How to Stand Up to a Dictator: The Fight for Our Future

Written by Maria Ressa

Narrated by Maria Ressa and Rebecca Mozo

Introduction by Amal Clooney

From the recipient of the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize, an impassioned and inspiring memoir of a career spent holding power to account.

Maria Ressa is one of the most renowned international journalists of our time. For decades, she challenged corruption and malfeasance in her native country, the Philippines, on its rocky path from an authoritarian state to a democracy. As a reporter from CNN, she transformed news coverage in her region, which led her in 2012 to create a new and innovative online news organization, Rappler. Harnessing the emerging power of social media, Rappler crowdsourced breaking news, found pivotal sources and tips, harnessed collective action for climate change, and helped increase voter knowledge and participation in elections.

But by their fifth year of existence, Rappler had gone from being lauded for its ideas to being targeted by the new Philippine government, and made Ressa an enemy of her country’s most powerful man: President Duterte. Still, she did not let up, tracking government seeded disinformation networks which spread lies to its own citizens laced with anger and hate. Hounded by the state and its allies using the legal system to silence her, accused of numerous crimes, and charged with cyberlibel for which she was found guilty, Ressa faces years in prison and thousands in fines.

There is another adversary Ressa is battling. How to Stand Up to a Dictator is also the story of how the creep towards authoritarianism, in the Phillipines and around the world, has been aided and abetted by the social media companies. Ressa exposes how they have allowed their platforms to spread a virus of lies that infect each of us, pitting us against one another, igniting, even creating, our fears, anger, and hate, and how this has accelerated the rise of authoritarians and dictators around the world. She maps a network of disinformation—a heinous web of cause and effect—that has netted the globe: from Duterte’s drug wars to America's Capitol Hill; Britain’s Brexit to Russian and Chinese cyber-warfare; Facebook and Silicon Valley to our own clicks and votes.

Democracy is fragile. How to Stand Up to a Dictator is an urgent cry for Western readers to recognize and understand the dangers to our freedoms before it is too late. It is a book for anyone who might take democracy for granted, written by someone who never would. And in telling her dramatic and turbulent and courageous story, Ressa forces readers to ask themselves the same question she and her colleagues ask every day: What are you willing to sacrifice for the truth?

Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperAudio
• Release date: Nov 29, 2022
• ISBN: 9780063257559

Maria Ressa

Maria Ressa is the co-recipient of the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize for her work defending freedom of expression and democracy. She is CEO, cofounder, and president of Rappler, the Philippines’ top digital news site, and has been a journalist in Asia for over thirty-six years. She was TIME Magazine’s Person of the Year in 2018 and won the UNESCO World Press Freedom Prize in 2021. Among the many other awards she has received are 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 Shorenstein Journalism Award from Stanford University, and the Sergei Magnitsky Award for Investigative Journalism. She grew up in the Philippines and the United States and currently lives in Manila.

Reviews for How to Stand Up to a Dictator

[coco hernandez · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

It is very inspiring and eye-opening. Would be great to read while listening to this, too.

[Marcelino Decena · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Very powerful narratives against digital populism which is bastardizing the liberal democratic global order.

[jorgeepower · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is a very insightful book on the fragile nature of democracy and what contributes to it.

[Marco Harder · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

A full-on hypocrite, truth be told. A really bad read.

[ruztomlamundaoforeducation · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This book serves as an inspiration and preparations for those youth that will become a journalist. I recommend it to read or listen to that book for everyone to understand why democracy and the bill of rights is really more important than to surrender tour rights to those oppressors.

[Myra Pacana Soriano · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Very timely. I've already shared this to friends, we are one with Ressa on this fight.

[Enzo Bonoan · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Extremely timely and this masterpiece shows exactly why Maria Ressa was chosen to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. I believe it is a must-read not only for Filipinos who want to make things right but also to everyone else around the world.