A Citizen's Guide to Standing Up to Dictators

The Fight Back

Maria Ressa is CEO, co-founder and President of Rappler, the Philippines's top digital news site. She is the current Nobel Laureate and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize 2021, the first Filipino in history to do so. She grew up in America and studied at Princeton University before working as a journalist in Asia for over 36 years. Maria 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, and was named by TIME as one of the most inspiring and influential women of the century. She has also featured in Prospect's Top 50 Thinkers, Bloomberg 50, and the BBC's Top 100 Women. She 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, opening and running 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.

Take Action to Save Democracy! 
 
The Fight Back is 40,000 words of actionable guidance for citizens everywhere who refuse to let democracy collapse. It is a book about agency—and what you can do now. More than anything, it's a book about courage: at a time of creative destruction, it's time to create the world we want. 
 
We now face three convergent crises. The crisis of truth: tech platforms and AI have destroyed our information ecosystem, making shared reality impossible. The crisis of order: the United States—the nation that built the post-war international system—is now dismantling it, launching illegal military operations, killing its own citizens in the streets, arresting journalists who document it. The crisis of accountability: institutions have been captured, law weaponized, and those with power answer to no one. 
Each chapter in each section will open with a visceral first-person scenario and closes with 10 specific steps everyone can take. The book culminates in 100 actions distilled into a detachable 10-point plan for immediate implementation.

Maria Ressa

Absolutely sublime and transformational. [Maria Ressa] lays out the moral paradigm for our time and the consequences of ignoring it and the thrill and reward of embracing it

Shoshana Zuboff, author of the international bestselling Surveillance Capitalism

A personal hero of mine ... she's an important warning for the rest of us

I don't think I've read a more important book this year.

Maria is a key voice... she is so incredible in so many ways. The world needs to listen to what she has to say

Maria Ressa is five feet two inches, but she stands taller than most in her pursuit of the truth

So how do you stand up to a dictator? One thing is for sure: you cannot do it alone. Ressa needs support from all of us, and she needs it now

Tales of a moral giant... All of these attempts to raise the alarm came to nothing, so it is hardly surprising that Ressa's inspiring book has an impassioned, frustrated and, at times, angry tone. She saw the future and knew how it didn't work for democracy. And nobody except the Nobel committee seemed to be paying attention. For which mercy, much thanks

Nobel Peace Prize-winning journalist Maria Ressa's How to Stand Up to a Dictator makes an unmissable Book of the Week. It is a memoir of a life devoted to truth-telling, an account of her battle to expose the reality behind the Philippines' former president Rodrigo Duterte's so-called war on drugs, and a brilliant dissection of the "virus of lies" generated on social media platforms.

How to Stand Up to a Dictator is confronting, even terrifying - but feels vital... This book lays bare how big tech companies are allowing democracy to be eroded through the dissemination of disinformation, and the devastating effects it can have on a nation...Ressa spends her days on bail awaiting her next court hearing. The rest of us should be watching with bated breath. In the meantime, the least we can do is read this book, learn from it and pass it on to everyone we know.

At a time when the world faces a stark choice between authoritarian leaders and those with the courage to stand up to them, Maria Ressa is an indispensable guide in showing us the path from our troubled present to a better future

Radio 4 Book of the Week

**THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER** 
 
WINNER OF THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE 2021 
 
What will you sacrifice for the truth? 
 
Maria Ressa has spent decades speaking truth to power. But her work tracking disinformation networks seeded by her own government, spreading lies to its own citizens laced with anger and hate, has landed her in trouble with the most powerful man in the country: President Duterte. 
 
Now, hounded by the state, she has multiple arrest warrants against her name, and a potential 100+ years behind bars to prepare for - while she stands trial for speaking the truth. 
 
How to Stand Up to a Dictator is the story of how democracy dies by a thousand cuts, and how an invisible atom bomb has exploded online that is killing our freedoms. It maps a network of disinformation - a heinous web of cause and effect - that has netted the globe: from Duterte's drug wars, to America's Capitol Hill, to Britain's Brexit, to Russian and Chinese cyber-warfare, to Facebook and Silicon Valley, to our own clicks and our own votes. 
 
Told from the frontline of the digital war, this is Maria Ressa's urgent cry for us to wake up and hold the line, before it is too late. 
 
Praise for Maria Ressa: 
Winner of the UNESCO Press Freedom Award 2021 
'A personal hero of mine ... she's an important warning for the rest of us' 
Hillary Clinton 
'Maria Ressa is 5ft 2in, but she stands taller than most in her pursuit of the truth' 
Amal Clooney 
'Maria is a key voice ... she is so incredible in so many ways' 
Carole Cadwalladr

Maria Ressa

Praise for How to Stand Up to a Dictator

Absolutely sublime and transformational. [Maria Ressa] lays out the moral paradigm for our time and the consequences of ignoring it and the thrill and reward of embracing it

A personal hero of mine ... she's an important warning for the rest of us

I don't think I've read a more important book this year.

Absolutely sublime and transformational. [Maria Ressa] lays out the moral paradigm for our time and the consequences of ignoring it and the thrill and reward of embracing it

A personal hero of mine ... she's an important warning for the rest of us

I don't think I've read a more important book this year.

Absolutely sublime and transformational. [Maria Ressa] lays out the moral paradigm for our time and the consequences of ignoring it and the thrill and reward of embracing it

A personal hero of mine ... she's an important warning for the rest of us

I don't think I've read a more important book this year.

Books by Maria Ressa

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter