Maria Ressa on how to save democracy from Big Tech

AI is full of possibilities. Enterprises run on realities. That's why Pega combines the world's most powerful AI with the governance, transparency, and control enterprises demand. So you can move faster, adapt faster, and scale AI with confidence. All the power of AI, none of the uncertainty. Learn more at pega.com slash AI. The question really is, can Silicon Valley still reform itself? Can you do enough with values? Guys, we've been talking about values all day. We are doing our best to survive this time period because this is a period of market failure for news organizations. The new world order that's being created is made up of strands, like a spider web. Each strand, it looks weak, you can tear it, but the spider web can hold. If those countries can hold together. This is Masters of Scale. I'm Jeff Berman, your host in today's episode. Reid Hoffman and Arya Finger sit down with the incredible Nobel Peace Prize winner, journalist Maria Ressa. They discuss the critical moment that democracy is facing and how we scale our work to protect it. The actual concrete steps that all of us can take. It's a lively and extraordinarily timely conversation. I know it's going to be meaningful for you. Let's dive in. Maria, so glad you could join us. First, congratulations on your victories in the Filipino Supreme Court. And if you ever thought super young at heart, right, an instance, so you have just one case still pending, yes? Yeah, so it took almost a decade, but there were 10 cases filed against Rappler, the company that I led, and 11 against me. A case now has gone all the way up to the Supreme Court. So it's meant for almost a decade I've had to ask for, I lost my right to travel. So until today, to be here in front of you, you had to write a letter to my Supreme Court to ask for permission for me to travel. So I'm going to ask for permission for me to travel. So guys, when you lose your rights, be careful, it takes a while to claw them back. Easier to defend it up front. But where is the corrupt leader who tried to stop you and your fellow journalists right now? Okay, well, so first, the fight back has two dictators, right? But, as you pointed out, Maria, the dictator, Rodrigo Duterte, who had tried to put me in jail for the rest of my life and closed Rappler down, was arrested in March 2025, he's charged with crimes against humanity, and his trial at the International Criminal Court begins November 30th. But that's the first dictator. My second dictator, and I do name them, and I would argue the more powerful dictator in the Philippines is Mark Zuckerberg. At that point, 97% of Filipinos on the internet were on Facebook. Facebook is, was our internet. Today, it's 100%, right? But at that point, I sat with him, and in 2017, I said, you know, Mark, you have to come visit the Philippines because it's so powerful. The ability to do good is incredible. He was frowning at me. Reid doesn't frown at me, but he was frowning. And then he said, Maria, where are the other 3%? And that was my introduction. So my second dictator, as along with other dictators in tech, has gotten more power. One system of governance has had some level of accountability. The trial begins. It's a whole-of-society approach, right? But the other dictator has gone on to get more power, and that same culture is global, right? So, I mean, in 2016, I sat in California in Mountain View at that point to say what was happening to us is coming for you. And I feel like Cassandra and Sisyphus combined. And, like, really, Reid, I'm so happy you're here because, you know, my question really is, can Silicon Valley still reform itself? I do think, and this is part of, like, the Master Scale Summit, which is part of the thing of not just technology, but it's kind of soul and culture and humanism and people. And I do think that one of the things that Silicon Valley is a bit of a microcosm for America is also good at rebuilding, reinventing itself. So I have that hope and optimism. I do think it's some work. You have to focus on, you know, what are the human impacts? I think technology, you know, I've said we're homo techne, that technology is fundamental to being human. But you have to focus on the human part of it. And so that's part of the reason we wanted you out here and on this stage so that Silicon Valley can, you know, hear that and participate. And so it's, you know, but it's just as your own work, it's work. Yeah, a lot. And we're counting on you. You are the one who can help us solve this. We have so much to learn. You know, in your book, The Fight Back, you say we're not just fighting one crisis. This is three intertwined crises, which is a lot. How would you define these three? Because we need your experience to make sure we don't go all the way down that road. I mean, look, at the 80th anniversary of the United Nations, so the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, right, that was how the world responded to Hiroshima and Nagasaki and our own potential self-destruction. At the UN on the 80th year, I said that if we win information integrity, if we can tell the difference between fact and fiction, then we can begin to fight the other problems, climate, gender, rule of law. If people, the citizens, cannot tell the difference between fact and delusion with information warfare, with narrative warfare, cognitive surrender now, right, then we lose it all. So here's the way the three things roll out, right? The first is the crisis of truth. We've heard that a lot. And that goes to social media, right? We can't tell the difference literally by design, social media except LinkedIn. So social media, yeah, he had some values, no? One or two. But literally, lies spread faster. And if you use fear, anger, and hate, in the Philippines in 2017, women journalists were attacked at least 10 times more than men, so gender disinformation. And then the whole thing of growth, so social media. The second part is the crisis. If you can't tell fact from fiction, then you move down. You move down to what hollows out. Your institutions hollow out. That breaks down the crisis of order, right? If you don't have rule of law, how do you organize society? This is why there's impunity of the two dictators. And the third rung is, without that, you have a crisis of accountability. And part of that is you have a system of laws the United Nations has set up for accountability that is frayed at the edges. But look. My Rodrigo Duterte is facing crimes against humanity. But you have the tech that rules our world. And I'll pull this out, right? Please tell me I'm wrong. I'm waiting for you, Aria, also. Three layers of AI that starts with that culture that started social media, hacked our biology, the attention economy. The second layer are the chatbots, the large language models. That second layer, I called it in the book, it hacked intimacy. So trust is broken to intimacy, what makes us human. And then the last one is agency itself, from the agentic and multi-agentic. And I co-chair the UN's Independent International Scientific Panel on Artificial Intelligence. And we came out with this report in July that said that geopolitically we're changing the world because 75% of the compute power, it comes from America. America points to China, but only 15% of the compute power is China. And then the world's laws come from EU, which has 5%. The pace has accelerated. You both said this. And then the last pace, as early as July, the people who built it themselves said they could not control it. They could not control the frontier model. So the question, of course, is why do they build it? So we're going to get to AI in one moment. Sorry, I'm taking them where I want to go. The very clever journalist is turning the interview around. Stay tuned. But okay, you started with information. No, we want to hear from you. You started with information integrity being sort of the most important fight. And it's the first one that leads to the next three. There are a lot of people here who agree with you and really care about information integrity. How do we fight it? How do we fight? back against that first layer. What are all the answers? First, get off your seats and stop with learned helplessness, I think is the first one, right? Yep, agency. The title, agency, it's the cellular level of a democracy that the technology targets. You have tremendous power, and that's part of what the fight back is, you know, after the first chapter. So, every chapter has 10 steps, and at the end of the book, there are 10 strategic goals. You know, I fought with my publisher because they wanted to put the strategic goals at the beginning, and I was like, no, because it looks like you have to climb Mount Everest with strategic goals. When you do it step by step, you just take a step forward, right? So, the first chapter is called the two dictators, and the first step you have to do, you should do it, like, as soon as you leave tomorrow. Just take a look. How much time do you spend on screens? Too much. And then when you have that, the second step is, which app makes you angriest? Consider deleting it, right? I mean, these are easy steps. So, that's the first, and the book is set up. So, there's the first three chapters, understand. The second four chapters, defend. Chapter four is defend yourself. Have you done the 15-minute security audit? Defend your community. Defend your journalists before it's too late. Defend your institutions. And the last chunk, build. Hillary Clinton asked me this. She actually said, Maria, we know the problems, but why are we always playing defense? And so, what's the offense? Chapter eight, build your own technology, right? Where is public interest tech? Read an area. Chapter nine, super important, where, again, we go bottom up, but chapter nine is govern collectively, because no nation on the earth can do this on their own, but the leaders who are trying to fight this battle are getting elected out. Why do we think tech and far right are kind of close-knit? There were decisions that have made that have shifted the world, right? So, govern collectively. And the last one, and think about this one, for your kids, for your family, the world we want. What's our vision of the world we want? I know you both have a vision of the world we want, but that's there. So, the strategicals are at the end, but everyone in this room, you guys are all so powerful. You're so powerful. You're in Silicon Valley, for God's sakes. This little area has turned my world upside down in the global south. And on January 6th, I thought, oh my gosh, Silicon Valley since came home to roost. But you really didn't learn the lesson. I hope you learned the lesson now. Fight back. Yeah. No, no, it's important to take the agency. We all know the disappointment that comes when a grand gesture falls flat. Something that we don't know. Something that didn't deliver the results you expected. Marketing budgets too often fall into that trap, aiming for big impressions, big reach, but without the revenue to back it. LinkedIn has a name for it, Bullspend. LinkedIn ads generate the highest ROAS of all major ad networks. They target by company, industry, job title, and more. Spend $250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn ads and get a $250 credit for the next one. Just go to linkedin.com slash scale. That's linkedin.com slash scale. Terms and conditions apply. Stripe Treasury is your new financial operating system built for what's next. 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So one of the things that Silicon Valley innovates on that isn't just, you know, technology networks, et cetera, but it's also business models. Yes. So journalism needs a new business model. Yes. Say a little bit about that. Yeah. So I think Rappler, but let me first talk about our own experiences. We survived our state dictator. We survived barely. And it happens. The fear is real. So I empathize. I'm Filipino and I'm American. Imagine going through this twice in a decade, right? Can you tell everyone in one sentence what Rappler is? Sure. Rappler is a news organization. So this is my 40th year as a journalist. I'm an investigative reporter. I opened the Manila Bureau of CNN in 1987 and in Jakarta in 1995. And then I ran the largest news group in the Philippines. In 2011, I realized that the tech was transformative and I bit hook, line, and sinker. I thought that social media, Facebook, would be a way to come bottom up, to hold power to account. And for a while, it was. Right? For a while, it was. And then it wasn't. And that's when it was tweaked. But Rappler is a news organization of about 100, 120 people. We're small. We're about $5 million a year. Nothing like what you have heard here in Silicon Valley. But here's what happens when the news group becomes mission driven. When the Philippine government first tried to shut us down on January 15th, 2018, I remember these dates. We had a meeting, all 100 of us, and our median age in Rappler is 23 years old, 23. So when Duterte was bullying our reporter, she was 26 years old, right? So I said, this is a different time. If you want to leave, we will help you find a job. And not one of the journalists left. And we became so focused on this. But let me answer your question about the business model. I think the business model today, so we survived Duterte. And my gosh, we will do our best. We are doing our best to survive this time period, because this is a period of market failure for news organizations. If you don't know this yet, right? Zero click search means that referral traffic to every news site has gone down in my country, a drop of 85%. In Facebook, Facebook was the first one. Once the largest, this was the first one. When they scrape Rappler or any other news group, your server costs go up. So I'm literally paying for someone else to steal our content. And they're doing it. Anyway, I'm just saying that support your journalists before it's too late. Yeah. Amen. So we only have about three minutes. Oh my God. Should we do the UN question or? Go for it. All right. Okay, great. So you also lead efforts at the UN to create AI safety guidelines. Say a little bit about that and say, you know, usually Silicon Valley is a fairly skeptical environment about the UN. Say, you know, kind of how and why we should get behind it. Yeah, because no country can fix this problem on its own. And what we've seen is that the Security Council is compromised, right? Nothing has moved. So what happened in the last two years is the General Assembly began the act of creation. The Independent International Scientific Panel on AI that the UN created, the US voted against it. But that set the facts. So like everything, we need the facts. And so we did that by July. And then when we went to the global dialogue, also created last year, and we talked to the countries, then we began to realize that they were only talking to the people selling them the tech that are both predatory and extractive, right? So what we can see now is countries in the global south, in particular, want to know how the tech can be used for good. And there's so much that could be used for good. But be careful of the Faustian bargain. I'll say this. Chapter nine, govern collectively, is about the nations that are trying to come together, despite the fact that the American beam has been pulled out. Each strand, it looks weak, you can tear it, but the spider web can hold if those countries can hold together. So what I hope for is the middle countries, the global south, Asia, that these countries can come together. Again, think about it this way, right? China has 15% of the world's compute power. The US still has huge power if you can nudge them in the right direction. But if you can't, what's the rest of the world doing? It's 193 member countries in the UN, and we're the global majority. So if we can move forward, then we need help from people like you guys, you guys, right? That's the order that we're after. I haven't given up. I mean, you can't give up. Well, you never give up. That's great. So clearly, the US is consequential when we're talking about AI, compute, etc. All of these companies are based in Silicon Valley. I'm sure no one here knows this, but in two weeks, we have the midterms. Oh, yeah. Less than two weeks now, right? Some might say that, I mean, democracy is once again in crisis. Some people aren't sort of aware of the threats. Other people are resigned to inaction because what can they do? What would you tell us less than two weeks out from the midterms that we need to be watching? Well, first, get up off your seats and go do things, right? Hope comes from action. If, again, a hundred tactical steps in the book, chapter seven is defend your institutions. You guys, are going to go through what we went through in the Philippines in 1986. You will have to fight for electoral integrity, right? So go be a poll watcher, go run, do things, build communities of action. I mean, Minneapolis is very inspiring, right? The civic circles start with the civic circle, eight to 15 people. And when I write this, I write this from like someone who's had to do drills for the worst. First case scenarios. What's your civic circle? How will you guys work together? And, and then the last part, since you're in Silicon Valley, please build public interest tech, right? Like little Rappler in the Philippines, because we were playing whack-a-mole for a decade and I begged the Silicon dictators. No, I, I begged, but it doesn't make money. They did. They were nice in some ways. So what we did is we, we went, and if you're familiar with the matrix protocol, the matrix protocol has 150 million addressable users, France and Germany, all of Germany's health system is on the matrix protocol. And so what's the future of news? Because we're not going to give up. The future of news is a global federation that is built on the matrix protocol. We built a chat app. We rolled it out in 2023. There's 65 Filipino news groups. We're just rolling it out in Southeast Asia. When you go on something federated that isn't manipulating you, I warn you, it will be boring. But you will have information integrity. And when push comes to shove, so this is this news cycle normally is that you get one to 5% normally. That's a normal news thing because people don't want to be watching the news all day. But when crisis hits, you go and we hit 99 to 100%. Your news organizations are going to the gym every day to always make sure we're factually accurate. None of the tech you use actually care about the facts, maybe except LinkedIn. Go to public interest tech. And then, well, the last one I'll say also is that we all have shared interests, including Silicon Valley. And one of the things we saw was a common, you've worked with Camille Francois and Roost, robust open online tools. We incubated this in SIPA at Columbia University. And you were part of this also. What it is, is we went to all the tech companies here and they work together. And what we said is, give us your trust and safety tools. So even OpenAI gave us an OSS. Discord gave us. They became an alliance because we took what they didn't want to do. We perfected it and we rolled it out to everyone for free. That's what a floor for safety can look like, right? So it's a lot of moving parts. You are so incredibly important. We don't, we, the rest of the world often don't have a seat at the table that you have. So act, please, right? The time, the window is still open, but it's closing fast. Well, on that note, you can tell why a profile encourage vigor and strength who will never give up. Maria, so thank you so much for being here. Thank you. Thank you for joining. Thanks again to Maria Ressa for joining us at the 2026 Masters of Scale Summit. Her new book is The Fight Back, a citizen's guide to standing up to dictators. And a massive thank you to everyone who joined us in San Francisco at the Presidio Theater for what was truly an amazing week. I'm Jeff Berman. Thank you for listening. 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