At the opening program of the GIJC conference on 21 November 2025 in Malaysia, Maria Ressa — Nobel laureate, journalist, and co-founder/CEO of Rappler — delivered a stark warning: “Reality is broken. We cannot solve any problem, let alone existential ones like climate change, if we don’t have facts — if we don’t have journalists. Without this, you cannot have democracy.”
She cited a report from V-Dem in Sweden showing that 72% of the world now lives under authoritarian rule, a number that has been rising sharply. “We are literally electing illiberal leaders democratically,” she said, “because the tech we carry with us has splintered reality.”
Ressa played an example of a deepfake audio scam impersonating her from March 2024. It urged people to invest in a fake crypto scheme something she has never endorsed. “There are many more,” she said. “I’ve been deepfaked telling diabetics to throw away their insulin. The amount of scams, fraud, and weaponization of the internet is accelerating and with new AI models, it will get worse.”
She traced the roots of the crisis to a 70-year-old surveillance business model, where personal data fuels profit for tech platforms. “This toxic surveillance model is our collective enemy,” she emphasized. “Without information integrity the ability to tell fact from fiction our communities lose the capacity to engage civically or vote meaningfully.”
Ressa outlined several harms created by the current system:
Surveillance and digital colonialism: “Colonialism didn’t die — it moved online,” she quoted whistleblower Christopher Wylie.
Bias and oppressive AI systems disproportionately harming women, LGBTQ+ people, Black and brown communities, and the Global South.
Exploitation of data workers and massive environmental costs from the energy demands of advanced AI.
The destruction of individual agency and democracy, with journalists on the front lines. “This is the deadliest year for journalists — more than 250 have been killed in Gaza alone.”
Ressa then showed Rappler’s internal financial data to illustrate how crisis created opportunity. Before the Duterte administration targeted Rappler in 2016, they were close to breaking even. But after political attacks began, their advertising revenue collapsed by 49% in four months due to pressure on advertisers.
Rappler’s response was radical: they carved out all non-journalists into a separate company — Nerve — which transformed investigative methods into tools for analyzing information operations. Using NLP, data forensics, and psychology, Nerve mapped disinformation networks to help clients — and to help Rappler survive.
Studying “patient zero” cases of online attacks against Rappler, the team found the same patterns reproduced globally: gender and race are the two fracture lines most exploited by information operations.
She explained how modern influence operations work: Seeding meta-narratives; Narrative building; Echo-chamber reinforcement driven by platform design; Crisis exploitation; Malign amplification by coordinated networks; Normalization of lies, making the previously unthinkable acceptable.
She gave examples from the Philippines, the UK (the Southport riots), Pakistan, and especially the U.S. — where the “Stop the Steal” narrative followed the same pattern of early seeding, mainstreaming, and eventual normalization.
In a preview of a new report from Nerve and the Institute for Global Politics at Columbia, Ressa revealed that in the first 100 days of Trump’s second term, 143 executive orders were issued — enabling rapid dismantling of checks and balances, amplified by influencer networks and platform algorithms. “Governance is being subordinated to narrative warfare,” she said.
She warned that when shared reality collapses, citizens cannot hold power to account. This enables strategic corruption and global kleptocracy, not just local wrongdoing.
