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The arrest of Rodrigo Duterte is a welcome sign that the rules-based order continues to hold, the Nobel laureate Maria Ressa has said, even as the global order has been marred by the US “descending into hell” at the hands of the same forces that consumed the Philippines.
Ressa’s remarks came after Duterte, the former president of the Philippines, made his first appearance before the international criminal court (ICC) in The Hague, accused of committing crimes against humanity during his brutal “war on drugs”.
His arrest and the trial suggest that the thousands of victims and their families – rights groups estimate that as many as 30,000 people were killed during the years-long crackdown – may finally see justice, said Ressa. “There’s a sense that impunity ends and that the idea of an international, rules-based order can perhaps still exist.”
The American-Filipina journalist, however, found it impossible to untangle the news from the bigger picture. In 2016 Duterte had become the “first president elected with social media”, she said, seizing on the ubiquity of Facebook in the Philippines to, as her reporting has documented, mobilise online mobs and spread disinformation. Now, she said, the same tactics were being used to undermine democracy around the world, particularly in the US.
“I joke all the time that the Philippines went from hell to purgatory … My only worry is that the west and America is at the stage we were at in 2016, when you’re descending to hell,” she said. “To watch this deja vu twice, it’s like a bad punishment for me.”
As a cofounder of the Rappler news site, Ressa was at the forefront of exposing the propaganda spread by online trolls during Duterte’s time in power, alongside his government’s alleged abuses of power and growing authoritarianism.
Ressa, who in 2021 was awarded the Nobel peace prize in recognition of her determination to uphold freedom of expression, spoke to the Guardian from Berlin, where she was participating in a “people’s court” that has this week put social media on trial, examining how it interacts with polarisation, radicalisation and misinformation.
The week-long Social Media Tribunal, which has no legal powers, will hear testimonies from sources that range from a Facebook whistleblower to a Rohingya campaigner and victims of cyberstalking and sextortion before handing down its “judgment” on Friday.
Backed by the rights group Cinema for Peace and Ukraine’s Center for Civil Liberties, and created under the patronage of Benjamin Ferencz, who until his death in 2023 was the last surviving prosecutor from the Nuremberg trials, the initiative aims to ramp up pressure for international accountability. In 2023, the same campaigners were behind a similar “people’s court” that put the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, on trial for the crime of aggression after his invasion of Ukraine.
The tribunal in Berlin was opened on Monday by Ressa, who cited a whistleblower on how, more than a decade ago, the Philippines was alleged to have been used as a “petri dish” to test out the interplay between social media and tactics of mass manipulation. “If it worked in our country, they went to the west, specifically targeting America,” said Ressa.
As falsehoods, many of them laced with fear, hate and outrage, began hurtling across social media in the Philippines, Ressa travelled to Silicon Valley to sound the alarm. “I felt like Cassandra and Sisyphus combined,” she said. “And I think people just kind of thought, ‘oh that’s interesting, that’s never going to happen here.’”
Years later, the world watched as the 2024 US presidential elections played out against a similar backdrop, giving rise to an ecosystem that continues to prop up the Trump administration. Ressa, who last year described “tech bros” such as Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk as “the largest dictators” said the US was now staring down “the greatest challenge democracy will face”.
She said: “Because when you give the broligarchy state power – ie the most powerful country in the world at this moment in time – who knows what will happen?”
What she did know was that time was of the essence. “What we learned in the Philippines is that you are at your greatest power when the attacks begin. If you are silent, you give consent. If you are silent, you give up your rights,” she said. “This is that moment where you have to ask yourself, what are you willing to sacrifice for the truth? Because if you don’t, if you bury your head in the sand like an ostrich, you will lose your rights.”
She pointed to the Philippines to highlight what was at stake. As Rappler refused to back down from publishing stories about Duterte’s administration, Ressa fended off a barrage of hate – at one point the messages soared to 98 an hour, she said – and faced 10 criminal charges. Two years after Duterte left office, she has won most of the cases but two charges remain, forcing her to request court permission each time she wants to leave the country.
Duterte’s arrest last week laid bare a nation still divided: while supporters took to the streets in his strongholds, others continue to grapple with the painful fallout of a years-long anti-drug campaign that saw thousands of people – many of them men in poorer, urban areas – gunned down in the streets.
“In 2016, when the drug war began, I was like ‘Oh my god, this is going to affect a generation of Filipinos’. And it has,” she said. “So yes, he’s arrested but there’s so much damage that now needs to get rebuilt.”
She cast it as a sort of cautionary tale for the US and west, one that pointed to how the free rein of technology could pave the way for populism to be tipped into authoritarianism. “If you do not protect your rights today, what’s destroyed takes a hell of a long time to rebuild.”
