Nobel laureate Ressa fetes Philippine studies program at USF
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Maria Ressa, CEO of Rappler (Photo by Aneela Mirchandi)
Maria Ressa, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021 for her work fighting for press freedom in the Philippines, gave the keynote. Jose Antonio Vargas, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist whose memoir Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen recounts his struggle as a “Dreamer” — children brought to the United States without valid immigration papers — moderated the question-and-answer session with Ressa.
“I’m finally here!” Ressa began her speech, beaming at the four hundred strong attendance of staff, students, alumni, and local Filipino elite. She received a standing ovation.
In its over quarter century of existence, said Prof. James Zarsadiaz, program director, in his address — YPSP has become one of the most important centers of study of Filipino heritage and culture in the US. He introduced the prominent members of the diaspora in attendance, including Dr. Roderick Daus-Magbual, mayor of Daly City, and John Morada, the first Filipino American elected to the Dublin city council.
“We knew we had to do something grand to celebrate,” Zarsadiaz said to applause, “and hear from someone who understands we live in perilous times. The person we needed to hear from was Maria Ressa.” He also announced that a roundtable panel after the keynote would take stock of how to defend a free and open society.
The history of the Philippines since the imposition of martial law in 1972 formed a grim backdrop to the morning’s celebration. The country spent over 10 years under the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos, during which it turned out his regime had looted the national coffers to the tune of billions of US dollars.
Amb. Alfonso Yuchengco, the founder and original sponsor of YPSP, played an important role fighting for democracy during the Marcos years. The scion of a wealthy family of Chinese immigrants to Manila, Yuchengco quietly spent his personal fortune aiding pro-democracy revolutionaries.
Yuchengco’s daughter, Mona Lisa Yuchengco, who now lives in the Bay Area, introduced Ressa’s keynote. She spoke to the assembled crowd of the intense danger of facing down an authoritarian regime.
“My father carried a cyanide pill in his pocket so he would not be forced to reveal the names of his cooperators,” she said. The YPSP program was created in honor of her sister Elena after her untimely death.
The authoritarian regime of Rodrigo Duterte came to power through elections held in 2016, in an era of social media. At the time, one platform — Meta’s Facebook — held an overwhelming monopoly among users in the Philippines, a preponderance that continues today. The country’s 95 million Facebook users account for over 80% of the population. Duterte’s administration is accused of using Facebook’s algorithms to wage information warfare against his opponents using fake news and dehumanizing memes. As covered in a deep report by Buzzfeed News, Duterte relied on Facebook to fuel his drug war, during which extrajudicial vigilante-style killings racked up a body count that the International Criminal Court (ICC) estimates to between 12,000 to 30,000.
In March 2025 Duterte surrendered to the ICC for his crimes against humanity and is being held at The Hague.
As the founder and CEO of Rappler, an online news outlet in the Philippines reporting on the Duterte regime, Ressa faced an unrelenting onslaught both online and off. She was forced to post bail ten times to get out of false arrests. A Thousand Cuts, a Frontline documentary, recounts Ressa’s struggle for press freedom while staring down Duterte’s administration.
During her presentation, Ressa showed some of the dehumanizing memes that had targeted her via a flood of Facebook posts — including slurs morphing her face into ape-like forms, deep fakes that showed her selling cryptocurrency, and other forms of intense online bullying that have driven some to suicide, Ressa said. At the peak, she was getting over 90 such messages an hour. Despite repeated requests, Facebook shrugged their shoulders and offered no help.
That was in early 2016. Those same techniques were used later in the same year for the American presidential election by Cambridge Analytica, Ressa said, naming the British marketing firm that shut down in 2018 after they were found to have improperly used Facebook user data in their campaign supporting the election of Donald Trump through false news, memes, and microtargeting.
“Cambridge Analytica called the Philippines a Petri dish,” Ressa said. “We were the guinea pigs, America was the target. Guess what Filipino Americans, America can learn a heck of a lot from you now.”
Using her formulation of “Facts. Truth. Trust” Ressa has repeatedly spoken about the importance of information and press freedom in maintaining democracy. “We are living through an Information Armageddon,” she said, accusing the Silicon Valley billionaires including Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, and Elon Musk, CEO of X, of wielding autocratic power over the fates of the world’s democracies through their refusal to control the spread of false news over their platforms.
Ressa also spoke of Matrix, an open source, decentralized protocol that Rappler uses for its user forum, which has the potential to become a counter to the power of big tech.
Despite the serious themes being discussed, both Vargas and Ressa kept up a banter that lifted the mood of the gathering.
“I thank Duterte for my Nobel Peace Prize,” Ressa said, to laughter.
Students of the Yuchengco Philippine Studies Program (Photo by Aneela Mirchandi)
Vargas, a Bay Area native, was introduced by his mentor Teresa Moore, a media studies professor at USF. “Bless your 20-year-old heart,” Moore said of Vargas’s discovery of African American culture when she first met him as a student.
With a 4.6 million strong population, there are more Filipino Americans now than the entire US population at the founding of the republic, Vargas pointed out. It is now the third largest Asian diaspora, behind Chinese Americans and Indian Americans.
The YPSP program has helped Filipino American students form a bond with their heritage, said Mia Rios, an alum who had come all the way from San Jose to hear Ressa speak, in an interview with AsAmNews. She spoke of the thrill she got on her first day of class seeing her theology professor in a barong, the traditional embroidered formal Filipino national dress.
YPSP also has a commitment to democracy promotion, Zarsadiaz said in an interview with AsAmNews. “We promote these goals by having programming, to get people to think about these things, to realize that there’s an urgency — especially when it comes to democracy, human rights, freedom of speech, and these rights that are so sacred to the US and the Philippines alike.”
“My father would have been very happy to see the impact of this program,” Mona Lisa Yuchengco said in an interview with AsAmNews. And yet, she said, with democracy at risk at home, they need to get louder and play a bigger role in democracy promotion. Yuchengco publishes an online news outlet, Positively Filipino, that covers the Filipino diaspora.
James Sobredo, a retired ethnic studies professor who had flown in from Manila to attend the event, described himself as a supporter of YPSP. He spoke of the changes in the diaspora in the last decades, since the start of the program. “I grew up feeling like we were second, third-class citizens, but now in the mainland, Filipino Americans are doing quite well!” At the same time, he said, they had to watch out for the “model minority” narrative, which is often used to bash other ethnic communities and control their activism.
Sobredo said that Rappler’s reporting about the Duterte regime had been required reading in his classroom at Sacramento State University — lessons that continue to be relevant in the US today.
Ressa hit on the same theme repeatedly during her talk. “If we lose the battle for information, we fall into a fascist world,” she said. “If America loses this battle, the world tips over.”
Reposted with permission from AsAmNews:
Nobel laureate Ressa fetes Philippine studies program at USF | AsAmNews
