How to Stand Up to a Dictator: The Fight for Our Future

Name: How to Stand Up to a Dictator: The Fight for Our Future
Price: 25.31 USD
Availability: InStock
Author: Maria Ressa
ISBN: 9780063257511

Maria Ressa is one of the most renowned international journalists of our time. For decades, she challenged corruption and malfeasance in her native country, the Philippines. As a reporter from CNN, she transformed news coverage in her region, which led her in 2012 to create a new and innovative online news organization, Rappler, which used social media to crowdsource breaking news, find pivotal sources and tips, harness collective action for climate change, and increase voter knowledge and participation in elections. But within a few scant years, Rappler was being targeted by the new Philippine government... and Ressa became an enemy of her country’s most powerful man: President Duterte. She did not let up, but was accused of numerous crimes, and found guilty of cyberlibel; Ressa now faces years in prison and thousands in fines — even after receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021.

How to Stand Up to a Dictator is Ressa's story, but also the story of how the creep towards authoritarianism, in the Phillipines and around the world, has been aided and abetted by the social media companies. Ressa exposes how they have allowed their platforms to spread a virus of lies that pit us against one another, and how this has accelerated the rise of authoritarians and dictators around the world, from Duterte’s drug wars to America's Capitol Hill; Britain’s Brexit to Russian and Chinese cyber-warfare; Facebook and Silicon Valley to our own clicks and votes.

Democracy is fragile. How to Stand Up to a Dictator is an urgent cry for Western readers to recognize and understand the dangers to our freedoms before it is too late. It is a book for anyone who might take democracy for granted, written by someone who never would. And in telling her dramatic and turbulent and courageous story, Ressa forces readers to ask themselves the same question she and her colleagues ask every day: What are you willing to sacrifice for the truth?