First of all, I would like to thank everyone here. The main reason I am standing here today and staying out of jail is because of your solidarity. If it weren’t for the support of over 80 organizations, including CPJ, RSF, ICFJ, and others, in the hashtag Hold the Line, Rappler wouldn’t be alive today, and I probably wouldn’t be free either. Therefore, we need to mobilize this strength for every journalist under attack, anywhere in the world.

Today I want to focus on two things—radical collaboration and creation. 

The old world as we know it is almost completely destroyed. We cannot remain silent in this state of collapse. We must create a new one. If we do not radically collaborate and create, I fear that within a year, most of the world’s small and medium-sized news organizations will be closed.

Our fight is not just with the government. I want to give the example of Rappler’s newsroom. There are about 120 of us in Manila. My co-founder Glenda and our courageous journalists are driving Rappler. I only raised my hand to stop it from falling, but they have done the heavy lifting.

Our enemies are not just the oppressive governments that tried to silence us. The main problem is the technology that these rulers have come riding on. The technology that has literally torn our society apart. And, sadly, none of the technologies that control our lives today are based on ‘facts’.

A 2018 MIT study said that lies spread 6 times faster than truth on social media. In the Philippines, we saw that women were attacked 10 times more than men online. And now with the advent of ‘generative AI’, the situation has become even more dire.

The online attacks on me and Rappler during the time of then Philippine President Duterte were not just criticism. It was a continuous attack to silence me. If this is happening to you today, don’t be afraid, because it is a style. And, if you are in a Western democratic country, be prepared, this attack is coming to your doorstep.

They made fun of my appearance. When they didn’t find corruption or any other flaw in me, they targeted my skin disease (eczema). I have dry skin, I am not corrupt. But, they made my skin look even uglier in every photo. They created a hashtag against me called ‘Scrotum Face’. It may sound funny, but its purpose is profound – dehumanization.

When they dehumanize you, your safety is at risk. Online violence doesn’t always stay online, it turns into real-world violence. Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia suffered similar online attacks before she was murdered. In the Philippines in 2016, within months of Duterte taking office, we had to increase our security sixfold. 

I asked Facebook, ‘What are you doing?’ They said, ‘Maria, you are a public figure.’ Then I showed them the statistics – I was getting an average of 90 hate messages per hour.

The end of facts and the death of democracy

I have been repeating the same thing for a decade – there is no truth without facts. There is no trust without truth. And, without all of this, we have no shared reality. Without a shared reality, we cannot solve even the most basic problems, let alone existential crises like climate change. And without facts, democracy cannot survive.

Sweden’s V-Dem Institute says that today 72 percent of the world’s population lives under authoritarian regimes. We are electing liberal rulers through democratic means, because the technology we carry has fragmented our reality.

I received my first ‘deep fake’ video in March 2024. If our citizens cannot distinguish between truth and lies, how can they vote correctly? This is the main challenge today. Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Chris Wylie told me, ‘Colonialism is not dead, it has moved online.’

Today we are victims of ‘surveillance capitalism’ and ‘digital colonialism’. If you are a woman, LGBTQ+, black, or from the Global South, you are even more marginalized online.

Facebook’s first large-scale “content moderator” force was deployed in Manila and Warsaw, Poland. This data is exploitative of workers. It consumes a lot of energy to run AI, which is damaging the environment. Most importantly – it is destroying our democracy and freedom. This year has been the deadliest year for journalists. More than 250 journalists have been killed in Gaza alone. But I am not here to share my frustrations with you, I want to show you our statistics, because crisis is opportunity.

When the government began its attack on us in 2016, our revenue plummeted. Advertisers were scared. The ad-driven media model is dead. If you are still relying on ads, change course quickly.

What did we do? We separated journalism and technology. We created a separate tech company called Nerve. This company does what we investigative journalists do – analyze data. But it helps commercial brands. Our advertising revenue fell by 49 percent in the four months the government tried to shut us down, but we used new technology and data models to turn Rappler profitable in 2019 (the year I was issued 11 arrest warrants). So I say: If you’re under attack, don’t stop. Grab your target and keep moving.

The War of Narratives and the Deconstruction of Reality

We studied the attacks on us. What we found was that ‘gender’ and ‘race’ were being weaponized around the world to divide society. The same narrative Russia created when it annexed Crimea in 2014 was used when it invaded Ukraine eight years later. We call this ‘opportunistic propaganda.’

First, the seeds of lies are planted. It is nurtured in an ‘echo chamber’. And when a crisis arises, that lie is established as truth. Look at the Southport riots in the UK or the ‘Stop the Steel’ campaign in the US – the pattern is the same.

We have prepared a report in collaboration with Columbia University: ‘The First 100 Days of Trump 2.0: The War of Narratives and the Deconstruction of Reality.’ Its conclusions are alarming. Political legitimacy is now achieved not through policy debate, but through blind devotion to our own separate realities. The aim of rulers is to dismantle democratic ‘checks and balances’.

Do not despair, because we have solutions. We must end ‘surveillance for profit’. When bio-tech and info-tech combine, it is more dangerous than ‘Big Brother’. We must protect marginalized communities from becoming even more marginalized online. And, journalism must be established as an antidote to authoritarianism. 

We have set up an international fund to protect the media of the ‘Global South’. My appeal to donors – this is the right time. If you don’t invest now, it will be too late by next year. 

We formed Facts First PH, a coalition of over 150 organizations in the Philippines. We understood that facts alone are not enough, you need emotion. But not hate, but inspiration. We saw that inspiration spreads as fast as hate. And, most importantly – we can no longer rely solely on ‘Big Tech’ platforms, we need to create our own technology. We have created a ‘chatroom’ using the ‘Matrix Protocol’, where real people can talk to real people, without any manipulation of algorithms.