Maria Ressa is one of the two 2021 Nobel Peace Prize Laureates. She is the co-founder, CEO, and executive editor of Rappler.com, an online news organization in the Philippines. Ressa has been honoured around the world for her courageous and bold work in fighting disinformation, “fake news”, and attempts to silence the free press. TIME magazine named her in their Person of the Year feature for 2018 and one of the 100 Most Influential People in 2019. She has faced threats and persecution because of her work for freedom of expression. The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to her for her “efforts to safeguard freedom of expression, which is a precondition for democracy and lasting peace”. In her Nobel lecture, she addressed the global problem of disinformation in social media: “An invisible atom bomb exploded in our information ecosystem, and the world must act as it did after Hiroshima. Like that time, we need to create new institutions, like the United Nations, and new codes stating our values, like the universal declaration of human rights, to prevent humanity from doing its worse. It’s an arms race in the information ecosystem. To stop that requires a multilateral approach that all of us must be part of. It begins by restoring facts”.
