How to Stand Up to a Dictator: The Fight for Our Future

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

"In this impassioned warning and inspirational call to arms, Ressa identifies and illuminates her core values of empathy, honesty, and faith in humanity to illustrate how a strong commitment to such foundational beliefs can provide the key to democracy’s survival. . . . Searing and electrifying." — Booklist (starred review)

From the recipient of the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize comes a powerful and inspiring political memoir that chronicles her career fighting fascism, filled with insights and advice for standing against authoritarian bullies and confronting disinformation and lies. It includes an introduction by Amal Clooney.

Maria Ressa is one of the most renowned international journalists of our time. For decades, she challenged corruption and malfeasance in her native country, the Philippines, on its rocky path from an authoritarian state to a democracy. As a reporter from CNN, she transformed news coverage in her region, which led her in 2012 to create a new and innovative online news organization, Rappler. Harnessing the emerging power of social media, Rappler crowdsourced breaking news, found pivotal sources and tips, harnessed collective action for climate change, and helped increase voter knowledge and participation in elections.

But by their fifth year of existence, Rappler had gone from being lauded for its ideas to being targeted by the new Philippine government, and made Ressa an enemy of her country’s most powerful man: President Duterte. Still, she did not let up, tracking government-seeded disinformation networks which spread lies to its own citizens in a clear example of information warfare laced with anger and hate. Hounded by the state and its allies using the legal system to silence her, accused of numerous crimes, and charged with cyberlibel for which she was found guilty, Ressa faces years in prison and thousands in fines.

There is another adversary Ressa is battling. How to Stand Up to a Dictator is also the story of how the creep toward authoritarianism, in the Phillipines and around the world, has been aided and abetted by social media companies. Ressa exposes how this era of surveillance capitalism has allowed their platforms to spread a virus of lies that infect each of us, pitting us against one another, igniting, even creating, our fears, anger, and hate, and how this has accelerated the rise of authoritarians and dictators around the world. She maps a network of disinformation—a heinous web of cause and effect—that has netted the globe: from Duterte’s drug wars to America's Capitol Hill; Britain’s Brexit to Russian and Chinese cyber-warfare; Facebook and Silicon Valley to our own clicks and votes.

Democracy is fragile. How to Stand Up to a Dictator is an urgent cry for Western readers to recognize and understand the dangers to press freedom and our freedoms before it is too late. In telling her dramatic, turbulent and courageous story, Ressa forces readers to ask themselves the same question she asks every day: What are you willing to sacrifice for the truth?

• A Journalist’s Memoir: Follow Nobel laureate Maria Ressa’s journey from CNN correspondent to founder of the groundbreaking news site Rappler, and finally to a primary target of her own government.
• The Battle for Truth: Go inside the fight against President Duterte’s murderous drug war and the sophisticated, state-sponsored disinformation networks that spread lies to an entire nation.
• Disinformation and Democracy: Discover how Silicon Valley giants like Facebook became accomplices to authoritarians, allowing a virus of lies to infect global politics.
• Holding Power Accountable: A searing look at the weaponization of the law, where cyberlibel cases and the threat of a lifetime in prison are used to silence critics and dismantle the rule of law.

Maria Ressa is the CEO of Rappler, a 2021 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, and one of the world’s foremost voices on press freedom and information integrity. Maria is professor of professional practice at the School of Inter­national and Public Affairs at Columbia University and co-chairs the International Fund for Public Interest Media, the World Economic Forum Global Future Council on Information Integrity and the UN’s Independent Inter­national Scientific Panel on AI. She is also vice-chair of the UN’s Internet Governance Forum, and among others, serves on the boards of the Committee to Pro­tect Journalists, the International Center for Journalists, ROOST, and the International Association for Safe and Ethical AI.