upset upside down. So, um, so since then, nobody gets set as essentially been shut down Russian journalists cannot use the word war to describe the war that is happening in Ukraine. And so it's funny in April. Was it April? No, September, in September, the beginning of September, Dmitry, you know, just said, Okay, I'm not going to call it war. I'm going to call it hell. You know, so he calls it hell in that very Russian British accent and sorry, Russian accent. So sorry, back to the low. We don't know what will happen. Yeah, so we keep going. It's gotten worse in that sense. It's far more uncertain. You're on quicksand. But you also know that this is the right time to to a raptor has been formed around the mission of journalism. And then I guess the last thing I'll say is that that our presidential elections in the Philippines is the perfect example of the success of information operations. It's called death by 1000 cuts of democracy. There's, there's a great Milan Conqueror quote that just kept reverberating in my head on election night, the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting. On election night, you know, you could definitely see this is the end of something that started in 2014, which was the rehabilitation of the Marcos image 2014 is the first year we began to see references to the golden age, you know, when when autocracy was turned into heroism. And when you know it set the stage for 36 years after people power after Filipinos ousted the Marcos family accused of stealing $10 billion in 1986 dollars. You know, the son and namesake for Denand Marcos Jr. Nick, his nicknames Bong Bong, you know this very well, comes and wins overwhelmingly. And this heralds the next stage, you know, like, if nothing is significantly changed in our information ecosystem, elections will continue to bring these types of results, illiberal leaders will be elected democratically. And as they did in the Philippines, they will crumble institutions from inside. And then we look at the tipping point of geopolitical power balance, you know, when is the point when fascism, when autocracy ink what an apple bomb called autocracy ink will win. So that's when when we look at the numbers and the number of elections that are coming up, we think it'll happen in the next two years. So, you know, sorry, long answer but last two minutes of democracy essentially. What do you think, you know, we have to do something. What is the transition like from Duterte to Bong Bong given I remember in 2016 you had this long compelling interview with Duterte, your team covered his transition. That hasn't been the case right that it's a different way it has a different style of handling media in many ways it's not as bad I mean given the Duterte set a very low bar. There's a lot of behavior, but there's still signs that there's a great deal of intolerance and control that they want to exercise. I think I'll go back extreme highs extreme lows, right. And you're right. The Duterte administration and, and we've seen this everywhere around the world, autocratic rule. One man dictating calling the shots has led to bad governance, especially during the time of coded the Philippines was one of the country's last countries in the world to bring its children back to school that has an immediate impact on our next generation on our manpower on the quality of our people right up on the quality of our democracy because education determines that, but I would say, you know the extreme high, let's do a high for a rappler. You know, when President Mark Boss and this is probably like something every Filipino needs to get used to to say President Mark Boss 36 years later, when President Mark Boss went to New York for the UN General Assembly. A rappler reporter was there. Bea Coopin was part of the press corps that was covering the president. So the de facto palace ban that was put in place by the Duterte administration. And that began around 2018. That began in 2018. So we had brought a case to the Supreme Court demanding this be declared unconstitutional, it was not taken up, but under the Mark Boss administration. We've been able to, in 2018, Pia Renada, who was our reporter, as well as me, because I'm not even a reporter, we were banned from the palace. And then successfully over time, we were banned from anywhere the president president to attend it. So we had to be very, we had to cover. We continued covering in some ways it gave us more latitude because we didn't have to physically be there but we continue doing our jobs. Under President Mark Boss, what we saw during the campaign was a very similar style to Bolsonaro. And this is an ongoing election in Brazil right now, right? So October 2 was the runoff. Bolsonaro did much better. There's another elections at the end of October. And what they've done, both Bolsonaro and Marcos in the campaigns was to push aside traditional media, i.e. accountability media, journalists who will ask questions that are tough, right? That you need to answer if you're going to run for the highest office in the land, they push them away. And then what they do is they travel with their own cadre. The bloggers. And this is what I would say. I think social media has given these, this is another way that social media has torn accountability down. So having said that, that's a high, you know, so we're back. Actually, we just, we were talking about this. So it was good to have a reporter with President Marcos. But at the same time, just the beginning of October, you had another journalist killed in Manila. You know, this isn't in the provinces, not that that is any worse, you know, but this is the second killing of a journalist. Exactly at a time when there was significant, there were significant questions to the Marcos administration for the spending of money, like going to the F1 in Singapore, right? I think in the end, I hope that the Marcos administration realizes that it is now their track record that governance is difficult and requires 24 hours in a day. And that in the end, it will be their performance that will be assessed. But here's the thing, boy, and you know this, we want him to do well. Because this is a very tough time globally. So yes, highs and lows. Yeah. I mean, I mean, and he has some people who have respect or respected in some ways, in some aspects. But it's also been argued that Marcos, the Marcos as we're successful, as you mentioned in changing the story and using social media. YouTube by here is the one that's really been most effective. Facebook, of course, was also very effective. What was your take on the view that on the analysis that it was a very well financed social media campaign that changed the story? It's not just social media. It was a whole combination. But as you know, this is our focus in rapper. It has been the impact of social media, how social media has become a behavior modification system, how information operations or information warfare. And I really nudge Western journalists to stop using the word misinformation. It is disinformation. It is at scale. It is insidious manipulation. So yes, that well financed information operations that began in 2014. It's death by a thousand cuts of our history. But then you combine that, right? Like if you talk, if you're a journalist who was in the Philippines during elections, many of the foreign journalists would go into these neighborhoods, the same neighborhoods where the drug war killed neighbors, right? Killed people. There was one mother of somebody who was killed who said she believed that if she voted for Marcos, she would get gold, right? I mean, these are the lies that make people not just vote, but behave differently in the real world, like January 6th in the United States. So that's the first step was changing history. The second step was reinvigorating political dynasties that were long the support base of the Marcosists. In many ways you can say that the win of Marcos Jr. really was, I mean, if you look at his appointments, they harken back the way he acted, the way the campaign was crafted. The foundation is the father. The use of Bagung Lipunan to non-Filipinos, Bagung Lipunan, new nation, this was the rallying cry of Ferdinand Marcos when he declared martial law, right? In 1972. So, okay, so that's the first is social media. The second is the feudal political dynasties. I would say the third is the infighting inside the Duterte family itself. If Sara Duterte had chosen to run for president, I'm not so sure President Marcos would be. That's what I've heard. I mean, this is sort of water under the bridge now, but what is your theory on why they gave up, essentially they gave up that power, that position? Sara Duterte has her own mind. She and her father have their own hurts and their, I call it, you know, like they have their own family dynamics and I think this is one, this may be one of President Duterte's regrets, right? I mean, it was, he ran Bongo is longtime aide who became a senator largely because of President Duterte and President Duterte chose Bongo at one point to run for president. Sara Duterte opted out. That's at the stage for a Marcos rebirth, right? So all of these things, it's a perfect storm. Another thing that you need to include in that mix is millions, tens of millions unemployed, the fear, you know, coming out of a lockdown, not just having lost your jobs, but many more who could lose their jobs, right? And then really this promise of a trickle down theory that didn't trickle down. So that was the beginning and then you had COVID and then you had fear. The Philippines didn't really have a social safety net. In fact, it had almost nothing. Like many of the rest of the world, there was legislation passed to help the wealthy, to help the corporations, but the rich got richer, the poor got poorer. We're guessing, actually, we are the same generation, the martial law generation. How did you feel the day that it became clear that there was going to be a, I mean, I talked, and the context of this, I talked to friends including Glenda and I've read her pieces on Just the agony of realizing that 36 years later, they're back. You know, the first instinct is blame, right? But how do you blame this? I mean, in many instances, I suppose if I needed to, I didn't really look at the people, or even the Marcoses. I looked at the social media platforms that enabled the manipulation of our minds, that to me is pushing the rise of fascism globally, right? And to the point that we may lose democracy, not in 10 years, but in two. So, for me, truly the biggest change, and this is what I said in the Nobel lecture in December last year, is how social media has become, social media is how most people around the world now get their news. Social media promises to connect us, but it didn't tell you that it was literally creating a clone of you, taking your personal data, your thoughts, your fears, and then allowing you to be targeted exactly at your most vulnerable points. You know, I can talk a lot about that because this is part of the investigation that Rappler has done. This is the reason why it is easy to hold the line. We see the data. So the first is really if I were to blame to the death of democracy, it would be Facebook first in the Philippines and Rappler is a partner of Facebook. Rappler is one of two Filipino fact-checking partners. AFP, Ajans Frans Press is the third that's operating in the Philippines. Fact-checking is a whack-a-mole game. Fact-checks don't spread. So really what the, what Facebook did, and I would say around 2014, Facebook was, I think, since 2021, the Philippines, for six years in a row, Filipino spent the most time online and on social media globally. So we were literally a Petri dish, and we had no protection. Our minds had no protection. Our fears were weaponized against us, and that is to make more money for Facebook. Having said that, just this year, YouTube is now number one, right? And YouTube has largely escaped unscathed because our focus has been on Facebook since it was the largest, it's the largest impact on our information ecosystem. Even if a video is seated on YouTube or TikTok, the distribution still remains Facebook. So, you know, that's the first accountability because that pattern, that trend is not just in the Philippines, it is global. You played an important role a few years ago. You actually even met with Mark Zuckerberg and the Facebook team. What has changed? I mean, back then, I remember you weren't that optimistic. Has anything changed in terms of the kind of signals that you're getting from the social media giants and how they would change the way they operate? We rang the alarm in 2016. In 2017, I met with Mark Zuckerberg. 2018, the Cambridge Analytica scandal blew everything. We became fact-checking partners with Facebook shortly after that. And then there was a slight moment in 2018 where I was hopeful that Facebook would do the right thing. But today, what's become clear is it's kind of a hunker down policy. You know, they do the barest minimum. Although the PR is very good, they continue to say, I mean, I think there was an instance where Facebook claims it was actually helping human rights in the Philippines, which is literally not true. So, I'm very concerned. What Mark Zuckerberg did was leave the mess that was created by Facebook and moved to the metaverse. What they did was PR, but the real world harms that the company and what they built, this technology platform they built, continues, right? It has happened. Move Fast Break Things is the Facebook motto in my book. I'd actually say, well, yes, it broke democracy, so now what? Fix it. You know, we need real leadership, but instead what Mark Zuckerberg did was to come up with a vision, although far more tainted now. You know, it's very hard to listen to a company that has corrupted the information ecosystem, now talk about the metaverse. It gives them the idea that trust is there. I mean, obviously Libra did not work. That's already an indication of the lack of trust. I think that if Mark Zuckerberg was truly a leader, he would take what was in his hands, which is the capacity to fix this. He is the only one right now that could take action. And yes, that would probably mean Facebook would lose a little bit of money. But in the end, if that means saving facts, saving the integrity of elections, saving democracy, that's not a bad thing to tell your shareholders. But in that context, what can countries like the Philippines and media organizations in countries where this is a problem do? Yeah, no, that's a great question. We've largely been the punching bag, right? And I just I said this at the Clooney Foundation for Justice Awards, the Albee Awards where, you know, the only defense journalists have is to really to shine the light, shine the light. And that's what we've done. We continue to do this on extra judicial killings. We continue to do this on corruption. We continue to do this on information operations in the Philippines. But we have a little flashlight. So what's what's happened at the Clooney Foundation when my gosh, like George and Amal Clooney took what they had and turned the Hollywood Klee glides on on the fight of human rights activists. And for five of us, the award itself is named after Justice Albee Saxe, who was, who is core to defeating apartheid in South Africa and gave up, you know, essentially literally lost his arm for doing that work. But for us, it was, if we can mobilize people all around the world, the users of the social media platforms to understand that they are being manipulated, that their private lives are being cloned and sold. But it's an uphill battle. It truly is. Unless there is leadership, I call this, you know, enlightened self-interest from these huge American companies. And it's not just now you have to add TikTok into the mix. And one of the court disclosures that came out recently actually showed that Byte Dance, which is the American company of TikTok, was one of Facebook's top advertisers from 2014 to 2018. What was happening during that time, the data leaks. So TikTok has your data, right? TikTok, well, if Facebook is a blunt mallet, it's a blunt instrument for information operations. TikTok is a surgical probe. It is far more addictive to China. It's a Chinese company. There is a phrase that's being used out of the TikTokization of Facebook, right, or even YouTube, using very short videos. And some people, young people are here actually using it for news, which is scary. Well, so more than that, right? After, particularly here in the Philippines, but you can see this after the lockdown globally, people don't want bad news. They, you know, they don't want news, right? At a time when we need news, there is avoidance of news. And this came out in several surveys. So the difficulty also is that the technology companies themselves are now fighting amongst themselves. So you're right, TikTok's addictive short video is now being replicated on Facebook, on YouTube. And that has created this harmful, far more harmful feedback loop where news organizations, the demand has gone down. But at the same time, the platforms themselves have depreciated the reach. Some of it under policies like, you know, child-friendly policies. In the Philippines here, we were actually flagged. The report that we did on the killing of Percy Lapid was flagged because we used the word killing. How do you describe a killing, except to say killing? So what I think we're afraid of is that the supply of disinformation continues and grows while the supply of facts and news decreases in distribution. This is a formula for disaster. Let's talk about your book, How to Set Up to a Dictator, which is coming out next month, right? I just saw the galley's, the fifth version. So right before this, I'm very, I'm really happy finally to see it. Yes, it's coming out in November. Yeah, you discussed these issues in your book and it's coming out. Can you talk about the process of writing? I mean, in terms of how the idea came up and what you decided was going to be your approach. Given that I'm assuming you were writing it during a time at a time when a lot of things were happening and you were under, you and Brabler were under pressure and dealing with a lot of stuff. Yeah, I mean, so just first I just decided I was going to get up and start writing at 5am every day. And before my real work with Rapcler began, I would write from 5am to 11am every day. I wrote 400 pages that was cut down. Thank God I had a masterful editor, Jonathan, cut it down to 200 pages roughly, right? So the idea for this, there are two publishers, Penguin Random House in the UK and the Commonwealth, and then you had Harper Collins in the US. So imagine I had three editors, right? So it was actually the process itself was painful. The writing was cathartic. Partly because the question everyone asked me, and you asked this also at some point, you know, where do you get courage? I mean, for me that started me thinking, you know, what is it? Because I can't imagine reacting in any other way, but the way I've reacted, the way Rapcler has reacted, because we know what our rights are under the Constitution. We know when we are being pummeled, when we are being harassed and intimidated, right? I was in shock when it happened and there were several things that, you know, I was, I just didn't expect whatever happened in my lifetime, including getting arrested, including getting 10 arrest warrants in less than two years, right? These are, I have done nothing wrong but be a journalist. So this is 36 years that I've been a journalist. I started in 1986 and it was incredible. So I went back. How do you find that? Like you, it's truly in your values. What has been atomized? Meaning, values. This is what social media has done. This is what the attention economy has deprived the next generation, this generation of, because in the end, we live our lives based on these values in a search for meaning. But when meaning is atomized to meaninglessness, then you begin to worry, right? I spoke at my old high school at the 40th anniversary. Like 40 years after I graduated, I go back to Tom's River North in Tom's River, New Jersey, which is where I went. I went to a public high school, you know, and I was speaking to hundreds of high school students. And when I was talking to them about social media, you could hear a pin drop. And this was right after the Buffalo shooter. And the day after I left was Uvalde. So these kids who spend their lives performing, curating their lives for social media, for a group popularity, right? I mean, I was really glad to leave high school behind. Who wants to forever live in with popularity, trying to be popular. But here's the other part. Our young kids today, our teenagers are curating and living a performative life for a popularity that can easily, a crowd that can turn into a mob. So what do they believe? What are the foundational values for all the many hours they spend on any of these social media platforms? Do they learn? No, nothing that is really, you know, some studies will say they read more. Okay, read what? What is real? Short messages. And also, frankly, ADHD, right? There are lots of things. So, sorry, but back to what I tried to do in the book. Every chapter is a macro. So there's a title on Facebook. It is How Friends Are Friends. I can't remember the exact title now it went through. How Friends Are Friends Killed Democracy. And then the subtitle is Think Slow, Not Fast. The subtitle of every chapter is the micro. The personal lesson I learned, right? So I went back. I'm old now. We are the last of the boobers, right? We're the last of the boobers. I mean, right? Am I wrong? Actually, I'm going to ask something, given your career in journalism, where there was always been, and I asked you this before, I want to get your answer not two years later. But activism is frowned upon for journalists, right? You're not supposed to be involved directly with a lot of these causes. That is no longer true for you, of course, over the last years, given what's been going on and the challenges you face. How do you reflect on that? Oh my gosh, both of us were our traditional journalists, right? We grew up at a time when standards and ethics manuals were very clear. That to me changed, and I can peg exactly the day. February 14, 2019. I was arrested on February 13 at 5pm, which is when courts closed. They came with an arrest warrant that was defective. And they didn't even have an amount for bail. So I couldn't, we had to wait to get an amount for bail. I knew there was a court that was open until 9pm because we state this out. I had thought through a worst case scenario. But they made sure that I spent the night in jail, right? So when that happened, it was so petty. And then I reflect back on what happened to Lila Dalima and other activists, right? When that happened, I went from being a journalist to a citizen. And I was flabbergasted at how the law was bent to the point that it's broken for extremely petty reasons. I posted bail the next day on Valentine's Day. And I actually, you know, I will not ever forget what I said when I came out, because of course it shocked all of us. And you know what I said is, you know, this is not about Rappler. It's not about me. It is about the rights you have as a Filipino citizen. Am I an activist? You know, I still cringe when people say, you know, you are a fierce Duterte critic. I don't think I was criticizing him. I think I was just laying out the facts. I think we were telling you there are information operations. Here are the facts. This is the data. There are this many people killed, you know, until today. No one will actually give you a true number for the number of Filipinos killed in this drug war. If you go by December 2018, which was the last time the Commission on Human Rights actually came out with a number, it was at least 27,000 December 2018. And then you talk to any reporter today. Time has actually even rolled that back, along with the Philippine police, which rolled it back in 2020 to like 5,500. By January 2017 Amnesty International, the police had already said that it was at least 7,000. So anyway, let me not dive into this. I'm just saying that I haven't done anything differently. I continue to be the journalist I was in 1986. I am following the standards and ethics manual. What happened was the world moved to the right and even democracies began to attack. I would say it's not just me. Every journalist that tries to hold power to account. Women journalists, more than men, are attacked. Hideously on social media, because that is where the information operations happen. So is journalism activism. Absolutely. When it is a battle for the facts. This is an audience question and also related to your book. Who do you lean to as you lean on rather as your writing community, people you trust and maybe rely on bounce ideas off of in your writing and you've written this is your third book right. It's, of course, Michael founders, you know, Glenda Gloria, who was who was run. So Michael founders Glenda Gloria, Chai Jovelinia, Beth Rendoso, each of us. I don't think Rappler would have done as well if it was only one of us it was this perfect mix. This is how we analyze the world, how we deal with crisis, you know it is always the four of us. Beyond that I had, I had really great editors. Hanson, who, who actually was the nominated for a Pulitzer for her most recent book her area of expertise is Turkey. And so I actually learned a lot more about this is part of what gave me a far, far broader global view. And so I had Hanna Terry Wood from eBury, who was the first one to pull email me to say do you want to write a book. I was like, Yeah, I guess I should write a book, and her ideas and then we had Jonathan J. Oh, who, who is with Harper Collins, I think beyond that, it's what we live every day. You know, what made it unique is that I grew up in the golden age of journalism. So you really literally see how journalism changes, how technology grew, and how technology took over I, you know, in CNN, the Jakarta Bureau which I opened the Jakarta Bureau in 1995. And, and we were one of 12 sites CNN had where we tested new technology. So we were, you know, I had one of, in Manila I had one of those first suitcase cell phones you know so heavy that it would drag on the ground, as I was trying to run to coverage but then when we got to Jakarta and you had the end of 32 years of so far though, where every week I would be in a different city where one group was trying to kill another, literally the violence. Indonesia taught me what mob violence is like. Right. And this, this is part of what I write about in the book. I have seen this behavior on social media in the real world. And when in Indonesia and Malaysia is where the word amok came from run amok is also the color. Yes. So it is, it's literally the same and the impact on people of what social media has done there's three, three ways that it impacted us individually though at the psychological level. The second level is as a group, because we behave differently in groups and that I would call that sociology, sociology, right sociologically so we behave differently in groups. I began looking at this when I was looking at how terrorists were radicalized right groups behave differently and then finally at scale globally, which is what you know when you have more than 3 billion accounts it's 3.2 billion right now. Then it's called emergent human behavior. And this emergent human behavior is about fear, anger, hate, it amplifies the worst of what we are as human beings. This is what I sounded the alarm on it the Nobel lecture last year, because I feel like the very companies that claim to connect us for good are actually destroying our humanity. And we need to call this out that emergent human behavior, the incentive structure of social media rewards the bad. This is the reason why we're literally in the upside down, you know, stranger things. If you guys watch it, we're in the upside down, it's deceptively familiar but but it's corrupt, it's ugly, it's full of stuff growing on the walls, and we somehow we're going to have to turn this right side up. What has been. I mean, it seems like a daunting problem. What are you zeroing in on in at this stage of your career. What will be the key focus for you. It's, it's a great question the micro part is Rappler, which is literally where we test our ideas and we have three pillars technology, journalism, and community, right. When we test something here, I see if it works globally, because what's local is global and what's global is local. That is something we have learned. I think that's what the Nobel Prize also showed right so the first is on technology. Rappler is building its own tech, it's we've been building it for two years now is expensive. It's called lighthouse our my elevator pitch in 2011 2012 was we build communities of action and the food we feed our communities is journalism. Right, so, so what so there's a platform called lighthouse that is will be done hopefully by the end of the year but we started rolling it out for elections and literally what you will see is our communities are here right. And also on the tech part, I've spent most of the last two years focused on legislation, because the solution to this, because we have to work for solutions, long term is education medium term is legislation short term is civic engagement So the second pillar is is sorry the first pillar is technology so legislation this spring 2020 spring 2023 is when the Digital Services Act and the Digital Markets Act the EU is probably the most effective legislation that will try to protect our minds that is focused on data on technology rather than on content, because I think that's a great deflection of the of the technology companies they deflect the content but that's not the problem. It's it's distribution that's a problem. So that's tech, the second part of journalism, journalists, we keep doing our jobs and we're just a punching bags. We, we keep doing our jobs right so how do we do that, and especially in the global south. I accepted I'm the co chair of the International Fund for Public Interest Media, which is trying to increase ODA the overseas development assistance funds from a business of democratic nations from 0.3% to 1%. The co chair is Mark Thompson, who is the former CEO of the New York Times he's former director general of BBC so you can kind of see, you know what we're trying to do is to raise enough money to be able to give news organizations in the global south, a lifeline to survival as legislation kicks in right. And then the third part, which is, well of course in Rappler we continue doing the journalism. Even under these times. The third part is community, the most important part. And in this one we've, this is the challenge to the world is a challenge to the United States you have midterms in a month. Exactly, you know, you have midterms in a month. And when we did a scan of the United States, a social scan. My gosh, it's worse than the Philippines. Right, so, so what's to happen. The challenge for each of us is we need to define and redefine what civic engagement looks like in the age of social media and exponential lives. You know, civil society groups, news organizations, we actually did a whole of society approach for our may presidential elections that worked a four tiered pyramid we called it the facts first age pyramid. We worked with Google News Initiative and me Dan, which is San Francisco base. It became a data platform that connected the four layers. The four layers are 16 news groups in layer one fact checks. The first time news organizations work together like this, but fact checks are boring and they don't spread. They don't get distributed. So the second layer, we call the mesh. 116 groups civil society and geos human rights activists environmentalist business groups, the church, and their task was to share the fact checks, but add emotion, because emotion is So for example, right, there's a fact check about the tallyana gold, share it with your thoughts, your emotions, right, and we tried to get away from anger because you don't want to become a monster to fight a monster. That's another chapter title in in in my book. Don't become a monster to fight a monster. How do you break through the silos. I mean, you said community, but the tendency now is happening in the US right. There's groups like Trump's truth social is the perfect example of that. How do you break through those barriers that are set up by technology by these platforms. I think that's the wrong question, because I don't anyone can accept for the platforms that polarized us right so what we can do. And it's not about talking to your, what we can do is individual you know in the Nobel lecture I talked about an individual battle for community, a person to person defense of democracy. What do we have control over right now. Right, because I see a news organizations in the states also have this right. How do we regain trust. Guess what, it's not in our control. We're getting clobbered because of the technology, and you know to try to like spin ourselves in circles to solve something we can't actually waste our time. The question here is, how can you build your communities based on facts. How can you build your communities based on the goodness of human nature, based on what we are as people, and then slowly mesh it all together. So you know that second layer mesh. The third layer are academic researchers. For the first time, eight research groups in the Philippines came together, and every week, they would tell Filipinos. What is the manipulation this week, whether it's YouTube, TikTok, or Facebook, or Twitter, right, and then the last layer layer for us the most important one, and this connects to what you just asked. The law legal groups that came together, volunteer some of them, but groups like the internet integrated bar the Philippines, the Philippine Bar Association, these groups never came together. When you have impunity online. It leads, it creates impunity offline. If you get away with a crime online, why would you not feel like you can get away with it in the real world. Online violence is real world violence, right. So what that layer four did in three months was to file more than 21 cases, tactical, strategic legal cases to protect the integrity of the vote, and to protect the people the rights we're trying to protect the facts. So more, when I would say the question would be, how can we build bigger and bigger communities that we can pull together, it's not about political leaning, it is about, can we agree this is a glass of water, or is someone going to say, no, this is a glass of vodka and say it a million times and even if it's not true, that would get greater distribution. This is why technology platforms should not get away with impunity. You know, it's already been proven genocide has happened in Myanmar, you know, the harms that have happened are proven, it is time to demand accountability. This is one question from the audience, which I think it's good for you to answer. What is the best way we can support you. Oh my gosh. Well, thank you for asking. You know, we have something we started in 2018. Shortly after we were banned from the palace. Now, it's a rapper, rapper plus please join us. We actually, this is how we build our communities and it's a very vibrant community. You can see it on rapper, just join rapper plus the second one is in your own area of influence and in fact I would put this first. Really, in your area of influence, don't bury your head. This is the lessons that are in the book. Right. Like, the first one is, this is a time of massive change, creative destruction. Our old world has been destroyed, and we need to create our new one. So, learn, don't bury your head in the sand. You know, the second, the second lesson in the book is how we can't be silent. So, silence is consent, but not being silent doesn't mean screaming. Also, right, this is what I miss. There's a great book by Andrew keen also someone from, from your part of the world, you know in 2007 he wrote a book called the cult of the amateur. He in 2007 predicted that the internet, the way it was being created was going to create the cult of the amateur we brought him to Manila in 2013, because I wanted I had such a glowing view of the what technology could do I was the truest of true believers in social media. I am so disappointed is mild I feel extremely betray that that the money part was more important than the potential for good. See, I get emotional on this. They could have done so much good. So, so yeah, please in your area of influence, you know, don't don't bury your head. This is it. A specific question. Well, how do you like share my personal experience with Facebook, I've been pulling back and creating this a small circle just communicating the small circle friends, in terms of sharing photos and all that. What would you advise to Filipino, especially in the US is, you know, this is a US audience in terms of how do you deal with Facebook how do you use it. You know, close everything, you know, let me say, when you're on Facebook, Facebook sucks your data. Right. And that means everything your friends your relationships your thoughts, you know the way it works right like every atomized post that you have machine and builds a model of you. Over time I started calling this model, your clone. So then what happens is artificial intelligence comes in and takes that clone of you, because Facebook says it built it, that it's now it now owns it. So it takes that, and that's the database that is used for micro targeting, right, what is micro targeting, identifying your weakest moment to a message. And that is insidious manipulation. I believe, you know, we came out September with Dimitri and I at the Oslo Peace Center we came out with a 10 point action plan, along with 10 other Nobel audience, and about 100, 150 other groups around the world calling for an end to surveillance for profit one to demanding the technology companies treat everyone equally. You're in San Francisco so I don't know if you saw the film coded bias, right, because think of the programmer as an editor who codes their own personal biases into what they create. So, for example, the film coded bias. It was a former MIT student who she's a black female, and she couldn't do the AI exercise that was assigned to her, because the AI didn't recognize her right you can see all of these with there's been a lot more talk about it it's been exposed coded bias. The third part is journalism as antidote to tyranny. So those are kind of the spirit of those 10 point action plan it's, it's kind of at a constitutional level, and what we're doing now is trying to find ways to operationalize this. So I guess like, don't give up, please don't give up, you know you are extremely powerful there, especially since you have elections coming up right it's easy to say I have no voice, but you actually do. And here's the part that keeps me energized still. We have to create, because it's all destroyed. We're in the upside down somehow. If you saw, if you saw, I did. We have to climb up the into the real world, we need to bring it into the right side up. And that now is dependent on each of us because the battle, frankly, is individual. It's an individual battle for integrity. It is an individual battle for facts. You have family and friends I think you know in the States, it's very hard to talk to someone whose family hasn't been divided by politics. So back to Tom's River North, I was like, you know, there's, there are all these games we used to have this rivalry with Tom's River South, north versus south, and we would do athletics and I and that's what we talked about it's like, you'll play games and then after that you'll be friends. But when did politics become a gladiator or Toriel battle to the death. It shouldn't be that way. That isn't what we signed up for, but that is what these tech platforms have perpetuated. Right Maria, we will let you go on on behalf of the Philippines. I'm going to pass it on to to to a but wanted to mention on behalf of the Philippine American Book Festival and the San Francisco library thank you. Best of luck to you and my best to the Raptor team, especially my friend Glenda Gloria and the other Manangs. Thank you so much for your work also and thank you for having good in the San Francisco public library. I wish I could be their person. Thank you. Pass it on to Abe. Okay. Thank you, Ben and Maria for a great one hour of intense discussion about where where we are and it's very appropriate that we, you know, we take on the book and Maria, thank you again for joining us because it's so appropriate for the American International Book Festival to know we do these little things to to a dictator the fight for our future by by you and coming out next month so definitely the library will be carrying your book, and we encourage all those to preorder the book. And thank you again for joining us this afternoon. It was a great, great talk.