Maria Ressa on how to save democracy from Big Tech

When truth is under attack, how do you fight back? Nobel Peace Prize-winning journalist Maria Ressa has spent years confronting disinformation and political pressure through her news organization, Rappler. In conversation with Reid Hoffman and Aria Finger, Ressa explores the crises facing truth, accountability, and democracy, and what we can do to help defend them. Her new book is The Fight Back: A Citizen's Guide to Standing Up to Dictators. This conversation was recorded live as part of Masters of Scale Summit on October 21, 2026 at the Presidio Theatre in San Francisco. Subscribe to the Masters of Scale weekly newsletter: https://mastersofscale.com/subscribe See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 2:12Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:47Jeff Berman?

  This is Masters of Scale. I'm Jeff Furman, your host. In today's episode, Reid Hoffman and Arya Fingur 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.

• 3:26Jeff Berman?

  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?

• 3:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it took almost a decade, but there were 10 cases filed against Rapppler, 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 guys, when you lose your rights, be careful. It takes a while to claw them back.

• 4:13Jeff Berman?

  Yes.

• 4:14Speaker 02

  Easier to defend it upfront.

• 4:16Speaker 03

  But where is the corrupt leader who tried to stop you and your fellow journalists right now?

• 4:22Speaker 02

  Okay, well, so first, The Fight Back has two dictators, right? But, as you pointed out, Arya, the dictator Rodrigo Duterte, who had tried to put me in jail for the rest of my life and close Rapppler down, was arrested in March 2025. He's charged with crimes against humanity, and his trial at the International Criminal Court begins November 30.

• 4:51Speaker 02

  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, was, 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%?

• 5:35Speaker 02

  And that was my introduction. So my second dictator has, along with other dictators in tech, has gone 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. I feel like Asanda and Sisyphus combined. And like, really, Reid, I'm so happy you're here because, you know, my question really

• 6:19Speaker 02

  is, can Silicon Valley still reform itself? Can you do enough with values? Guys, we've been talking about values all day.

• 6:29Jeff Berman?

  I do think, and this is part of the Masters of 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, and 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.

• 7:11Jeff Berman?

  And so it's, you know, but it's, just as your own work, it's work.

• 7:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, a lot, and we're counting on you.

• 7:19Speaker 03

  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.

• 7:39Speaker 02

  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 you don't, 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.

• 8:23Speaker 02

  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.

• 8:40Speaker 02

  Social media, yeah, he had some values, no?

• 8:45Jeff Berman?

  One or two.

• 8:47Speaker 02

  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 of is the crisis. If you can't tell fact from fiction, then 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.

• 9:28Speaker 02

  And part of that is, you have a system of laws, the United Nations is 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, Arya also. Three layers of AI that starts with that culture that started social media, hacked our biology, the attention economy. The second layer is, are the chatbots, that the large language models, that second layer, I called it in the book, it hacked intimacy.

• 10:13Speaker 02

  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, you know, geopolitically, we're changing the world because 75% of the compute power 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.

• 10:56Speaker 02

  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 did they build it?

• 11:10Speaker 03

  So we're gonna get to AI.

• 11:11Speaker 02

  Sorry. I'm taking them where I want to go.

• 11:15Speaker 04

  The very clever journalist is turning the interview around.

• 11:20Speaker 03

  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 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?

• 11:43Speaker 02

  First, get off your seats and stop with learned helplessness, I think, is the first one, right?

• 11:49Speaker 04

  Yep, agency.

• 11:52Speaker 02

  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, when you do it step by step, you just take a step forward, right? You just, 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.

• 12:37Speaker 02

  How much time do you spend on screens?

• 12:39Speaker 03

  Too much.

• 12:41Speaker 02

  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 it's, 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?

• 13:25Speaker 02

  Chapter eight, build your own technology, right? Where is public interest tech? Read and argue. Where is public interest tech, right?

• 13:35Speaker 04

  Trying to turn the interview around, but you know.

• 13:38Speaker 02

  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 strategic goals are at the end, but everyone in this room, you guys are all so powerful. You're so powerful.

• 14:22Speaker 02

  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 6, 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.

• 14:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, no, it's important to take the honor. Agency.

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• 16:47Speaker 04

  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.

• 16:57Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 16:58Speaker 04

  So journalism needs a new business model.

• 17:00Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 17:02Speaker 04

  Say a little bit about that.

• 17:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I think RAPLAR, 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?

• 17:22Speaker 03

  Can you tell everyone in one sentence what RAPLAR is for the folks who don't know?

• 17:26Speaker 02

  Sure. RAPLAR 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 RAPLAR is a news organization of about 100, 120 people.

• 18:11Speaker 02

  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 in January 15, 2018, I remember these dates, we had a meeting, all 100 of us, and our median age in RAPLAR 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.

• 18:55Speaker 02

  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 distributor of news globally, that went down by 2024 at least 60 to 70%. So that means unless you already have us on your phone, you will not discover us. That's one, so revenue stream.

• 19:39Speaker 02

  But the flip side of that is that, you know what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. In a weird way, I have to thank Duterte. Because when he tried to shut us down, within four months, we dropped 49% of our advertising revenue. We should have died in 2018, but we pivoted and created a company that did tech and data. Like, literally, we could, the company, our sister company was called Nerve, and that was how we figured out, like, we could do NLP, figure out, here's the cluster of the messaging that's attacking us, and here are the networks that are spreading it.

• 20:20Speaker 02

  When we did that, that allowed us to maintain, it now contributes roughly 40% of our revenues because advertising model is dead, essentially. So what doesn't kill you does make you stronger, right? Embrace your fear and create. I think this is part of what we've been saying all day. But having said that, folks, 53% of the traffic on the internet today is non-human. There's so much of the AI companies that have gotten money. So what do they do? They scrape. When they scrape RAPLAR or any other news group, your server costs go up.

• 21:01Speaker 02

  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.

• 21:12Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 21:19Jeff Berman?

  So we only have about three minutes.

• 21:21Speaker 02

  Oh, my God.

• 21:22Jeff Berman?

  Should we do the UN question or?

• 21:25Speaker 03

  Go for it.

• 21:25Jeff Berman?

  All right. Okay, great. So you're also a 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, but the UN, say, you know, kind of how and why we should get behind it.

• 21:41Speaker 02

  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 what, 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?

• 22:26Speaker 02

  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. 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. So what I hope for is the middle countries, the global south, Asia, that these countries can come together.

• 23:11Speaker 02

  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.

• 23:40Jeff Berman?

  Yeah. Well, you never give up. That's great. Yes, exactly.

• 23:45Speaker 03

  So clearly, the US is consequential when we're talking about AI, compute, et cetera. 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.

• 23:57Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Less than two weeks now, right?

• 23:59Speaker 03

  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?

• 24:15Speaker 02

  Well, first, get up off your seats and go do things, right? Hope comes from action. If, again, 100 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 I, when I write this, I write this from like someone who's had to do drills for the worst case scenarios.

• 25:00Speaker 02

  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 Rapppler in the Philippines, because we were playing whack a mole for a decade, and I begged the Silicon dictators, no, 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.

• 25:43Speaker 02

  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 that's 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%.

• 26:26Speaker 02

  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. Sorry.

• 26:40Jeff Berman?

  We tried.

• 26:41Speaker 02

  But 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 safety tools. We incubated this in, in CIPA at Columbia University, and you were part of this also. What it is, is we went to all the tech companies here and they worked 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

• 27:22Speaker 02

  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.

• 27:50Jeff Berman?

  Well, on that note, you can tell why a profile in courage, vigor, and strength who will never give up. Maria, so thank you for joining.

• 28:04Jeff Berman?

  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.

• 28:34Jeff Berman?

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• 29:14Speaker 05

  Hey, listeners, Bob here. If you listen to Rapid Response on Masters of Scale, you may be missing half the show because every Friday we release a second Rapid Response exclusively in the Rapid Response feed. The guests and topics are just as compelling and timely, from Ford CEO to NASA's administrator to the lessons from the devil wears Prada. It takes about 10 seconds to find. Just search Rapid Response wherever you listen to podcasts and hit follow to make sure you never miss an episode. I hope to see you there.

• 29:50Speaker 06

  Humans will never be more intelligent than AI. There's going to be two types of companies. Those are great at AI and those that went out of business because they weren't.

• 29:59Speaker 01

  How do we build a future that is human-centered?

• 30:04Speaker 07

  I'm Rana Elkhayubi. And on my podcast, Pioneers of AI, we answer that question and so many more. As an AI scientist, entrepreneur, and investor, I know what it takes to build AI that works for everyone. Every week, I sit down with the pioneers shaping our future, and we take you behind the scenes of the AI that's transforming our lives. Find Pioneers of AI wherever you tune in.

• 30:34Jeff Berman?

  Masters of Scale is a Wait What original. Our executive producer is Eve Trow. Senior supervising producer is Tricia Bobita. Associate producer is Masha Makatenina. Video editor is MG Frederick. Senior Talent Executive is Stephanie Stern. Mixing and mastering by the audio boys themselves, Aaron Besonelli and Brian Pugh, with original music by the remarkable Ryan Holiday. Visit mastersofscale.com to find the transcript for this episode and to subscribe to our newsletter. And be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel.