The Fight Back

This is a timely and crucial book. It provides a clear plan for how to save democracy in the age of AI. Equally important, it gives readers the courage to hold the line. – Yuval Noah Harrari, bestselling author of ‘Sapiens’
An inspirational – and deeply practical – guide to re-writing the authoritarian playbook by someone who has herself retaliated against tyranny – Carole Cadwalladr
Everyone who cares about what’s happening in the world as national and tech dictators exercise greater unaccountable power over our lives needs to read this book right now to learn from Maria Ressa how to wage ‘The Fight Back.’ You couldn’t have a better guide than Maria, a brave journalist and Nobel Peace Prize winner, who stood against both Duerte and Zuckerberg despite their best efforts to ignore and silence her. She’s taken the lessons she learned to tell all of us how we can overcome fear and despair to hold leaders responsible for the harms they’re causing. This is the call to action we need now. – Former US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton
Maria Ressa is a relentless and fearless leader who ignites a room and leaves you wanting more. Clear, urgent and gobsmackingly necessary, The Fight Back is the next best thing to having Maria in your pocket: an impeccable guide to where we are, where we need to go and what each of us can do to get there. – Baroness Beeban Kidron, UK Crossbench Peer and author of USERS, How Big Tech Took Control and How to Fight Back
A practical guide for rejecting cynicism and resisting tyranny - from a woman who has done both – Amal Clooney
The Fight Back is nothing less than a survival guide for democracy. Drawing on her own experiences as a journalist, media founder and public intellectual, Maria Ressa lays out with dazzling clarity the way in which political and technological autocrats are destroying not just democracy but humanity itself, and offers a practical, step-by-step guide for resistance. For anyone who’s ever said change is impossible, The Fight Back lays out clearly what each of us must do in this moment. Buy everyone you know a copy. – Jodie Ginsberg, CEO, Committee to Protect Journalists
This is a manifesto for our times: a bold, brilliant, gut-punch of a book, with an inbuilt action plan for change. The plan is forged from Maria’s experience as a target of legal, financial, physical and online attacks, all designed to silence her - but instead they lit a fire. – Caoilfhionn Gallagher KC, human rights lawyer

Maria Ressa is CEO, co-founder, and President of Rappler, the Philippines’s top digital news site. She is the current Nobel Laureate, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize 2021, and the first Filipino in history to do so. Ressa grew up in America and studied at Princeton University before working as a journalist in Asia for over 40 years. She has endured multiple arrests by the Duterte government, which is the subject of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival documentary, A Thousand Cuts.

Ressa won the UNESCO World Press Freedom Prize 2021 and was TIME Person of the Year in 2018. She was also named by TIME as one of the most inspiring and influential women of the century. She has featured in Prospect’s Top 50 Thinkers, Bloomberg 50, and the BBC’s Top 100 Women. Ressa has received countless awards for her work, including the Golden Pen of Freedom Award from the World Association of News Publishers.

Before founding Rappler, Maria investigated terrorism in Southeast Asia. She opened and ran CNN’s Manila Bureau and Jakarta Bureaus, before heading the largest news group in the Philippines. She wrote Seeds of Terror in 2003 and From Bin Laden to Facebook in 2012.

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