MARIA RESSA

Maria Ressa was almost 10 years old in September 1972 when martial law was established in her home country of the Philippines, marking the formal beginning of Ferdinand Marcos' authoritarian regime. Her family left the country shortly after, and she and her sister moved to Toms River, New Jersey.

A self-described introvert, she remembers her first coding experiences in high school using BASIC and FORTRAN—the early days of machine learning. After graduation, Maria went on to study at Princeton University, where she graduated cum laude in 1986 with a bachelor's degree in English.

That same year, the People Power Revolution was unfolding back in the Philippines through a series of popular demonstrations and a sustained campaign of civil resistance against regime violence and electoral fraud, leading to the end of Ferdinand Marcos' 20-year regime. The regime had looted 10 billion dollars from the country and its people.

She has since referred to Marcos as the kleptocrat who triggered a democracy. Wanting to get in touch with her roots, she headed back to the Philippines and opened CNN's Manila bureau in and their Jakarta bureau in 1995, spending years reporting from war zones.

In 2012, along with three other female founders and with a small team of journalists and developers, she co-founded a news site called Rappler, which was unique at the time for strategically incorporating data analytics and digital innovation into journalism.

Their work highlighted how social media platforms could be used to spread disinformation, harass opponents, and manipulate public discourse. This work earned them international acclaim, particularly as it exposed the anti-democratic regime of former President of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, who employed violence and lies to manipulate public discourse. She and her team have survived multiple, politically motivated attempts to silence Rappler's reporting.

Since then, she has become an activist and prominent voice on digital journalism and technology's impact on democracy, and has received multiple accolades, including being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021 for her work.

Today, Maria speaks globally about strategies to avoid being manipulated by AI, explaining that one of the greatest dangers of modern technology is that it is robbing us of history, context, and nuance and is insidiously manipulating us by hacking our biology—changing our emotions, the way we see the world, the way we act, and the way we vote.

She believes in journalism as an antidote to tyranny and shares important points of action one can take to build safer online environments: stopping surveillance for profit with data privacy and antitrust laws, and stopping coded bias, because if you are marginalized in the real world, these biases will further marginalize you online.