With billions heading to the polls this year, the stakes for global democracies are substantial. Generative AI advances and broad accessibility are already reshaping sectors with exponential growth ex...
Maria Ressa
Maria Ressa co-founded Rappler, the top digital only news site that is leading the fight for press freedom in the Philippines. As Rappler's CEO, Maria has endured constant political harassment and arrests by the Duterte government, forced to post bail ten times to stay free. Rappler's battle for truth and democracy is the subject of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival documentary, A Thousand Cuts.
In October 2021, Maria was one of two journalists awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of her "efforts to safeguard freedom of expression, which is a precondition for democracy and lasting peace."
For her courage and work on disinformation and 'fake news,' Maria was named one of Time Magazine’s 2018 Person of the Year, was among its 100 Most Influential People of 2019, and has also been named one of Time's Most Influential Women of the Century. She was also part of the BBC's 100 most inspiring and influential women of 2019 and Prospect magazine's world's top 50 thinkers. In 2020, she received the Journalist of the Year award, the John Aubuchon Press Freedom Award, the Most Resilient Journalist Award, the Tucholsky Prize, the Truth to Power Award, and the Four Freedoms Award. In 2021, UNESCO awarded her the Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize.
Among many awards for her principled stance, she received the prestigious Golden Pen of Freedom Award from the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers, the Knight International Journalism Award from the International Center for Journalists, the Gwen Ifill Press Freedom Award from the Committee to Protect Journalists, the Shorenstein Journalism Award from Stanford University, the Columbia Journalism Award, the Free Media Pioneer Award from the International Press Institute, and the Sergei Magnitsky Award for Investigative Journalism.
Before co-founding Rappler, Maria focused on investigating terrorism in Southeast Asia. She opened and ran CNN's Manila Bureau for nearly a decade before moving to Indonesia and opening the network's Jakarta bureau, which she ran from 1995 to 2005. That was when she returned to Manila as the senior vice president in charge of ABS-CBN's multimedia news operations, managing about a thousand journalists for the largest news organization in the country.
Maria authored Seeds of Terror: An Eyewitness Account of Al-Qaeda’s Newest Center of Operations in Southeast Asia and From Bin Laden to Facebook. Her most recent book, How to Stand Up to a Dictator, was released in November 2022 and has been translated into 20 languages with more to come.
In 2022, she was appointed by the United Nations Secretary-General to the Leadership Panel of the Internet Governance Forum and serves as its Vice-Chair.
She is an inaugural Carnegie Distinguished Fellow at Columbia University’s newly launched Institute of Global Politics, where she leads projects related to artificial intelligence and democracy. In July 2024, she will join the faculty of Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs as a professor of professional practice.
Maria focuses critical attention on the breakdown of our global information ecosystem and how interconnected communities of action can hold the line to protect democratic values.
In conversation with journalism’s Nobel Laureate: Maria Ressa on democracy, disinformation and demagoguery
When Maria Ressa was awarded the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize, alongside Russian journalist Dimitry Muratov, it was the first time the practice of journalism had been honoured by the Nobel Committee since 1...
Disarming disinformation: how leading international editors are responding to information pollution in a pivotal year for democracy
This panel presents the first insights from the new global research project Disarming Disinformation, which has seen researchers embedded in multiple international newsrooms to study their responses t...
Fighting gendered disinformation: how women journalists stand up to dictators, shadowy foreign agents and digital conspiracy networks
Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Maria Ressa learned how to stand up to a dictator when she was targeted by gendered disinformation linked to former president Rodrigo Duterte. The BBC’s Marianna Spring ha...
At the time of her death, Daphne Caruana Galizia was facing 48 civil and criminal lawsuits in Malta, had her bank accounts frozen, and was receiving a steady barrage of threats from London libel lawye...
Journalism Innovation Project: rebooting audience engagement amidst 'platform capture' and online toxicity
Dramatic shifts in the media landscape over the past two decades — including the advent of social media, the rise of participatory audiences, and what the Journalism Innovation Project calls “plat...
Tools and strategies to help prevent the publishing and spread of disinformation
The surge of disinformation techniques used in the lead-up to the British election have demonstrated that media and their platforms are woefully unprepared for what 2020 may bring. The rising tide of ...
The law plays a key role in protecting freedom of speech. However, at the same time, laws ranging from anti-terrorism to criminal defamation and cybercrime are increasingly being used to silence journ...
Jason Rezaian, the then Washington Post Tehran bureau chief, was arrested in July 2014 by Iranian authorities and imprisoned for 544 days until his release in January 2016. Jason’s memoir, entitled...
The role of journalism as a check on power is being tested all over the world, even in counties that have traditionally enjoyed a high degree of press freedom. In this panel, we’ll speak to those on...
Prime targets of a weaponised internet: online violence against female journalists
Women are increasingly the targets of online violence connected to orchestrated disinformation campaigns waged by states and political actors. They have become targets of online communities weaponised...
Journalistic "business as usual" is a disaster for democracy, and civilization
When basic freedoms -- including freedom of expression -- are under attack in democracies around the world, and when climate change is accelerating, staying with traditional newsroom practices isn't j...
Journalists under attack: protecting journalists against legal threats and fighting back through the courts
Journalists around the world are under attack like never before. Repressive criminal and civil laws, threats, harassment and violence are used against journalists to stifle critical reporting. The num...
The key attributes of blockchain technology - decentralized, immutable and trustless - hold promise for a news media environment increasingly controlled by powerful entities. In this session the speak...
First lessons from the Journalism Innovation Project: how to innovate under fire and avoid ‘shiny things syndrome’. This panel will mark the publication of the second Journalism Innovation Projec...
Journalism, fake news and disinformation: equipping journalism for the fightback
The targeting of journalists and news organisations - by states, populist politicians and deceptive corporate actors - makes fighting back against disinformation, misinformation and ‘malinformationâ...
How we can fight the political undermining of the media and promote freedom of expression
Globally, media is in crisis: in addition to public mistrust and eroding revenue models, we are witnessing overt threats and attacks against media, often by government actors or vested interests. Th...
Journalism when caught between right-wing extremism and military authoritarianism
This session explores the crises of journalism and freedom of expression globally in term of the quandary in which we find ourselves, faced by religious and ideological extremism (e.g. Islamist extrem...
#ijf19talk by Maria Ressa. Moderated by Indira Lakshmanan. Disinformation and democracy: how information operations and new gatekeepers have weakened democracies around the world. Case study: the P...
Journalism and the future of the internet: help the UN draft a new international standard for a free and open worldwide web
The future of journalism is inextricably bound up with the wider Internet ecosystem. UNESCO, the UN agency with primary responsibility for media freedom and journalists' safety, is consulting worldwid...
Journalism's perfect storm? Confronting rising global threats from "f*ke news" to censorship, surveillance, and the killing of journalists with impunity
Some hail this period in journalism as a Golden Era, pointing to major global collaborative journalism projects and the biggest data dumps in history. True, large scale investigative journalism is ‘...
Help define the moral imperatives that should be guiding media and platforms' decisions
Both platforms and media helped get us into the mess we are in -- and before we can expect them to get us out we need to help them write the principles that should guide their decisions on product des...
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