Maria Ressa on Trump 2nd Term: “Narrative Warfare and the Breakdown of Reality”

HARI SREENIVASAN: Bianna, thanks. Maria Ressa, thanks so much for joining us. Maria, you have been an outspoken advocate for the press, especially when you were in the Philippines, and you witnessed and lived through how that government cracked down on the press. And you wrote a recent report at The Nerve which looked at the first 100 days of the second Trump administration, in which you said, “We recognize the warning signs immediately…It was a systematic importation and evolution of the authoritarian playbook that we survived in the Philippines.” Put this in perspective for us. Compared to what you witnessed in the Philippines, how concerned are you for the United States?

MARIA RESSA: Extremely concerned. I mean, you know, I tell friends, I have both deja vu and PTSD. And every development it’s like, Oh my God, we’ve lived through this. And, Oh my God, well, what is happening? Look, the report’s title is “Narrative warfare and the breakdown of reality.” I think if you don’t look at the data, you miss that cumulative effect — the way people’s behavior changed, right? So just on social media alone, we knew lies spread six times faster. That’s a 2018 MIT study. But we saw in the Philippines in 2017, if you lace it with fear, anger, and hate, it goes viral. And then it isn’t just the virality, it’s also the seeding of a meta-narrative that is a lie. But then the opportunistic amplification every time — so a lie told a million times becomes a fact. If you can’t tell fact from fiction — if people believe lies are facts, then you can control them.

And what we’re seeing here is the same thing that we lived through in the Philippines, which is narrative warfare up top. In the first 100 days of Trump 2.0, it was 143 executive orders that didn’t just act as policy or dismantle institutions like USAID in the physical world. They were content triggers in the virtual world, right? Where the public information ecosystem’s design is determined by big tech for profit. So those 143 EOs literally created this narrative warfare — that would be the top of the funnel. What’s the end goal? The second part of it is when people can’t tell fact from fiction, civic engagement disappears. And the middle of it is the dismantling of institutions. There are no checks and balances. We lived through this in the Philippines under Rodrigo Duterte in 2016. It took him six months. I think our report posits to you that in America it happened within a hundred days, 143 EOs.

The biggest change from 2016 to today is the fusion of state with big tech, right. And you can see that in the dismantling of safety measures that had been put in place — that had been demanded by the world. By 2024, we had these measures, but then Facebook just decided to take them down. No fact-checking. And people went to vote in America with more propaganda than facts. News organization’s distribution was far less than it should have been. 

We are living through an information armageddon. In order to make democracy work, we need a shared reality. And I’ve said this over and over, the three sentences since 2016, facts don’t spread as fast as lies, right? So if you don’t have facts, you can’t have truth, without truth, you can’t have trust. Without these three, we don’t have a shared reality. You can’t have journalism, you can’t have democracy. 

SREENIVASAN: Yeah. You know, let’s break that down a little bit. So, say for example, an executive order comes out, how does it go through the sort of tech ecosystem? 

RESSA: Look, first, it’s not an accident like we called it in the report, a Deconstruction Model, where in the past, the Persuasion Model, a government would have to persuade its citizens, have discussions about policy, right? But what happened here with a Deconstruction Model is the gatekeepers, institutional gatekeepers, the press, Congress, legislature…think tanks, the academics, all of the discussion that goes around a policy — should we dismantle USAID? — is completely thrown out. And the content triggers then, so that when the EO happens, the content trigger goes in, it use — the administration uses executive actions to create narrative events. They’re amplified. A decentralized network of influencers, they reframe these events for politically-aligned communities. And then it’s reinforced by platform, our algorithms, that reward this emotional behavior. You know, it becomes, politics becomes a gladiator’s battle to the death.

But I think more interesting than all of this are the — this isn’t an accident. There’s a deliberate political strategy that leverages direct unmediated communication to bypass traditional checks and balances. There’s a technological architecture: that’s social media platforms are built to reward emotions. They spread further. And then there’s an economic model, right? The creator economy. And no offense to influencers and creators, but you are part of an ecosystem that monetizes attention, and it creates this powerful financial incentive.

So TikTok was the most interesting because it’s all about spectacle and moving it away from policy to personalities. It’s influencer driven reality. Independent creators drove 66% of all engagement, dwarfing mainstream media, which only had 32%. Instead of talking about policy, it went to Barron Trump instead.  It created the presidency as pop culture. It softens the image of authoritarian power for younger audiences. Americans now get their news from social media, right? In TikTok complex executive orders were stripped of all meaning of context, and they were repackaged as memes and irony.

SREENIVASAN: So what happens when the institutions that used to stand in the middle, whether it’s Congress or an independent press, get eroded away, or are made well inconsequential, less relevant, by this sort of information funnel and this warfare that you’re talking about?

RESSA: Impunity. What you get, literally, and, you know, in “How to Stand Up to a Dictator,” most people assume the dictator I was talking about is Rodrigo Duterte, who by the way, was arrested March last year. He is now jailed in The Hague awaiting a trial. The charge against him is crimes against humanity, right? But the bigger dictator in “How to Stand Up to a Dictator” was Mark Zuckerberg, right? He’s not elected. He determines what billions of people around the world see and feel, and influences the way we act, insidiously. 

When you see in my country the, it was my government that attacked me. And you’re seeing some of this happening, actually, that’s the narrative warfare we lay out in the report here. But for me, look, in 2017, the narrative warfare against me was #ArrestMariaRessa trended. And then I was arrested in 2019. But in 2017 it was laughable. 

So it’s like fertilizer seeding the ground. The commodification of news has led to a steady decline in the kind of news that reaches the widest audience. And that goes hand in hand with — when someone in power, like President Trump, like President Duterte, calls an investigative report, “fake news,” an investigative reporter, “fake news,” that is very, very different and carries consequences. When the gatekeepers are gone, then you have unrestrained power. And the impunity happens not just at the state level, but also at the technology that underpins this.

SREENIVASAN: You, you have been very critical of Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook. And you’ve called him kind of more dangerous and a bigger dictator than Duterte. And I, you know, look, I mean, Duterte has admitted to having death squads. He’s literally killed hundreds, if not more, thousands of people. Why is Zuckerberg worse, in your opinion?

RESSA: Here’s an easy one that everyone has already agreed to (and I’ve watched the narrative shift over time). 2018 Myanmar, where it was genocide in Myanmar enabled by Facebook. And both Facebook and the U.N. sent its teams to investigate that. They came out with the same, with the same conclusion. That it had enabled this. I’ve watched this in the Philippines. I’ve lived through it. Like literally, I’m not just giving you data. I’m giving you the experience of it. And if we don’t fix it, democracy will not survive through it, right? You’ll have a lot of companies with a lot of profit. But it comes at a societal, at a global expense. 

At some point, the world will tip. And it’s the same in a closed system when a metanarrative is seeded, right? You pound it opportunistically. At some point it takes over the system. We’re at that phase. And the, and the problem globally, and you’re seeing this, whether it is in the U.K. or France or Germany or even Canada, right, or Australia. What you’re seeing is the democratic leaders are standing on wood that is being eaten by termites. And that wood will collapse until we extinguish the termites. That’s what narrative warfare does.

SREENIVASAN: You said that one of the bottoms of this funnel is that there is a kleptocracy, or inherently that’s what it enables. Explain that.

RESSA: In the Philippines, what we saw — six months, Duterte became the most powerful leader we had ever had. More powerful than the first Marcos in 1972 when he declared martial law by executive order, right? So the top of the funnel, and then it goes down within six months, the legislature essentially collapsed. So what happens when, when all of that goes, is that you, you don’t have a democracy anymore. And it is transforming in front of your eyes. It’s the death by a thousand cuts of a democracy.

SREENIVASAN: One of the things you’ve written about before is how Duterte was -really kind of picking off and I, the sort of elites in the top. And to make examples of particular type of individuals and institutions, that creates a massive chilling effect. How did you overcome that in the Philippines where people knew that this could be injurious to their personal health if they decided to spread this information? 

RESSA: I decided not to leave the Philippines. Rappler was the third news organization targeted by Duterte. So I held a meeting and I told everybody in Rappler, it’s gonna get worse and look, if this is too much for you, let us know and we will help you find a job in another news organization. Not one reporter took that, not one journalist took that offer. 

One of the things that we did was if a dozen agents came in – and they did when they arrested me on February 13th, right – but if they came in to try to shut down Rappler, what would we do, right? We had code. We had one code word that would give us five minutes for every report, every person inside Rappler to shut down their electronics. We did quarterly drills of a raid if they came in, I wanted to be prepared. And those drills, our people didn’t know whether they were real or not. And some of our people cried through it. But each time we learned something and it prepared us. That’s the thing, right? The seven Ps: proper preparation — we drilled it every quarter. So we were prepared for the worst. It never happened, thank God. But we were prepared, and because we were prepared for the worst, we weren’t afraid.

SREENIVASAN: You know, you  look at this as not a free speech issue. If we wanted to try to constrain some of what the social media platforms are doing today, you’re saying stop trying to argue the speech case. Start looking at the safety case. Explain that. 

RESSA: This is by design harmful to us. And where we’ve seen the most progress, and this is bipartisan, even in the United States, is on safety for kids, right? I mean, think about how corrupted this is. Lies spread faster, if you lace it with fear, anger, and hate, it spreads even faster. Did you actually agree to be cloned in the virtual world? Data privacy is largely a myth now in America, right? Like, I didn’t agree to that. There’s a little bit more protection if you’re in the E.U. The laws in the E.U. helped us in the Global South. So a lot of this, everything in the physical world is now being replicated in the virtual world. But democratic countries also abdicated responsibility for protecting its citizens in the virtual world, right? 

In November 2022, we came up — about 300 Nobel laureate, civil society groups. We came up with a 10 point action plan that boils down to just three buckets. The first is to stop surveillance for profit. We are not, we did not give approval to be cloned. And this kind of, you know, this kind of cloning insidiously manipulates us. So stop surveillance for profit. The second one is stop coded bias, because if you are a woman or LGBTQ+, if you are Brown or Black or part of any ethnic minority, you’re further marginalized online. The third is journalism as an antidote to tyranny. Because think about the system that big tech created — social media first. And now let’s, we can talk about chatbot separately, but in social media, what’s rewarded, right? A news organization separates the publisher — the arm that has to make money — from the journalism group that has to call a spade a spade, that has to tell you things you may not wanna hear. So that’s the next phase. We have a shared reality on facts. When that happens, we can have civilized policy discussions. We can agree to disagree, we can learn. That’s the other part, right? It’s not the cult of the amateur. 

And finally, the last part of it is, that builds community. That’s how we bring disparate voices together by finding our common ground. If we don’t fix the public information ecosystem, everything we do downstream will collapse, because we live in toxic sludge.

SREENIVASAN: Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and CEO of Rappler. Maria Ressa, thanks so much for your time.

RESSA: No, thank you.