Maria Ressa speech 2024 Cannes Lionheart Award

Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Maria Ressa delivered her keynote speech last June 21, 2024 ahead of being presented with the prestigious Cannes LionHeart award.

The award is given to an individual “who has harnessed their position to make a significant and positive difference to the world around us,” Cannes Lions said.

Watch and read a transcript of Ressa’s speech here.

Thank you so much for recognizing our work at Rappler in the Philippines. In 2014, a just year after our startup got off the ground, a campaign we worked on for Pantene with David Guerrero won a Lion. That was the first time I personally felt the power of your industry for good. It broke stereotypes for women around the world. 

Over the years — this is my 38th year as a journalist, I’m really old, younger than Jacques though — I thank you. We have worked with so many brands, done so many campaigns, and I truly thank you for standing by us at the worst of times.

In January 2018 when the Philippine government tried to shut Rappler down, advertisers received phone calls, and within 4 months, we lost 49% of our advertising revenues. 

But 51% had the courage to stay with us and support us. Thank you.

Look, it’s tough to be a journalist today. In order to keep doing my job, I had to be okay with going to jail for the rest of my life. It was over a century in jail combined, all those sentences. In order to be here today, I had to ask the Philippine Supreme Court for approval to travel. It’s been a long time, but I can’t complain because in a strange way I am lucky.

Every year for the last decade, more journalists are harassed, jailed, or killed. Last year, the number of journalists killed increased by 44% because of Gaza. 

But there are many more novel ways of silencing journalists today — from the death of our business model — which you can help control, to a time when free speech is used to pound free speech to silence. If you’ve been the target of attacks, you know what can happen.

In the Nobel lecture in 2021, I said an atom bomb exploded in our information ecosystem when journalists lost our gatekeeping powers to technology companies. And the death toll from that, well, that death toll is still rising. 

In humanity’s first contact with AI, social media turned our world upside down by rewarding lies, amplifying fear, fueling hatred. Imagine lies spreading six times faster in 2018, that created a distribution system that is dangerous to journalists, that doesn’t give journalism a chance, that is dangerous to brands.

This outrage economy — built on our data, microtargeting us — has transformed our world. It insidiously manipulates not just us, but the people we serve, igniting the worst of who we are, fueling our blackest emotions. 

These next three sentences I keep saying over and over, I feel like Sisyphus and Cassandra combined, ever since 2016, when I was getting 90 hate messages per hour on social media. 

Without 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, no democracy — we can’t solve an existential problem like climate change. 

Generative AI, launched November 2022, triggered another arms race, and the failure of democratic governments to hold tech companies in check — that is the least regulated industry globally today. The failure to put laws in place to protect the public — each day of impunity means these governments lose more power. 

It’s a tech coup in plain sight, and like social media, LLMs or large language models, they’re not anchored in facts, they spew lies. This time they use a chatbot and it’s called hallucinations. They sound like facts but they’re not. 

It is about to get worse. You’ve heard the phrase “the enshittification of the internet” — with deep fakes, you won’t be able to tell what’s real and what’s not. 

It’s not a coincidence that 71% of the world today lives under autocratic rule. Globally, we are electing illiberal leaders democratically. 

Because if we don’t have integrity of facts, we cannot have integrity of elections. And in this 2024, the tipping year for democracy, where half of the world is voting, there will be far less safety measures in place in the technology that connects and rules us. 

So this race to the basement began when Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022. Today, as the UK — July 4th — France, Germany, the US. As these countries prepare to vote after the EU elections, there are far less safeguards for each of us. That means people will get less news in their feeds, they’ll get more propaganda, more outrage, more hate. We will have to struggle for agency. 

The youth, your kids, are particularly vulnerable. Because they’re mildly addicted to the technology they use. They get their news on social media, mixed in with propaganda. They get less sleep, are more distracted, have higher incidents of ADHD, more eating disorders for teenage girls, and more suicides. 

I don’t mean to depress you. I mean to tell you it is time to act. 

Today, Orlando Wood told you that only 6% of the $750 billion that brands spent on advertising was truly effective last year. He showed how trust is a key driver of profit. 

So here’s my request for you, along with my very effusive thanks: please put your expertise to work, imagine facts as a brand. It’s not doing well because it’s boring.

What would the world’s best creatives do to strengthen the brand, facts? And then please also add another brand, tackle truth. What would you do to strengthen truth? 

Because if we can do both facts and truth, build them as a brand, then we can restore trust. Which every brand in the world needs to grow. That brings along the best of humanity: the ability to lower our shields, to be vulnerable, to work together and build a better world. 

We need you. This is the moment because the window is closing. What you do today, what you choose will matter. We cannot let lies win. This can get better. With your help.  So, please join us. – Rappler.com