Maria Ressa at DLD: Creating Tech to Counter a New Authoritarian Playbook

For years, technology conferences have often treated journalism as an obstacle to innovation — a source of scrutiny, regulation, and reputational risk — rather than as a system that helps technology earn public trust and legitimacy. At the Digital Life Design (DLD) conference this year, Limelight set out to challenge that framing by putting journalism, and the technology shaping its survival, at the centre of the programme.

‍

‍

Maria Ressa on Disinformation, Power, and the Future of Journalism

‍

DLD, the annual gathering in Munich where technologists, policymakers, founders, and media leaders debate how power moves in the digital age, offered a fitting stage. Limelight organised a keynote by our patron, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Maria Ressa, to draw a direct line between the rise of tech-enabled authoritarianism and the conditions under which journalism now operates. Ressa’s work shows how disinformation, platform incentives, legal pressure, and economic intimidation converge, and how newsrooms are forced to adapt when the infrastructure around them is hostile.

‍

When she took the stage, Maria moved fast, compressing years of reporting, harassment, lawsuits, data analysis, and institutional pressure into half an hour. She spoke about what happens when information systems are deliberately warped, how narratives are seeded, reinforced by platform design, and amplified during moments of crisis. She described this as something she had lived through at Rappler, and then watched spread far beyond the Philippines.

‍

‍

“I sometimes joke that in the Philippines we moved from hell to purgatory, while you’re still heading straight for hell.”

‍

‍

Listening from the audience, what struck us was how little of this felt distant. The mechanisms she described—the economic pressure on newsrooms, the use of law as intimidation, the way social platforms reward outrage over verification—mapped cleanly onto what journalists across Europe are now experiencing.

‍

‍

The data backs this up. Reporters Without Borders now classifies the global state of press freedom as “difficult,” the first time it has applied that label worldwide in the history of its Press Freedom Index. In more than half of all countries, conditions for journalism are rated “poor” or “very poor.” Advertising markets have collapsed, platform referrals have become unpredictable, and news organisations increasingly depend on systems they neither control nor benefit from.

‍

The human cost can’t be forgotten either. More than 300 journalists were imprisoned worldwide last year, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, and dozens were killed while doing their work. At the same time, people encounter news in environments optimised for engagement and surveillance rather than accuracy.

‍

Ressa named this moment an “information Armageddon,” the final battle for democracy, which begins with information integrity.

‍

‍

“We are living through an information Armageddon. Information integrity is the mother of all battles.”

‍

‍

At Rappler, that response has taken a deliberately practical form. Ressa described building a shared digital space connected directly to the newsroom—part forum, part publishing layer—where communities gather around reporting rather than platforms. The system includes an AI chatbot trained only on verified Rappler journalism, designed to answer questions with sources attached and journalists visible behind the responses. It is not optimised for virality or scale. It is built to keep facts intact, conversations moderated by human standards, and data owned by the community rather than extracted by third parties.

‍

For Limelight, this is the context in which we operate. We fund journalism as infrastructure: the reporting itself and the conditions that allow it to exist, circulate, and remain independent of power. That is why it mattered to us to organise this keynote with Maria, and why it mattered that it happened here, in a room full of people shaping the technologies and narratives that increasingly determine what people see.

‍

Below, you can watch the video of Maria Ressa’s talk at DLD, or read the edited transcript of her remarks.

‍

//videourl//

‍

////

‍

Transcription

‍

"I sometimes joke that in the Philippines we moved from hell to purgatory, while you’re still heading straight for hell.

So let me share some lessons from us.

First, journalism. I wouldn’t be standing here without the help of many people in this room. And if there’s one thing I hope you take away from these 30 minutes, it’s two words: radical collaboration. It was the only way we survived.

This is my newsroom in the Philippines. At our height, we had about 100 to 120 people and around 90 million page views a month. Like every news organisation today, that number has since dropped. Our real turning point began in 2016, when Rodrigo Duterte was elected. We were with about 90 hate messages per hour—attacks from the bottom up through social media, and from the top down through the law.

What happens when the law is weaponised?

In 2022, I wrote this question for Filipinos: What will you sacrifice for the truth? Since then, that question has spread everywhere.

We are living through an information Armageddon. Information integrity is the mother of all battles.

The book has now been translated about 25 times. German and English came out simultaneously. The French title is more direct: Resist the Dictators. The Japanese edition removes the dictator entirely and focuses on social media. The Korean translation landed just after what happened there last year. The Mandarin version is coming, and I can’t wait to see what happens in 2026.

If China moves against Taiwan, the first stop will be the Philippines. And Georgia, have you been watching for more than a year of daily protests? A Ukrainian translation is coming too.

2026 is it. The mother of all battles. And it begins with information integrity.

Everything I’m saying to you is grounded in data. I originally wrote 400 pages. My editor cut it in half and said, “Do you want people to know everything you know, or do you want them to read the book?” He was right.

So what’s the problem?

Artificial intelligence is neither artificial nor intelligent. It’s been around for more than 70 years. What’s changed is scale and investment—hundreds of billions poured into generative AI—built on a toxic surveillance model. Everything about you has been digitised. You have digital clones running around.

We know this well at Rappler.

The harms are many. Surveillance and digital colonialism. The Global South becomes the content moderator for the Global North. We absorb the trauma first so others can use biased, oppressive AI systems.

When one editor kills a story, that’s one editor and one story. When bias is coded into systems, it scales to millions—and you can’t even see it.

In 2016, the top two cities for Facebook content moderation were Manila and Warsaw. Environmental damage from resource-intensive AI operations is only now entering public awareness. Sam Altman has said OpenAI alone would need the power output of hundreds of thousands of nuclear plants.

And then there’s the destruction of agency and democracy. As of March last year, 72 per cent of the world lives under authoritarian rule. We are electing illiberal leaders democratically.

Did you choose that? Or were you targeted by information operations?

Let me show you how this works.

When the Philippine government tried to shut us down in January 2018, within four months we lost 49 per cent of our advertising revenue. The government simply called advertisers and told them not to work with us.

So we split off our data arm. Being attacked is a curse—you get 90 hate messages an hour—but it’s also a blessing, because you get the data. We studied it. That became a second company, Nerve. I can talk about it now because I’ve won 10 of 11 criminal cases since 2016.

Here’s what we learned.

Information operations don’t work through one viral post. They work in phases: seeding, then opportunistic amplification.

Malign actors craft a narrative. Platform design reinforces it through echo chambers. Every crisis becomes an opportunity to push it again and again until the lie feels normal. Once that happens, reality shifts—and people don’t even realise it.

We saw this in the Philippines. We’ve seen it elsewhere too.

Take the UK Southport riots. An event occurs. False claims spread. Corrections follow, but it doesn’t matter—the damage is done. Disinformation moves rapidly through far-right networks, triggering violent anti-immigrant protests in at least 27 towns and cities.

The pattern is always the same: narrative building, echo-chamber reinforcement, crisis exploitation, amplification.

We call the company Nerve because it tracks the nervous system of the public information ecosystem.

In the US, immigration discourse is the most disconnected from reality. People say fact-checking doesn’t work—but that’s not true. What doesn’t work is fact-checking in isolation.

Look at the flood of executive orders in Trump’s first 100 days. The goal wasn’t policy debate. It was emotional saturation. Break shared reality. Dismantle checks and balances.

Political legitimacy is no longer won through ideas. It’s won through allegiance inside self-reinforcing realities.

We’ve seen the endgame. Narrative warfare breaks democratic institutions. Duterte dismantled constitutional checks in six months. In the US, it happened even faster.

What follows is strategic corruption and kleptocracy. Power plus profit. Big Tech is part of this.

So what did we do?

In November 2022, we launched a ten-point action plan at the Nobel Peace Library in Oslo. The world has since gotten worse. But the principles remain:

Stop surveillance for profit.

Stop coded bias.

Journalism is an antidote to tyranny.

Now, the solutions.

The situation has deteriorated further. Deep fakes blur reality. I’ve seen fake videos of myself telling people to buy crypto. If you see that, it’s not me.

At Rappler, we built around three pillars: journalism, community, and technology.

For journalism, we created emergency funding. Big Tech began choking traffic to news in 2023. Generative AI reduced referrals further in 2024. So we helped launch the International Fund for Public InterestMedia—$60 million in direct support (in the Global South) to keep newsrooms alive.

For community, we organised. In late 2021, we brought together 150 groups across four layers: newsrooms, fact-checkers, civil society, researchers, and legal organisations. Each group shared one fact-check per day—without anger.

Faith groups joined. Universities analysed the data weekly. Legal firms prepared accountability.

We mapped the public information ecosystem and identified boundary spanners—people who could carry facts across divides. Before the 2022 elections, we reclaimed the centre.

Finally, technology.

We cannot win narrative warfare on platforms designed for profit. Facts are not their anchor. So we built public-interest tech.

Using the Matrix protocol—open source, decentralised, encrypted—we created a shared space linked directly to news sites. Users can talk across outlets without data being shared. Communities keep ownership of their data.

We launched this in September last year. It works.

We built our own fact-anchored chatbot. Every response links to verified sources. Every channel includes real journalists responding directly. This rebuilt trust.

Since rolling it out, we’ve banned just three accounts. Three strikes and you’re out—the same rules we use in the physical world.

When you live under extractive, predatory systems, people behave badly. I believe humans are fundamentally good. We just need environments that allow it.

This is the moment. If we don’t act, news organisations will die—or be co-opted. I lived through this once. Fear works.

That’s why we need to build technology rooted in facts, protect journalism, and reclaim shared reality.

We’re a small newsroom of about 120 people in the Philippines. You can try this yourselves.

Thank you."

////

‍