Rappler

Okay, time for this week's interview now.

What can ordinary citizens do to make sure they're not just one more cog in a global machine that monetizes our attention and our time? Maria Ressa runs Rappler in the Philippines and won the Nobel Peace Prize for her brave journalism and resistance to intimidation.

She is also the co-chair of the UN's Independent International Scientific Panel on AI, whose work you will hear her describe in more detail.

We sat down together at FP's Tech and AI Forum on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly.

And let me just talk about media.

Folks, support your journalists before it's too late, right? We have been demonized and we have made mistakes partly because the incentive structure of social media pays for the crap sorry i mean you get the widest distribution because of the worst of us right so right now you're getting tech big tech is literally choking news organizations And yet those news organizations are the ones that are giving the fuel for the chatbots you're using.

So I literally am paying more for server space so that these scrapers can scrape Rappler for our content.

That's the same all around the world.

In 2021, she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts to safeguard freedom of expression.

Maria Ressa is the founder and CEO of the Philippine independent news site Rappler, and she's a former CNN journalist.

Among other places, she covered East Timor.

She's also the co-chair of the United Nations Independent International Scientific Panel on Artificial Intelligence.

I actually expect we could have you on for the whole hour because if you think you're gonna reach your meeting on time, I mean, I've been talking to people who go one city block near the UN right now, and it takes them an hour to drive from one end to the other.

But we're gonna let you go.

Co-chair of the United Nations Independent International Scientific Panel on artificial intelligence, co-founder and CEO of the Philippine independent news site, Rappler.

She also received a Nobel Peace Prize in twenty twenty-one.

Duterte's right-wing buddies in Congress then refused to renew the broadcast franchise of ABS-CBN, the nation's biggest network, which had made the mistake of exposing the extrajudicial killings of his so-called drug war.

11,000 people lost their jobs, and Nobel laureate Maria Ressa's little opposition newspaper, The Rappler, was ordered shut.

Almost without exception, this is the process autocrats use to destroy democracies, as documented brilliantly by people like Timothy Snyder and Ruth Ben-Ghiat.

First, the strongman's friends acquire the newsrooms.

It is a quasi-judicial and quasi-political proceeding where the votes of senator-judges are influenced by emergent factors.

Absent any metric with which to approximate how senator-judges are likely to vote when judgment day comes, I would venture on looking at Rappler's six analytical factors that tend to affect the senator's voting tendency in an article I accessed on September 19th.

I submit that, as in any legislative voting, patterns are not random but a product of various considerations, as Ateneo de Manila University Assistant Professor Aryan Aguirre declares in an interview with Rappler.

He maintains that the votes of the Senator judges will be affected not only by law and evidence, but also by 2028 electoral positioning, Senate block cohesion, public opinion and media, Duterte popularity and international criminal court arrest spillover, and VP position offer post-conviction.

Following these considerations, he grouped the senator-judges into categories.

It is also worth asking why, years after a similar flood-driven jam struck the same San Simon stretch in 2023, the tollway still goes underwater every time the monsoon hits, GMA News explainer report.

According to a Rappler report on September 1, 2026, Mlex Corporation, through operator Metro Pacific Tollways Corporation, MPTC, has said it plans to eventually raise the northbound and southbound pavements in Tulaok once the Tulaok Bridge Elevation Project is completed.

but eventually is not good enough for a company that collects toll fees every single day.

There are engineering solutions to a problem that is now recurring annually.

And we cite many different Filipino scholars.

We cite the works of our colleagues in the press, Rappler, ABS-CBN, the fact-checking of VERA files.

We collect good examples from within the country and amplify them.

And also translate them.