Maria Ressa

Maria Ressa (born 1963 in Manila) spent nearly two decades as CNN’s bureau chief in Manila and Jakarta before co-founding the Philippine news site Rappler in 2012. Her reporting on Rodrigo Duterte’s drug war and on coordinated online disinformation made her a target of state harassment and a cyber-libel conviction — and won her the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize, shared with Dmitry Muratov, for safeguarding freedom of expression.

From information Armageddon to AI red lines

Ressa has long described the platform era as an “information Armageddon,” citing MIT research that lies spread six times faster than facts on social media — a dynamic she says generative AI makes dramatically worse. Having lived through algorithmic mobs as a test case, she treats AI-generated falsehood not as a hypothetical harm but as an accelerant poured on a fire already burning.

On September 22, 2025, she opened the UN General Assembly’s High-Level Week by announcing the Global Call for AI Red Lines — an open letter from more than 200 signatories, including ten Nobel laureates and leading AI researchers such as Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio — urging governments to “prevent universally unacceptable risks” and to “define what AI should never be allowed to do,” with an international agreement in place by the end of 2026.

At the Clinton Global Initiative days later she pressed the point with characteristic bluntness: “No action, talk only is no longer an option.”