Nobel Laureate Maria Ressa Debuts ‘The Fight Back: A Citizen’s Guide to Standing Up to Dictators’

Maria Ressa launched her new book, The Fight Back: A Citizen's Guide to Standing Up to Dictators, with a presentation and panel discussion in front of a packed crowd at Columbia SIPA on October 14. The Nobel Peace Prize winner and Columbia SIPA professor participated in a panel discussion hosted by the Institute of Global Politics with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Executive Producer and Editor-in-Chief of PBS’ FRONTLINE Raney Aronson-Rath. Camille François, codirector of IGP’s Technology and Democracy Initiative alongside Ressa, moderated the panel.

Ressa’s book, and her work at the Technology and Democracy Initiative, elucidates the ways massive tech corporations, social media, and now unregulated AI erode people’s ability to understand the world. That lack of clarity and consensus erodes our agency — and empowers authoritarianism, Ressa argues.

“You're dealing with [the] impunity of two dictators, state and tech,” Ressa said. “The information chaos when you cannot tell the difference between fact and fiction is actually good for both of those. So we're affected at the cellular level of a democracy.”

Ressa knows firsthand how big tech can enable authoritarian leaders; in her native Philippines, Ressa and her outlet Rappler, an investigative news agency, were the targets of online abuse via Facebook. She also endured years of legal harassment and faced imprisonment by former President Rodrigo Duterte, who fueled the online disinformation campaign along with his supporters.

The book is divided into 10 strategic goals, with 100 action steps, so readers can understand how big tech and authoritarianism fuel each other. Then, they can take action at the personal and grassroots levels to address the erosion of democratic institutions, including the free press. 

“We're going to do everything we can — even though we were defunded [by the Trump administration] — to stay alive, so that we have an option for high-quality journalism that is factual,” Aronson-Rath told the audience. “We're going to send more people out into the world, boots on the ground. The only way I can see to fight AI, in journalistic terms, is to be the witnesses on the ground. That doesn't mean that there won't be relentless propaganda coming out too, but at the very least, we will have a record.”

Ressa stressed the importance of collective understanding and collective action, as technology and disinformation fragment us ever further. 

“[Multilateralism] is the only way we will do this,” she said. “We need to be able to [...] govern collectively, because one nation alone can't do this. And the United States, even though it has 75 percent of the world's [AI computing power] right now, will not be able to stand if the rest of the world can come together and actually put [..] legislation in place. We need protection. The world will be defined by what we do. This is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights against machines.”

Clinton, too, emphasized the importance of legislative guardrails around AI. “The idea that you can't regulate AI in this alleged competition to dominate the world with China is just a falsehood, and so we should be doing our version of regulation in order to defend democracy, defend human agency, defend our children,” she said. 

“[AI] has built by stealing the intellectual property of everyone who has lived before, and we have to ask ourselves: Is that what we want to applaud and hold up as some kind of ultimate achievement, or do we want to rein it in and use it to further human ingenuity and innovation and creativity and autonomy,” Clinton asked the audience. “So we have big, big questions, but it starts with leaders in the political and governmental realm who will be courageous enough to take this on.“