Dissident Spotlight: Maria Ressa
Maria Ressa founded Rappler to break important stories to hold her leaders accountable. That also led her to a battle against Facebook.

Maria Ressa is a journalist in the Phillippines who has covered Rodrigo Duterte’s corrupt presidency and social media’s role in his campaign. In 2021, she won the Nobel Peace Prize alongside Russian journalist, Dmitry Muratov.
We reviewed Ressa’s memoir, How to Stand Up to a Dictator. While we covered her reflections on practicing courage and journalism, we had to skim over the heroic resistance she mounted against a hostile government trying to imprison her and shut down her media company, Rappler.
She’s faced arrest and imprisonment to practice journalism in a way that holds leaders accountable and informs voters about the people they’ve elected to lead them. Among the most notorious abuses she covered was Duterte’s crackdown on drug crime.
Exposing Mass Murder
A 2017 Rappler investigation found that an estimated 1.8 million people in the Phillippines were current drug users. Duterte claimed there were three to four million. He ran his 2016 campaign as a tough-on-crime candidate and openly discussed hanging criminals as a real policy upon taking office.
When he took office on June 30, 2016, he put his murderous policies into place. Rappler found that during the first six months of Duterte’s drug war, his government:
6,216 people were killed in the drug war
4,049 people were killed extrajudicially
By the end of his term, Duterte had killed an estimated 30,000 people in police raids. These murdered drug users included people who smoked marijuana, not only hard drugs like cocaine, not that murdering them in the streets would be acceptable, either.
The murders weren’t limited to drug users and dealers. The New York Times reported on a lawsuit against the police alleging that a seven-year-old boy was shot for witnessing one of the massacres.
Rappler’s coverage of Duterte’s sloppy drug war and other shortcomings put Ressa in his crosshairs.
Fighting a Dictator and Social Media
Ressa faced harassment from police, threats of imprisonment, and at one point, arrest. While she was fighting the standard fight against tyranny, she also had to contend with social media’s grasp on her people.
Ressa used her media company to cover stories that revealed the truth about Duterte’s brutality. However, Duterte ran effective social media campaigns painting himself as a strong, competent leader and characterizing Ressa as a liar and a criminal. Ressa was gathering facts on the ground while Duterte ran the kind of targeted propaganda campaigns that social media made possible.
Facebook was the main offender, in part because it came pre-installed on smartphones in the Phillippines. That availability increased internet access, but it also made Facebook a primary news source for many Filipinos.
The results were disastrous. Before Cambridge Analytica became a data harvesting scandal in the United States, its parent company collected data from Filipino users and sold voter profiles to Duterte’s campaign. Duterte could target his lies to assuage voter concerns and build the public persona that would get him elected.
Ressa used her 2021 Nobel speech to decry how Facebook was “biased against facts” and “journalism.” The problem isn’t limited to Facebook. A 2018 study of Twitter found that falsehoods reached 35% more people than truthful stories.
Ressa and her company wage war on two fronts. They work to hold Filipino leaders accountable to their voters and battle against social media algorithms that spread emotional propaganda farther and faster than honest journalism. It’s a two-front war that Ressa has fought and continues to fight remarkably well.