Nobel laureate Maria Ressa warns that democracy is on the ballot in upcoming elections

Democracy is in danger of ending in less than two years, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Maria Ressa warned a packed National Press Club Headliners Luncheon on Tuesday. 

"We're electing illiberal leaders democratically," citing upcoming elections in Taiwan, China, Indonesia, the United States and probably Canada. "We will know whether democracy lives or dies by the end of 2024."

Ressa is founder and CEO of Rappler, an investigative news site in the Philippines. Rappler's stories of government corruption and human rights abuses have brought her and her staff a barrage of lawsuits, including her conviction on a charge of cyber libel that could send her to prison. She could be sentenced to 100 years in total, she said.

Unless or until then, she said, she'll continue to fight lies with truth and there's no truth without facts -- that is, journalism. 

She blamed the spread of false information not only on tech companies, which she noted harvest personal data used to "microtarget" deceptive messages to an audience primed to hear them, but also on democratic governments that she said failed to regulate the  practices that lead to dissemination of false information. 

Quoting author Shoshana Zuboff, she said Big Data is operating "surveillance capitalism."

"Technology is insidiously manipulating us, changing our behavior," she said, using a basketball analogy:  "We're walking into ... the last two minutes of democracy." 

She cited a 2018 study by MIT that found lies spread "six times faster than the really boring facts we journalists use."

She went on: "If you have no facts, you can't have truth. Without truth, you can't have trust. Without these three, we have no shared reality, no rule of law. We have no democracy, If we don't have integrity of facts, you don't have integrity of elections."

The long-term solution is education, Ressa said. In the medium term, it's legislation.

"Where are you, United States?" she asked. "In the short term, it's just us," she told the journalists. "We must act like the world has changed. Our journalism shifts." 

For Rappler, that meant collabroating on the 2022 Philippines election with 15 other news organizations, using artificial intelligence to supplement reporting, and fact-checking all of it. They worked with scores of human rights, religious and business groups to create "an information marketing campaign for facts." 

"Journalism is an antidote to tyranny," she said.

Ressa's latest book is "How to Stand Up to a Dictator."