‘She just keeps on going’: Duterte critic Maria Ressa’s fight for press freedom

Early one Sunday evening in October 2016, the Filipino journalist Maria Ressa was sitting watching the sunset from her living room in Taguig, a well-off suburb in south-east Manila, when she started receiving abusive messages on her Facebook page. A veteran reporter and former war correspondent, Ressa is the CEO of Rappler, an online news website that she co-founded in 2012. Rappler is one of a shrinking number of independent news outlets in the Philippines. It has reported on government corruption, investigated the country’s top businessmen, and shone a light on President Rodrigo Duterte’s controversial “drug war”, a campaign of extrajudicial killings that human rights organisations say has claimed more than 20,000 lives.

Just hours before Ressa was targeted, Rappler had published the last in a three-part series called Propaganda War: Weaponizing the Internet. The report, which was mostly written by Ressa, explained how President Duterte and his supporters were mobilising armies of paid trolls to silence critics, intimidate opponents and spread disinformation online. Rappler showed how a pro-Duterte network of 26 fake Facebook accounts was influencing millions of Filipinos. The findings were alarming, yet not even Ressa could have anticipated the backlash. “At first the messages attacked my credibility, like, ‘You’re wrong,’ ‘You’re lying,’ ‘You’re a paid hack,’ ” she says in a Zoom interview from her home. “It made me so uncertain that I went back to check all the data in the pieces we’d written, and everything was correct.”

At first, Ressa tried to respond to the messages in good faith. “But they weren’t actually wanting to talk to me,” she says. “They just wanted to pound me to silence.” Then the nature of the messages changed: as the night wore on, they became more misogynistic and explicit. “Maria, you are a waste of sperm! Your mother should have swallowed you!” read one. “Get a real job, you doggy, dirty, pussy c… motherf…er,” wrote another. “The number of the messages was overwhelming,” says Ressa. Before long, she was receiving 90 hate messages an hour.

The attacks continued for a month, spiking whenever Rappler wrote anything critical about the President. Ressa was called a bitch, a slut, a dog, a snake, and a witch. She was threatened with arrest, death and imprisonment. In early 2017, a 22-year-old man posted a comment on Facebook, saying that he hoped she would be “raped repeatedly to death … It would bring joy to my heart.” Facebook told Ressa to report the attacks, but the sheer volume of them – more than 2000 a day – made that impossible: Ressa calculated that it would take 108 hours – or four-and-a-half days non-stop – to report just 24 hours’ worth of abuse.

Ressa had received threats before in the course of her job. “But this was something different,” she says. “I knew then that something had fundamentally changed. What I decided to do was take that feeling and do something with it.”

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Maria Ressa, who turned 57 last year, has short, dark, gamine hair and a large, ready smile. She wears oval shaped frameless glasses (she is short-sighted). She is also tiny – just over 1.5 metres tall – the same height as your average Australian 12-year-old. (One old friend described her to me as “the Energiser Bunny”.) Equal parts earnest and chirpy, she peppers her conversations with Midwest Americanisms, such as “aw shucks” and “oh my gosh”, but has also been known to quote Bono and Holocaust poetry.

Born in Manila, Ressa moved with her family to America in 1973, when she was 10, a year after martial law was declared in the Philippines by then-president Ferdinand Marcos. She has recalled flying over Alaska as a little girl, seeing snow for the first time, and being thrust, with very little English, into primary school, where, as she tells me, she was “the shortest, only brown kid in my class”.

At Toms River High School North in New Jersey, she played piano, violin and guitar, and won a nationwide debating contest. She went on to Princeton, where she studied molecular biology and English, with certificates in theatre and dance; for her senior thesis, she wrote a play about Philippine politics. Then, in 1986, at the age of 23, she returned to the Philippines to reconnect with her roots.

It was a heady time for Filipinos. The so-called People Power Revolution, a popular, non-violent revolt led in part by the Catholic Church, had just seen the end of Marcos’s 20-year rule and the restoration of democracy.

“We were inspired by the Arab Spring and pro-democracy movements in Muslim countries, We were looking at the potential of social media and journalism to bring about social change.”

Journalism was initially a way for Ressa to understand what was going on while being paid for it. She took a job at CNN as a breaking-news reporter, going on to head up the network’s bureau in Manila and then Jakarta, in 1995. She spent the next 10 years reporting on terrorism in south-east Asia, studying, among other things, al-Qaeda’s presence in the region, before being poached by ABS-CBN, the country’s leading television network, where she became head of news and current affairs. In 2011, Ressa left ABS-CBN and, with five of her former colleagues, started Rappler the following year.

“We were inspired by the Arab Spring and pro-democracy movements in Muslim countries,” co-founder Chay Hofileña, who is now Rappler’s managing editor, tells me. “We were looking at the potential of social media and journalism to bring about social change.”

The name Rappler was a statement of intent – a portmanteau of “rap”, meaning to talk, and “ripple”, to make waves. Ressa staffed it with a handful of 20-something, mostly female journalists who practised what was then a very different style of reporting – shooting and editing video in the field, and writing stories on location. (Today the site has more than 100 staff, mostly based in Manila.) The young Rapplers, as they called themselves, broke stories, most notably about a Supreme Court chief justice being awarded a civil-law doctorate without a dissertation (he would eventually be impeached on corruption charges), and used social media to reach a broader audience and build a community of readers.

One of the biggest stories at that time was an up-and-coming politician named Rodrigo Duterte. Duterte was born into a political family: his father, Vicente, served as governor of Davao province, a rough-and-tumble region in the country’s south. Duterte also served as mayor of Davao in the mid 2000s, becoming known as Duterte Harry, thanks to his alleged involvement with a vigilante group called the Davao Death Squad. In an interview with Rappler in 2015, Duterte boasted to Ressa that he had killed three people himself. When the Philippines general election came around, in 2016, he leveraged his strongman appeal all the way to the presidential palace.

Duterte’s style is gleefully offensive: the 76-year-old’s speeches are peppered with random profanities and insults. He has described the country’s elites as
“motherf…ers” and sworn at the Pope. In 2016, when it was suggested that then-US president Barack Obama might be concerned about the Philippine government’s human rights record, Duterte called him a “son of a whore”. He once wolf-whistled a female reporter, and boasted at campaign rallies about the size of his penis.

Philippine politics has always had a showbiz quality, with choreographed dance routines and candidates who croon on stage, including former president Joseph Estrada, who sometimes sang at rallies backed by a 72-piece orchestra.

But Duterte has also made it a blood sport: in 2016, he told a crowd that he “should have been first” to rape Jacqueline Hamill, an Australian missionary who was gang-raped and murdered in Davao in 1989. (He later claimed that his language reflected his disgust at the incident.) He harbours a special loathing for journalists, whom he regularly describes as liars and prostitutes, and prime candidates for assassination. “If you end up dead, it’s your fault,” he told Rappler reporter Pia Renada. “It means nothing to me.”

Duterte’s hatred of the media sharpened after becoming president, when journalists began focusing on the drug war, which had become one of his signature policies. In 2016, he told a crowd, “The funeral parlours will be packed … I will supply the bodies.” Some sections of the media, including Rappler, ABS-CBN, and the left-leaning Philippine Daily Inquirer, claimed that the authorities were understating the number of people being killed, and questioned the level of impunity afforded the police.

Duterte attacked Rappler, accusing it of being owned by Americans and funded by the CIA. In March 2017, during an official ceremony at Malacañang, the presidential palace, Duterte described the Inquirer as “bullshit”. “You are sons of bitches,” he said. “You went too far.” In May the same year, he also targeted ABS-CBN, which he claimed was “full of shit” in a speech.

“Press freedom,” he said, flashing his middle finger, adding, “You want to know my sentiments? F… you.” The government’s anti-communist body, the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict, subsequently expressed concern about the network, suggesting it might have broken the law, without specifying how. (Such a tactic is known in the Philippines as “red-tagging”.)

By July 2017, after a sustained campaign of harassment, the Inquirer’s owners announced they were selling their majority stake to businessman Ramon Ang, a friend of Duterte’s and one of his campaign donors, for an undisclosed sum. ABS-CBN fared worse: in July 2020, the congress voted against renewing the network’s broadcast licence. (It remains off-air.)

Rappler was still standing. But by then, another, more sinister front had opened up in the battle for press freedom.

Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte told a journalist, “If you end up dead, it’s your fault.” Credit: Getty Images

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Filipinos are the world’s heaviest internet users – they spend more than 10 hours a day online, according to the We Are Social communications agency, and that was pre-COVID. “In a country with weak institutions, social media networks and the internet are the way things move,” Ressa says.

“There are also about 10 to 12 million Filipinos working overseas, and social media is how they stay in touch.” Facebook is by far the most dominant platform in the Philippines, with 96 per cent of internet users accessing it.
After the attacks on Ressa in October 2016, Rappler launched Sharktank, a social media monitoring tool that began collecting data from thousands of Facebook pages and Twitter accounts. According to Ressa, “Sharktank maps the information ecosystem of the Philippines.”

As the data accumulated, Rappler identified several Duterte propaganda networks. At the centre of one of the most prolific was a website called Trending News Portal (TNP), launched in 2014, which produced mainly entertainment news and viral videos. But as the 2016 elections approached, it became increasingly political, posting stories, for example, that the Philippines was ranked among the world’s fastest-growing economies, and unsubstantiated claims that Duterte’s political opponents had taken part in election fraud or been linked to the drug trade.

It soon became apparent that TNP, which had 4.3 million followers in 2019, was connected to nine other pro-Duterte websites, some of which also had followings in the millions. (It’s impossible to tell how many of these followers were real.) Most of these sites had no known authors or owners and no contact details. Fake stories posted on TNP would find their way onto these sites within minutes, or even simultaneously, suggesting they were being administered by the same people, a phenomenon known as sock-puppeting. This kind of orchestrated disinformation is what Facebook has dubbed “coordinated inauthentic behaviour”. (It banned the practice in 2018, and the following year removed Twinmark Media Enterprises, the company that owned TNP, from its platform.)

Coordinated inauthentic behaviour is not uncommon on Facebook, but it is particularly egregious in the Philippines. Katie Harbath, who was until March this year Facebook’s public policy director for global elections, has described the Philippines as “patient zero in the global disinformation epidemic”. In 2019, Nic Gabunada, Duterte’s former social media manager, was found to be operating 200 fake Facebook and Instagram accounts spreading pro-Duterte messaging. (Facebook, which also owns Instagram, removed them in 2019.)

Clusters of phony pro-Duterte accounts have recently come out of China, and a small number from Saudi Arabia and India. “It’s no secret that the government’s information arm, the Presidential Communications Operations Office, [also] has very close ties with Russia,” says Danilo Arao, an associate professor at the University of the Philippines Department of Journalism, who has himself received online death threats for criticising the President.

But the vast bulk of the disinformation is home-grown. Manila alone is thought to harbour hundreds of so-called “troll farms”. “You get a bunch of students in a room, casual workers, who could be paid $1000 a month or maybe $1 a post,” says Ross Tapsell, researcher at the Australian National University who interviewed trolls in the Philippines while studying the country’s disinformation industry. “Commonly they will be given a script or messages they can cut and paste.” When a newspaper writes an unflattering story about Duterte or a government project or policy, the trolls will bombard the comments section, a practice known as “brigading”. “They will post hundreds of comments attacking the journalist who wrote the story or the publication itself, in order to hijack or co-opt the discourse around it.”

Some of the social-media messages attacking Ressa. Credit:

In the Philippines, pro-government trolls have become the new crisis managers, manipulating consensus and creating alternate realities. Botched initiatives become roaring successes; critics become communist sympathisers; criminals and kleptocrats become national heroes. In 2019, Rappler wrote about a cluster of 360 Facebook pages operating in support of disgraced former president Ferdinand Marcos, his wife Imelda, and their son and daughter, Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos and Imee Marcos, both of whom are prominent political players. (Bongbong narrowly lost the vote for vice-president in 2016, and is said to be eyeing a presidential bid at the 2022 general elections.)

The Facebook pages, some of which originated in Macau, glorified the virtues of authoritarian rule and airbrushed human rights abuses in the martial law era. It’s thought that as president, Marcos stole about $US5-10 billion from the Philippine treasury in his 20-year rule; some of the bogus Facebook pages, which often linked to YouTube videos, attempted to explain this away by claiming that he had been given a million tonnes of gold by the descendants of the royal family of Maharlika, a mythical kingdom that was said to have ruled over the Philippines prior to the arrival of the Spanish. (There is no proof that such a kingdom ever existed.) Should the Marcoses reclaim Malacañang, this “Marcos gold will save the world!”

In a country where people spend more than 10 hours a day on the internet, an online “reality” can be the only one that counts. Despite Duterte’s botched response to COVID-19, despite the collapse of the free media, despite snaking queues outside Manila food banks, the president’s approval rating currently sits at 91 per cent.

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During the 2016 presidential elections, Duterte sometimes appeared on stage at campaign rallies with a former pop star, model and controversial sex blogger named Mocha Uson. With her broad face and glamorous long, black hair, Uson would prowl the stage, whipping up the crowds and praising Duterte’s “iron hand” in dealing with criminals. In return, Duterte made her the head of his social media unit, in 2017.

Former pop star and sex blogger Mocha Uson spruiked for Duterte in 2016.Credit: AFP

Uson, who is now 39, was rabidly partisan. She used her blog, which hit 5.3 million followers in 2017, as a megaphone for Duterte’s cult of personality, and would live-stream videos of herself from the presidential palace flogging coffee-table books about Duterte’s life and giving away bobble-head dolls of him, arms crossed, enforcer-style. Before Trending News Portal was taken down by Facebook, she had posted more than 500 of its stories, amplifying its reach by an order of magnitude.

Her advocacy has made her a figurehead for the Diehard Duterte Supporters, or DDS, a group of political hardliners who rally around the President with a fervour that rivals Donald Trump’s MAGA army. (Uson did not respond to requests for comment.)

In the years-long orchestrated campaign of online propaganda directed at Duterte’s critics, Uson has been the conductor. In 2016, she posted the term #presstitutes on her Facebook page. The term, which soon began trending, was initially aimed at the whole of the media. Over time, however, it became directed mostly at Rappler, and especially Ressa.

Before long, the term #presstitutes had been picked up by another pro-Duterte blogger and friend of Uson’s named R.J. Nieto, who blogs under the moniker Thinking Pinoy (a Pinoy is a Filipino). In May 2017, while he and Uson were accompanying Duterte on a state visit to Russia, Nieto claimed, without evidence, that Ressa was a threat to national security, and launched the term, #ArrestMariaRessa. Other terms began popping up online, including #ShutdownRappler, #BringHerToTheSenate and #UnfollowRappler. (Shortly afterwards, Nieto was hired as social media consultant for the Department of Foreign Affairs.)

“It’s all about seeding these malicious meta-narratives. Over time, it establishes an enabling environment where people start believing journalists are criminals and fair game.”

Hundreds of other pro-Duterte Facebook accounts and websites then began posting about Ressa’s imminent arrest and the closure of Rappler. “It’s all about seeding these malicious meta-narratives,” says Julie Posetti, the London-based director of research at the International Centre for Journalists. “Over time, it establishes an enabling environment where people start believing journalists are criminals and fair game.”

In late 2018, Uson resigned from Duterte’s social media team; a year later, she was appointed the government’s deputy executive director of the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration (OWWA). She has since moderated her invective toward Ressa, but Nieto has more than stepped into the breach. His Facebook page, which has 1.6 million followers, frequently focuses on Ressa, mocking her journalism, and her awards. (Ressa has received more than a dozen international accolades for championing press freedom globally, including being made Time Magazine’s Person of the Year in 2018.)

But the most insidious attacks target her appearance. Nieto’s followers call her an “ape”, “a thing”, and “an alien”. Ressa, who has eczema, is often compared to a scrotum: a common meme has Ressa wearing a pair of testicles for earrings. (Trolls in the Philippines increasingly use memes and manipulated images, which boost engagement and are harder for online abuse detection tools to pick up.)

Much like the President, Nieto, who is 37, despises the mainstream media and is given to colourful language. In a Facebook live video in 2017, he spoke about the “f…ing Malacañang press corp” – the journalists accredited to cover Duterte – saying that they were enemies of the people. In his vlogs, he looms large on the screen, chubby and almost baby-faced, his jeremiads delivered with a sly, ironic lilt.

When I speak to him on the phone, he says that he started blogging because the “media establishment needed a shake-up” and that he was initially a fan of Rappler until Ressa started “lying”. As for the abuse directed at her by his followers, he says he can’t control “how the public reacts”. Like Uson, he has been cited innumerable times for posting fake news, but he denies being part of any coordinated government propaganda machine. “I’m very passionate,” he says. “I’m a nationalist Filipino and I love my country.”

The Philippines is a developing country: more than a quarter of the population lives in poverty. In the slums and sweatshops of Quezon City and Manila, Ressa is either a complete unknown or worse, a traitor, habitually painting the country in a bad light. It’s in this context that Nieto operates. “Listen, Tim,” he tells me, “you are here to protect human rights and democracy, but I am here to protect my people.”

Ressa (holding a microphone) and fellow journalists campaigning for press freedom. Since 2018, Ressa, Rappler and its staff have faced 13 government investigations.Credit: AFP

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Journalism is a dangerous job in the Philippines: according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 86 reporters have been killed in the Philippines since 1992, nine of them during Duterte’s term. Others have been shot at, bashed, and harassed. The campaign to dehumanise Ressa has assaulted her dignity. (“My skin was probably the most vulnerable part,” she says.) But it has also made her a prominent target: there have been calls to have her beheaded and gang-raped. She sometimes wears a bulletproof vest, and often travels with a security detail. The Rappler office has also been subjected to bomb threats. Ressa says she and her staff have “workflowed” the response should the office be attacked, but she doesn’t like talking too much about security: “I don’t discuss safety measures because the minute you do, you’re not as safe.”

Human rights lawyer Amal Clooney described a conviction for cyber libel of Ressa and Rappler researcher Rey Santos jnr as a “blow to democracy in the Philippines”.Credit: Getty Images

But perhaps the most pernicious assault on Ressa has been via the courts. Since 2018, she, Rappler and its staff have been subject to 13 government investigations and spurious court cases, including for tax evasion, breaching foreign ownership laws, and libel prosecutions. (Ressa denies all the charges.) One libel case, which was lodged in December 2017, relates to an article that was written in 2012, four months before the cyber libel law was introduced. Since no criminal legislation can be retroactive, the National Bureau of Investigation dismissed the case in 2018. It subsequently came to light that Rappler had, in 2014, corrected a spelling error in the story – “evation” was changed to “evasion”. The plaintiff’s lawyers argued that Rappler had thereby republished the piece, allowing it to be tried under the new law. As The Atlantic magazine put it at the time, “It was a lawsuit built around a typo.”

Ressa and her former researcher Rey Santos jnr were found guilty in June 2020, and sentenced to a minimum of six months and one day and a maximum of six years in prison. (They are appealing the decision.) The ruling was denounced by human rights groups and the UN. British barrister Amal Clooney, who is leading Ressa’s defence, said the court had become “complicit in a sinister action to silence a journalist”, and that the decision was a “blow to democracy in the Philippines”. Other cases against Ressa are ongoing: if found guilty, she could face up to 100 years in jail.

“What we’re seeing in Manila is ‘lawfare’,” says Australian journalist and press freedom advocate Peter Greste. “The government doesn’t need to be successful. It just needs to throw enough cases at Rappler and hope that something sticks, and if it doesn’t, you end up tying them up in court, costing them enormous amounts of money and time, and causing massive mental stress.”

“Ressa has taken a sustained kicking for such a long time.”

Greste, who met Ressa at an event hosted in 2019 in Manila by the Committee to Protect Journalists, describes her as “one of the toughest and most courageous people I’ve ever come across. She has taken a sustained kicking for such a long time.”

Before she was denied the right to travel last year, Ressa frequently appeared at conferences and press freedom events around the world. From afar, at least, she can sometimes appear to be less a person than a symbol. And yet she is as vulnerable as anyone. At one stage she sends me an anxious text: “I’m not sure you understand the role of the propaganda machine in the Philippines’ decline to a dictatorship?” She wants to be able to see any quotes I attribute to her. “Whatever you write could have serious implications for my safety and freedom.” (I agree.) “I gotta worry about everything,” she writes. “And my plate is truly full.”

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From her days as a young reporter, Ressa has been fascinated by the interplay of media and terrorism, and the study of social networks; how personal psychology and group dynamics can shape and spread ideas and behaviours. The rise of the internet – and particularly social media – supercharged these networks, which harness the basest emotions to fuel partisan agendas.

“Social media is like a huge behavioural experiment in real time,” she tells me. “And we are Pavlov’s dogs.”

Nowhere is this truer than in the Philippines. With its ubiquitous social media and lax regulation, the country is the perfect testing ground for unscrupulous operators, including the scandal-ridden political consulting firm, Cambridge Analytica (CA). Its parent company, SCL Group, had, until it closed in 2018, been working on political campaigns in the Philippines since at least 2010. According to whistleblower Christopher Wylie, CA considered the Philippines to be the “ideal target” and “a Petri dish-type situation”, where the company could trial the best ways to manipulate voter sentiment online with almost total impunity.

Wylie, who had worked as a researcher for SCL Group, revealed in 2018 how the company used data from Facebook and other online sources to target users for disinformation campaigns. In an interview with Ressa in 2019, he explained how SCL had used the Philippines to experiment with artificial intelligence and “tactics and techniques that you wouldn’t be able to as easily in the West … if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t matter, you won’t get caught. And if it does work, then you can then figure out how to port that into other countries.”

The Philippines is regarded by some as a portent. In a recent report for the International Centre for Journalists, Julie Posetti described it as the “canary in the coalmine”, a warning about how the country’s “corrupted information ecosystem represents the West’s dystopian future”. Exactly how dark that future gets will depend a lot on how companies like Facebook police their own platforms.

So far, the signs aren’t great. Facebook has taken down scores of pages of fake content in the Philippines, but this is barely a drop in the ocean. Ressa works closely with the company to counter disinformation: whenever I speak with her, she seems to be either going into or coming out of a meeting with Facebook management. But she remains sceptical about the possibility of meaningful change. She cites the experience of Sophie Zhang, a former data scientist at Facebook who claimed, in 2020, that the company had variously ignored or overlooked blatant misuse of the platform by national governments, including the Philippines’, intent on misleading their people. (Facebook issued a statement saying it disagreed with Zhang’s account.)

When I ask Gemma Mendoza, Rappler’s head of digital strategy, what Facebook is like to deal with, she says, “We are frenemies. We work with them because it is necessary.”

Google has been equally ineffective. In 2010, it founded an internal unit, Jigsaw, to counter disinformation online and make the internet a safer place. As the Philippines shows, it hasn’t worked out that way. In 2019, Vice website published a piece that described Jigsaw as “a toxic mess”, a spectacularly dysfunctional operation that “despite the breathless headlines it has garnered, has done little to actually make the internet any better”. (Jigsaw did not respond to a request for comment.)

In the meantime, Ressa soldiers on. When I contact Rappler co-founder Chay F. Holifeña to see how Ressa is coping, she replies with a mixed bag of adjectives: “pretty well”, “occasionally angry”, “incredibly resilient”. Despite all evidence to the contrary, Holifeña says that “Maria remains an optimist at heart and is still idealistic” about the future of the Philippines, where Duterte is expected to run for the vice-presidency rather than presidency in next year’s election. “One of our colleagues calls her ‘Little Miss Sunshine’,” she writes. Duterte might have the power, but Ressa has the courage, not to mention the stamina. “Maria is incredibly focused,” Holifeña adds. “She just keeps on logging long hours of work. She just keeps on going and going and going.”

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