It is now well-known that some of the world’s biggest technology companies have built their strategies around monetizing the attention of consumers while simultaneously eroding the revenue models of news media. Maria Ressa, a Filipino American journalist and media leader who won the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts to safeguard freedom of expression, argues that Big Tech is destroying democracy. But what can ordinary citizens do in response? This is a question that Ressa attempts to answer in her forthcoming book, The Fight Back: A Citizen’s Guide to Standing Up to Dictators. Ressa is also a co-chair of the United Nations’ Scientific Panel on Artificial Intelligence, which gives her a unique vantage point to assess discussions on guardrails for AI. I caught up with her at FP’s Tech and AI Forum, on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly this week. The full conversation is now available on FP Live—on this website and on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube. What follows here is a condensed and lightly edited transcript.

Ravi Agrawal: You say that Big Tech is bad for democracy. I want most of this conversation to be about solutions, but before we go there, can you give us a quick sketch of the problem?

Maria Ressa: First, let’s define it. Artificial intelligence has been around in some form for 70 years, and it has gone out to the world in three phases. The first phase was about a decade ago with social media, where machine learning came in and cloned you, and then artificial intelligence came in and took all of our clones. That was micro-targeting. The next phase came around 2022 and 2023, when large language models (LLMs) came out. LLMs have never been factual—they’re probabilistic machines. The first rollout of that was chatbots, and those chatbots then changed what you see. Now, it’s not just having no facts, truth, or trust; it’s literally just AI slop. The third phase, which is what we’re grappling with at the United Nations’ Scientific Panel on Artificial Intelligence, is the agents and multi-agents, agentic and multi-agentic.

These three stages hacked our biology. Social media changed the attention economy. Our attention spans diminished. We gave up our attention. We gave up our intimacy. Now what’s being hacked is agency itself. You literally give these agents permission to act for you.

In July, when we released the preliminary report from the Scientific Panel on AI, we told you that this is not controllable. By that point, Mythos and Fable 5 had already come out. And of course, in July, we had the Hugging Face incident. So, we came out with a thematic brief to tell you what the facts are and what we need to do.

So, it’s been a decade. It’s getting worse. Don’t let them tell you that it’s just happening now; it started a decade ago when we documented the harms, and very little has been done to protect you.

RA: So, what can we do? What can ordinary citizens do, which is the subtitle of your new book, The Fight Back: A Citizen’s Guide to Standing Up to Dictators? And what can countries do, since we are here in New York during UNGA week?

MR: There are so many things. I’ll start with the U.N. So many people have written off the U.N., but no country alone can solve this problem of impunity and the breakdown of rule of law. The two dictators in The Fight Back are the state and tech. And you are the target in both the physical and virtual worlds.

So, what can you do? The U.N. Security Council has vetoes, so it’s been blocked every step of the way. Is anyone really happy with the way the Security Council has helped the rule of law globally? No. So what are the tools in their hands? The General Assembly. Countries are now speaking up. The president of the U.N. General Assembly, Annalena Baerbock, and U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres decided to create the U.N.’s independent, international panel on AI, and the countries that voted for it created the Global Dialogue for AI Governance. It was incredible to see in Geneva.

We completed the preliminary report in six weeks, which was lightning speed by U.N. standards. And it wasn’t country versus country. This panel is composed of people from 36 different countries. About a quarter were from Big Tech, but the rest of us were experts in other fields. We weren’t fighting. The United States versus China or Russia—none of that. We all agreed on the principles. Where we tore our hair out was between people versus Big Tech, but we found consensus. And if we could do it, then that’s the challenge for the General Assembly.

RA: What was the consensus? Because part of the issue is the way that the race toward AI is framed is very zero-sum. If you speak to anyone in the U.S. government or involved in the U.S. tech ecosystem, it almost doesn’t matter what you do, because the rationale is that we have to do it before they do—they being the Chinese—and obviously the Chinese, when confronted with this knowledge, will say, well, we have to do it, too. And so, you’re locked into this race where none of the safeguards seem to apply.

MR: First, it’s narrative warfare. Don’t believe it. Really, truly, the journalists need to call a lie a lie. We’ve learned to do that in my country. When former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte lied repeatedly, we repeatedly called it a lie. There are consequences when you do that. Over the course of 14 months, I was issued 11 arrest warrants, and it took almost a decade to win 10 of those 11 charges. I still have one more, and I still have to ask the Supreme Court of the Philippines for approval to travel.

I’m not speaking as the co-chair of the Scientific Panel on AI, because we do things by consensus. I’m speaking as myself. We’re falling off the cliff. These are cumulative harms that each of us faces, and it hits us as people, as a society, and then as governments. It is not a coincidence that the V-Dem Institute, as of March this year, said 74 percent of the world is now under authoritarian rule. We are electing illiberal leaders democratically, because—it goes back to the hack in your biology—the tech changes the way you feel. It aims to keep you scrolling. That’s money, and the more money, the more power. When you’re scrolling, it changes the way you feel, which changes the way you see the world, how you act, and how you vote.

RA: Tell me how we get from this report to pressuring the tech industry to be regulated and change their ways, and to work with governments to enforce that regulation and to make real changes at home.

MR: The United States voted against creating the scientific panel. The beam that held up the post-World War II order—the United States—is being pulled out. It’s actively destroying the system it helped create.

What can you do? In the book, I lay it out in terms of data. There are three simultaneous, cascading crises. The first is the crisis of trust, when lies spread faster than facts. We know, from a 2018 Massachusetts Institute of Technology study, that lies spread six times faster than facts. It’s gotten significantly worse since then, particularly after Elon Musk bought Twitter. Without facts, you can’t have truth. Without truth, you can’t have trust. Without these three, we don’t have a shared reality. I can say a million times, “We’re in Manila, we’re in Manila, we’re in Manila.” A lie repeated a million times becomes a fact. Except when you walk out the door, you’re not in Manila. Reality always brings you back. The crisis of trust cascades to the crisis of order—the dismantling of the order we used to know. The last one is the crisis of accountability. These are cascading failures.

We have to talk about this, and not in terms of, “This is the worst, we’re going to die tomorrow,” because we’re not. But the pattern and trends lead us. We have to use simple sentences: “This is what happened, this is what it demonstrates, this is the pattern and trend, this is what we’re uncertain about,” and then, finally, “this is what a prudent government should do next.” In the thematic brief that came out on Sept. 21, we included a chart, so you can see it and governments can no longer say they didn’t know.

One of the things I loved in Geneva was that our group of 40 scientists and experts went around and talked to different countries. Most of those conversations were off the record, but they were really great, because then you realize what the governments really know. One government asked me, “Why should we care? We don’t do frontier models.” You need to care because your people are being held by that tyrant, and if you don’t sit at the table to help regulate, control, and keep your citizens safe, then you will not be able to govern. I teach a 2024 book by Marietje Schaake called The Tech Coup: How to Save Democracy from Silicon Valley. She documents how each day that governments don’t act, they lose more and more of their power. The tech coup has happened in plain sight. It is time to act.

RA: Let me ask you a last question about something linked to all of this, and that’s the media and press freedom. You have lived through so much in the Philippines and withstood so much pressure from Duterte. What advice do you have for journalists and others in the United States?

MR: There are leaders who are fighting the two dictators (state and tech). There’s a coalition of 20 countries called Democracia Siempre, and they put information integrity at the top. One of the countries, Brazil, will have elections on Oct. 4. There’s a lot at stake here. The leaders who are fighting the two dictators are attacked in the public information ecosystem online. I’ve lived through this in the Philippines. In 2017, #ArrestMariaRessa trended, and I was arrested two years later. It’s like fertilizer; it changes the way you feel and think.

Those leaders who are fighting—they need you, now more than ever. When you are being targeted—and every single person is, because it’s the consumers that are being targeted—that gives you tremendous power. That’s where we come back, in every country around the world. This is not a time and place to just vote. This is a time and place to stand up to a dictator.

I asked a question of Filipinos, and then Americans when I started to see the Filipinization of the United States. It’s a simple question: What are you willing to sacrifice for the truth? Information integrity is the mother of all battles. If we win that, we win everything. If we lose that, we lose everything: Gender, climate, health, democracy, you name it.

Folks, support your journalists before it’s too late. We have been demonized, and we have made mistakes, partly because the incentive structure of social media pays for crap. Big Tech is choking news organizations, yet those news organizations are the ones that are giving the fuel for the chatbots you’re using. I’m literally paying for server space so that these scrapers can scrape Rappler for our content. It’s the same all around the world. Now, when you search on Google and generative AI gives you your answer without bringing you to our website, it means it took our content and didn’t bring you to our site, which means we have no revenue. The drop globally is around 75 to 80 percent; that’s huge. So, this is our last push. The business model of journalism advertising is dead, and we are looking for the next one. In countries like mine, I cannot have it come from the poorest of the poor.

Our world is changing drastically, and it’s in your hands—our hands—right now. Big Tech would like you to believe that this is the only way we can have the internet. Fifty-three percent of the internet today is non-human traffic—AI slop. Only 25 percent of the internet is open on the web; 75 percent is social media and AI. So, this is up to you. You vote with where you are. This is the battle that matters. Join us.