How to save democracy from Big Tech

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MARIA RESSA: The question really is, can Silicon Valley still reform itself? Can you do enough with values? Guys, we’ve been talking about values all day. We are doing our best to survive this time period because this is a period of market failure for news organizations. The new world order that’s being created is made up of strands, like a spider web. Each strand looks weak, and you can tear it, but the spider web can hold if those countries can hold together.

JEFF BERMAN: This is Masters of Scale. I’m Jeff Berman, your host. In today’s episode, Reid Hoffman and Aria Finger sit down with the incredible Nobel Peace Prize-winning journalist Maria Ressa. They discuss the critical moment that democracy is facing and how we scale our work to protect it, along with the actual concrete steps that all of us can take. It’s a lively and extraordinarily timely conversation. I know it’s going to be meaningful for you. Let’s dive in.

REID HOFFMAN: Maria, so glad you could join us. First, congratulations on your victories in the Philippine Supreme Court. And if you ever thought super young at heart — right? In an instant. So you have just one case still pending, yes?

RESSA: Yeah, so it took almost a decade.

HOFFMAN: Yeah.

RESSA: But there were 10 cases filed against Rappler, the company that I led, and 11 against me. A case now has gone all the way up to the Supreme Court, so it meant that for almost a decade, I had to ask for permission because I lost my right to travel.

HOFFMAN: Yeah.

RESSA: So even today, to be here in front of you, you had to write a letter to my Supreme Court to ask for permission for me to travel. So guys, when you lose your rights, be careful. It takes a while to claw them back.

HOFFMAN: Yes, yes.

RESSA: It’s easier to defend them up front.

Copy LinkWhen defending rights is easier than winning them back

ARIA FINGER: But where is the corrupt leader who tried to stop you and your fellow journalists right now?

RESSA: Okay, well, first, The Fight Back has two dictators, right? But as you pointed out, Aria, the dictator, Rodrigo Duterte, who had tried to put me in jail for the rest of my life and close Rappler down, was arrested in March 2025. He’s charged with crimes against humanity, and his trial at the International Criminal Court begins November 30.

But that’s the first dictator.

HOFFMAN: Yeah.

RESSA: My second dictator—and I do name them, and I would argue the more powerful dictator in the Philippines—is Mark Zuckerberg. At that point, 97% of Filipinos on the internet were on Facebook. Facebook was our internet. Today, it’s 100%, right? But at that point, I sat with him in 2017, and I said, “You know, Mark, you have to come visit the Philippines because it’s so powerful. The ability to do good is incredible.” He was frowning at me. Reid doesn’t frown at me, but he was frowning. Then he said, “Maria, where are the other 3%?” And that was my introduction.

So my second dictator, along with other dictators in tech, has gotten more power. One system of governance has had some level of accountability. The trial begins. It’s a whole-of-society approach, right? But the other dictator has gone on to get more power, and that same culture is global. In 2016, I sat in California, in Mountain View, to say, “What was happening to us is coming for you.” I feel like Cassandra and Sisyphus combined.

And really, Reid, the reason I’m so happy you’re here is because my question really is: Can Silicon Valley still reform itself? Can you do enough with values? Guys, we’ve been talking about values all day.

HOFFMAN: I do think this is part of the Masters of Scale Summit, which is about not just technology, but also soul and culture and humanism and people. And I do think that one of the things Silicon Valley, as a bit of a microcosm for America, is good at is rebuilding and reinventing itself.

So I have that hope and optimism. I do think it’s work. You have to focus on the human impacts. I’ve said we’re homo techne, that technology is fundamental to being human.

RESSA: Yeah.

HOFFMAN: But you have to focus on the human part of it. That’s part of the reason we wanted you out here and on this stage, so that Silicon Valley can hear that and participate in it. But just as in your own work, it’s work.

RESSA: Yeah, a lot of work, and we’re counting on you.

Copy LinkThe three crises eroding truth, order, and trust

FINGER: You are the one who can help us solve this. We have so much to learn. In your book, The Fight Back, you say we’re not just fighting one crisis. This is three intertwined crises, which is a lot. How would you define these three? Because we need your experience to make sure we don’t go all the way down that road.

RESSA: I mean, look, at the 80th anniversary of the United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, right? That was how the world responded to Hiroshima and Nagasaki and our own potential self-destruction. At the UN, in its 80th year, I said that if we win information integrity, if we can tell the difference between fact and fiction, then we can begin to fight the other problems: climate, gender, rule of law. If people, if citizens, cannot tell the difference between fact and delusion, with information warfare, with narrative warfare, with cognitive surrender now, then we lose it all.

So here’s the way the three things roll out, right? The first is the crisis of truth. We’ve heard that a lot, and that goes to social media, right? We can’t tell the difference. Literally by design, social media — except LinkedIn. Social media, yeah, he had some values, no?

HOFFMAN: Yes. One or two.

RESSA: Lies spread faster. If you use fear, anger, and hate, they spread even faster. In the Philippines in 2017, women journalists were attacked at least 10 times more than men, so there was gender disinformation. Then there’s the whole issue of growth and social media. The second part of the crisis is this: if you can’t tell fact from fiction, what gets hollowed out? Your institutions hollow out. That breaks down the crisis of order, right? If you don’t have rule of law, how do you organize society? This is why there’s impunity for the two dictators. The third rung is that, without that, you have a crisis of accountability. Part of that is that you have a system of laws the United Nations has set up for accountability that is frayed at the edges. But look, Rodrigo Duterte is facing crimes against humanity.

But you have the tech that rules our world, and I’ll pull this out, right? Please tell me I’m wrong. I’m waiting for you.

Aria, also, there are three layers of AI, and it starts with that culture that started with social media, which hacked our biology: the attention economy. The second layer is the chatbots, the large language models. That second layer, I called it in the book, hacked intimacy.

Trust is broken to intimacy, to what makes us human. Then the last one is agency itself, from the agentic and multi-agentic systems. I co-chair the UN’s independent international scientific panel on artificial intelligence, and we came out with this report in July that said that, geopolitically, we’re changing the world because 75% of the compute power comes from America.

America points to China, but only 15% of the compute power is China. Then the world’s laws come from the EU, which has 5%. The pace has accelerated.

You both said this. Then the last piece: as early as July, the people who built it themselves said they could not control it. They could not control the frontier model, so the question, of course, is why they build it.

FINGER: So we’re going to get to AI in one moment.

RESSA: Sorry. I know.

FINGER: It’s all good.

RESSA: I’m taking it where I want to go.

HOFFMAN: The very clever journalist is turning the interview around.

Copy LinkHow to fight back against information collapse

FINGER: Exactly. Stay tuned. But OK, you started with information integrity.

RESSA: OK, I’ll shut up.

FINGER: No, we want to hear from you. You started with information integrity being sort of the most important fight, and it’s the first one that leads to the next three.

RESSA: Yes.

FINGER: There are a lot of people here who agree with you and really care about information integrity. How do we fight it? How do we fight back against that first layer? What are the answers?

RESSA: First, get off your seats and stop with learned helplessness. I think that’s the first one, right?

HOFFMAN: Yep, agency.

RESSA: The title, Agency, is the cellular level of a democracy that the technology targets. You have tremendous power, and that’s part of what the fight back is after the first chapter. Every chapter has 10 steps, and at the end of the book, there are 10 strategic goals. I fought with my publisher because they wanted to put the strategic goals at the beginning, and I was like, “No,” because it looks like you have to climb Mount Everest with strategic goals. When you do it step by step, you just take a step forward, right? The first chapter is called The Two Dictators, and the first step you have to do, you should do it as soon as you leave here, or tomorrow, is just take a look: How much time do you spend on screens?

FINGER: Too much.

RESSA: Then, when you have that, the second step is: Which app makes you angriest?

Consider deleting it. Right? These are easy steps, so that’s the first.

HOFFMAN: Yeah.

RESSA: The book is set up so that the first three chapters are understand. The second four chapters are defend. Chapter Four is Defend Yourself. Have you done the 15-minute security audit? Defend your community. Defend your journalists before it’s too late. Defend your institutions. And the last chunk is build. Hillary Clinton asked me this. She actually said, “Maria, we know the problems, but why are we always playing defense?” So what’s the offense? Chapter Eight: build your own technology, right? Where is public interest tech, Reid and Aria? Where is public interest tech?

HOFFMAN: Trying to turn the interview around.

RESSA: Chapter Nine is super important, where, again, we go bottom up. But Chapter Nine is govern collectively, because no nation on Earth can do this on its own. The leaders who are trying to fight this battle are getting voted out. Why do we think tech and the far right are kind of close-knit? There were decisions made that have shifted the world, right? So govern collectively. And the last one — think about this for your kids, for your family — is the world we want. What’s our vision of the world we want? I know you both have a vision of the world we want, but that’s there. So the strategics are at the end, but everyone in this room, you guys are all so powerful. You’re so powerful. You’re in Silicon Valley, for God’s sake. This little area has turned my world upside down in the Global South.

On January 6, I thought, “Oh my gosh, Silicon Valley’s sins came home to roost.”

But you really didn’t learn the lesson.

I hope you learn the lesson now. Fight back.

Copy LinkWhy news needs new business models to survive

HOFFMAN: Yeah, it’s important to take the honor and agency. One of the things Silicon Valley innovates on isn’t just technology, networks, et cetera, but also business models.

RESSA: Yes.

HOFFMAN: Journalism needs a new business model.

RESSA: Yes.

HOFFMAN: Say a little bit about that.

RESSA: Yeah. I think Rappler — well, let me first talk about our own experiences. We survived our state dictator. We survived barely, and it happens. The fear is real, so I empathize. I’m Filipino, and I’m American. Imagine going through this twice in a decade.

HOFFMAN: Yeah.

FINGER: Can you tell everyone in one sentence what Rappler is, for the folks who don’t know?

HOFFMAN: Yes.

RESSA: Sure.

HOFFMAN: Yeah.

RESSA: Rappler is a news organization. This is my 40th year as a journalist. I’m an investigative reporter. I opened the Manila bureau of CNN in 1987 and in Jakarta in 1995, and then I ran the largest news group in the Philippines. In 2011, I realized that the tech was transformative, and I bit hook, line, and sinker. I thought that social media, Facebook, would be a way to come bottom up, to hold power to account, and for a while it was. For a while it was, and then it wasn’t, and that’s when it was tweaked. But Rappler is a news organization of about 100 to 120 people. We’re small. We’re about $5 million a year, nothing like what you’ve heard here in Silicon Valley. But here’s what happens when the news group becomes mission-driven. When the Philippine government first tried to shut us down on January 15, 2018 — I remember these dates — we had a meeting, all hundred of us, and our median age in Rappler is 23 years old. Twenty-three. So when Duterte was bullying our reporter, she was 26 years old, right? So I said, “This is a different time. If you want to leave, we will help you find a job.” And not one of the journalists left, and we became so focused.

But let me answer your question about the business model. I think the business model today — we survived Duterte, and my gosh, we are doing our best to survive this time period, because this is a period of market failure for news organizations. If you don’t know this yet, zero-click search means that referral traffic to every news site has gone down. In my country, it dropped 85%. On Facebook — Facebook was the first one, once the largest distributor of news globally — that went down by 2024, at least 60% to 70%. So that means unless you already have us on your phone, you will not discover us. That’s one revenue stream. But the flip side is that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. In a weird way, I have to thank Duterte, because when he tried to shut us down, within four months we dropped 49% of our advertising revenue. We should have died in 2018, but we pivoted and created a company that did tech and data. Literally, our sister company was called Nerve, and that was how we figured out, like, we could do NLP, figure out here’s the cluster of the messaging that’s attacking us, and here are the networks spreading it. When we did that, it allowed us to maintain — it now contributes roughly 40% of our revenue, because the advertising model is dead, essentially. So what doesn’t kill you does make you stronger, right? Embrace your fear and create. I think this is part of what we’ve been saying all day.

But having said that, folks, 53% of the traffic on the internet today is nonhuman. So many of the AI companies that have gotten money — what do they do? They scrape. When they scrape Rappler or any other news group, your server costs go up. So I’m literally paying for someone else to steal our content, and they’re doing it. Anyway, I’m just saying: support your journalists before it’s too late.

HOFFMAN: Yeah. Amen. So we only have about three minutes.

RESSA: Oh my God.

HOFFMAN: Should we do the UN question?

FINGER: Go for it.

Copy LinkWhy AI governance must be global, not national

HOFFMAN: All right, great. You also lead efforts at the UN to create AI safety guidelines. Say a little bit about that. Usually Silicon Valley is a fairly skeptical environment about the UN, so say how and why we should get behind it.

RESSA: Yeah. Because no country can fix this problem on its own. What we’ve seen is that the Security Council is compromised, right? Nothing has moved. So what happened in the last two years is the General Assembly began the act of creation. The independent international scientific panel on AI that the UN created — the U.S. voted against it — set the facts. Like everything, we need the facts. We did that by July, and then when we went to the global dialogue, also created last year, and we talked to the countries, we began to realize that they were only talking to the people selling them the tech, which is both predatory and extractive, right? What we can see now is that countries in the Global South, in particular, want to know how the tech can be used for good, and there’s so much that could be used for good. But be careful of the Faustian bargain.

I’ll say this: chapter nine, Govern Collectively, is about the nations that are trying to come together despite the fact that the American beam has been pulled out.

The new world order that’s being created is made up of strands, like a spiderweb. Each strand looks weak. You can tear it, but the spiderweb can hold if those countries can hold together. So what I hope for is that the middle countries, the Global South, Asia — that these countries can come together. Again, think about it this way, right? China has 15 percent of the world’s compute power. The U.S. still has huge power if you can nudge them in the right direction. But if you can’t, what’s the rest of the world doing? There are 193 member countries in the UN, and we’re the global majority. So if we can move forward, then we need help from people like you guys, right? That’s the order that we’re after. I haven’t given up. You can’t give up.

BERMAN: Yeah. Well, you never give up. That’s great.

FINGER: So clearly the U.S. is consequential when we’re talking about AI, compute, et cetera. All of these companies are based in Silicon Valley. I’m sure no one here knows this, but in two weeks we have the midterms.

RESSA: Oh, yeah.

FINGER: Right?

RESSA: Less than two weeks now, right?

FINGER: Less than two weeks.

RESSA: You better vote.

Copy LinkWhat citizens can do before democracy slides

FINGER: Some might say that democracy is once again in crisis. Some people aren’t aware of the threats. Other people are resigned to inaction because what can they do? What would you tell us, less than two weeks out from the midterms, that we need to be watching?

RESSA: First, get up off your seats and go do things, right? Hope comes from action. Again, there are 100 tactical steps in the book. Chapter seven is Defend Your Institutions. You guys are going to go through what we went through in the Philippines in 1986. You will have to fight for electoral integrity, right? So go be a poll watcher. Go run. Do things. Build communities of action. Minneapolis is very inspiring, right? The civic circles. Start with the civic circle: eight to 15 people. When I write this, I write this as someone who’s had to do drills for the worst-case scenarios. What’s your civic circle? How will you guys work together?

Then the last part, since you’re in Silicon Valley: please build public-interest tech, right? Little Rappler in the Philippines — because we were playing Whac-a-Mole for a decade, and I begged the Silicon Valley dictators. I begged, you know? But it doesn’t make money. They were nice in some ways. So what we did is we went and, if you’re familiar with the Matrix protocol, the Matrix protocol has 150 million addressable users. France and Germany — all of Germany’s health system is on the Matrix protocol. And so what’s the future of news? Because we’re not going to give up. The future of news is a global federation that is built on the Matrix protocol. We built a chat app. We rolled it out in 2023. There are 65 Filipino news groups. We’re just rolling it out in Southeast Asia. When you go on something that’s federated, that isn’t manipulating you, I warn you, it will be boring. But you will have information integrity. And when push comes to shove — this news cycle normally is that you get 1 to 5 percent. That’s a normal news thing, because people don’t want to be watching the news all day. But when crisis hits, you go, and we hit 99 to 100 percent. Your news organizations are going to the gym every day to always make sure we’re factually accurate. None of the tech you use actually cares about the facts. Maybe except LinkedIn. Sorry.

BERMAN: We try.

RESSA: Go to public-interest tech. The last thing I’ll say is that we all have shared interests, including Silicon Valley, and one of the things we saw was a common — you’ve worked with Camille François.

BERMAN: Yes.

RESSA: And ROOST.

BERMAN: Yes.

RESSA: Robust Open Online Safety Tools. We incubated this in SIPA at Columbia University, and you were part of this also. What it is is we went to all the tech companies here, and they worked together, and what we said is, “Give us your trust and safety tools.” So even OpenAI gave us an OSS. Discord gave us — they became an alliance because we took what they didn’t want to do, we perfected it, and we rolled it out to everyone for free. That’s what a floor for safety can look like, right? So it’s a lot of moving parts. You are so incredibly important. We, the rest of the world, often don’t have a seat at the table that you have. So act, please, right? The window is still open, but it’s closing fast.