We’re All Being Manipulated the Same Way
Editor’s Note: This piece was adapted from Ressa’s remarks at Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy, a conference hosted by The Atlantic and the University of Chicago, on April 6, 2022.
In the Philippines, we’re 33 days before our presidential elections. Filipinos are going to the poll and we are choosing 18,000 posts, including the president and vice president. And how do you have integrity of elections if you don’t have integrity of facts? That’s a reality that we’re living with.
I put all of this stuff together in a book, and this is part of the reason you’ll see these ideas over and over. And the question I really want to ask you is the question we had to confront: What are you willing to sacrifice for the truth? Because these are the times we live in. The prologue for the book—which I pushed in at the end of last year—started with Crimea and the annexation in 2014, because that’s when you began to see the splintering of reality that had geopolitical impact. And of course, I’ve had to revise it once Russia invaded Ukraine. And the question that goes through my head is, if in 2014, eight years ago, we did something about it, would we be where we are today? No, we wouldn’t be.
[Read: The information war isn’t over yet]
So here’s what I’m going to talk about today, really just three things: What happened? How did it change us? And what can we do about it? These are critical for me. It’s existential. I call it an “Avengers assemble” moment in
