My question really is, can Silicon Valley still reform itself? Can you do enough with values? This is a period of market failure for news organizations. There's so much that could be used for good, but be careful of the Faustian bargain. The new world order that's being created is made up of strands like a spiderweb. Each strand, it looks weak. You can tear it, but the spiderweb can hold. If those countries can hold together, act, please. The window is still open, but it's closing fast.
Please welcome Nobel Laureate Maria Ressa, Reid Hoffman, and Aria Finger.
Maria, so glad you could join us. First, congratulations on your victories in the Filipino Supreme Court. And if you ever thought you're like super young at heart, right? An instance. So you have just one case still pending.
Yeah. So it took almost a decade, but there were 10 cases filed against Rappler, the company that I led, and 11 against me. A case now has gone all the way up to the Supreme Court. So it's meant for almost a decade I've had to ask for... I lost my right to travel. So today, in front of you, I had to write a letter to my Supreme Court to ask for permission for me to travel. So when you lose your rights, be careful. It takes a while to claw them back.
Easier to defend it up front.
But where is the corrupt leader who tried to stop you and your fellow journalists right now?
Okay. Well, so first, the fight back has two dictators, right? But as you pointed out, Aria, the dictator Rodrigo Duterte, who had tried to put me in jail for the rest of my life and close Rappler down, was arrested in March 2025. He's charged with crimes against humanity, and his trial at the International Criminal Court begins November 30th.
But that's the first dictator. My second dictator, and I do name them, and I would argue the more powerful dictator in the Philippines is, was, Mark Zuckerberg. This is data-driven. We worked with them. At that point, 97% of Filipinos are on the internet. We're on Facebook. Facebook was our internet. Today, it's 100%, right? But at that point, I sat with him and I, in 2017, I said, 'You know, Mark, you have to come visit the Philippines because it's so powerful. The ability to do good is incredible.' He was frowning at me. Reid doesn't frown at me. But he was frowning, and then he said, 'Maria, where are the other 3%?' And that was my introduction.
So my second dictator has, along with other dictators in tech, has gotten more power. One system of governance has had some level of accountability — the trial begins, it's a whole-of-society approach, right? But the other dictator has gone on to get more power, and that same culture is global, right? So I mean, in 2016, I sat in California and in Mountain View at that point to say what was happening to us is coming for you. I feel like Cassandra and Sisyphus combined. And like, really, Reid, the reason I'm so happy you're here because you know my question really is: can Silicon Valley still reform itself? Can you do enough with values? Guys, we've been talking about values all day.
Well, hold on one second before we get to the next question. I do think, and this is part of the Mass Scale Summit, which is part of the thing of not just technology but it's kind of soul and culture and humanism and people. And I do think that one of the things that Silicon Valley is a bit of a microcosm for America is also good at, you know, kind of like rebuilding, reinventing itself. So I have that hope and optimism. I do think it's some work. You have to focus on, you know, what are the human impacts. I think technology, you know, I've said we're homo — that the technology is fundamental to being human, but you have to focus on the human part of it. And so that's part of the reason we wanted you out here and on this stage so that Silicon Valley can, you know, hear that and participate. But it's just as your own work. It's work.
Yeah. A lot. And we're counting on you. But...
But wait, Maria, you are the one — you need to keep talking. You are the one who can help us solve this. We have so much to learn. You know, in your book, The Fight Back, you say we're not just fighting one crisis. This is three intertwined crises, which is a lot. How would you define these three? Because we need your experience to make sure we don't go all the way down that road.
I mean, look at the 80th anniversary of the United Nations. So the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, right? That was how the world responded to Hiroshima and Nagasaki and our own potential self-destruction. At the UN on the 80th year, I said that if we win information integrity, if we can tell the difference between fact and fiction, then we can begin to fight the other problems: climate, gender, rule of law. If you don't — if people, the citizens, cannot tell the difference between fact and delusion with information warfare, with narrative warfare, cognitive surrender now, right? Then we lose it all. So here's the way the three things roll out, right? The first is the crisis of truth. We've heard that a lot. And that goes to social media, right? We can't tell the difference, literally by design. Social media — except LinkedIn. Social media... yeah, he had some values.
But literally, lies spread faster. And if you use fear, anger, and hate — in the Philippines in 2017, women journalists were attacked at least 10 times more than men. So gender disinformation. The second part is the crisis: if you can't tell fact from fiction, then you move down to what hollows out. Your institutions hollow out. That breaks down the crisis of order, right? If you don't have rule of law, how do you organize society? This is why there's impunity of the two dictators. And the third rung is: without that, you have a crisis of accountability. And part of that is you have a system of laws. The United Nations is set up for accountability that is frayed at the edges. But look, my Rodrigo Duterte is facing crimes against humanity.
But you have the tech that rules our world. And I'll pull this out, right? Please tell me I'm wrong. I'm waiting for you. Aria, also three layers of AI: that starts with that culture that started social media, hacked our biology, the attention economy. The second layer is the chatbots — the large language models, that second layer I called it in the book, it hacked intimacy. So trust is broken to intimacy, what makes us human. And then the last one is agency itself, from the agentic and multi-agentic. And I co-chair the UN's independent international panel on scientific intelligence — sorry, scientific panel on artificial intelligence, mouthful — and we came out with this report in July that said that, you know, geopolitically we're changing the world because 75% of the compute power comes from America, America points to China, but only 15% of the compute power is China, and then the world's laws come from EU, which has 5%. The pace has accelerated. You both said this. And then the last pace, as early as July, the people who built it themselves said they could not control it. They could not control the frontier model. So the question, of course, is: why do they build it?
So, we're going to get to AI in one...
I'm thinking where I want to go.
The very clever journalist is turning the interview around.
Exactly. Stay tuned. Maria's going to interview Reid for 20 minutes after. But okay, you started with information — no, we want to hear from you. You started with information integrity being sort of the most important fight, and it's the first one that leads the next three. There are a lot of people here who agree with you and really care about information integrity. How do we fight it? How do we fight back against that first layer?
What are all the answers? First, get off your seats and stop with learned helplessness, I think, is the first one, right?
The title, agency — it's the cellular level of a democracy that the technology targets. You have tremendous power, and that's part of what The Fight Back is. You know, after the first chapter, so every chapter has 10 steps, and at the end of the book there are 10 strategic goals. We did not — you know, I fought with my publisher because they wanted to put the strategic goals at the beginning, and I was like, no, because it looks like you have to climb Mount Everest with strategic goals. When you do it step by step, you just take a step forward, right? So the first chapter is called 'The Two Dictators,' and the first step you have to do — you should do it like as soon as you leave NEK tomorrow — just take a look: how much time do you spend on screens?
