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In 2021, Maria Ressa received the Nobel Peace Prize for her defense of freedom of expression. But her work in the Philippines has cost her trials, threats, and years of legal pressure.
As the founder of Rappler, one of Southeast Asia’s leading independent news platforms, Ressa has documented how online disinformation campaigns operate, showing how social media can be used to manipulate public opinion and rewrite reality.

At the World Meeting on Human Fraternity, she used a stark expression: “Information Armageddon.”
According to her analysis, the problem is not just the spread of fake news, but an economic and technological system that rewards polarization. Attention becomes profit, and conflict becomes a product.

The result is that the truth does not disappear: it is progressively weakened, rendered irrelevant.
His proposal starts here. Rebuilding an information ecosystem based on three elements: collaboration among media outlets, a return to the public service mission, and the development of technologies that give users back control over their own data.

The World Meeting on Human Fraternity showed just how widespread this analysis is: the information crisis is one of the areas where the quality of democratic life and the very possibility of recognizing ourselves as a community are at stake today.

Excerpt from the speech by Maria Ressa – Nobel Peace Prize laureate

The greatest battle we face today is the fight against impunity, because it leads to dehumanization.
We live in a physical world ravaged by war, and in a virtual world where our minds and emotions are insidiously manipulated by surveillance capitalism.
All of this has spawned violence, and online violence is real violence, on a global scale.
Last year, 274 journalists were killed.
We are facing three crucial battles: the battle for truth, the battle for human autonomy, and the battle for our future.
The first is the battle for truth.
When deepfakes can destroy reputations, when micro-targeting and disinformation campaigns can manipulate elections, when lies travel faster than facts, we must act. Platform accountability is not censorship: it is safety. It is the restoration of democracy’s immune system.
The second is the battle for human agency.
Algorithms that amplify our worst impulses, that reward outrage over empathy, that lock us into the bubbles of our biases, are not inevitable. They are choices. We can choose different values. We can design with human dignity as our starting point.
The third is the battle for the future we want.
Will artificial intelligence enhance human potential or replace human judgment?
Will the internet serve humanity, or will humanity serve the internet?
We cannot tackle these challenges alone—newsroom by newsroom, country by country. The internet and disinformation know no borders. Neither can our response. That is why we must radically rethink what collaboration means. I have seen what happens when we fail. I have watched democracy die in real time, one viral lie after another. In the Philippines, the Duterte administration filed eleven criminal cases against me in fourteen months. Nearly ten years later, I still cannot travel freely: I needed permission from the Supreme Court to be here today.
But I have also seen what is possible when we act with courage and conviction.
There are three paths to restoring the integrity of information and rebuilding trust.
The first: journalism.
We must return to our fundamental mission: serving the public interest. Today, this requires extraordinary courage: providing context when algorithms reward controversy, choosing fact-checking over virality. We must stop feeding the platforms that are destroying us and build our own communities of trust.
The second: community.
At Rappler, we’ve learned that survival depends on communities of action.
When Duterte attacked us, our community funded our defense. When algorithms tried to silence us, our community amplified the truth. We must build networks of trustworthy journalism organizations—federated systems that connect real people in a shared reality.
The third: technology.
We have developed technologies for the public good: an open-source, decentralized chat app based on Matrix that allows real people to communicate without algorithmic manipulation. This must be the future of information: technology in the service of human connection. We can choose different values. We can design with human dignity as our starting point. I urge you to reflect on the meaning of radical collaboration in these times and to join us.
Pope Leo — and before him Pope Francis — have asked us to be human.
That is why we became journalists: to help people understand the world and one another… today, to rebuild what technology has systematically destroyed.
We know what “creative destruction” means: we stand on the ruins of the world that once was. Now is the time, for all of us here, to create the world we want.
The future is not written in code. It is written by the choices we all make, together.
Before it’s too late.