In the global anti-free speech movement, Maria Ressa stands apart. The 2021 Nobel Peace Prize winner and Columbia professor has used her celebrated position to call for censorship in the name of tolerance and diversity. She is showered with accolades as she calls for curtailing speech with a highly sophisticated, though at times Orwellian, pitch. In the cause of tolerance, she calls for viewpoint intolerance, particularly in the regulation of speech on the Internet.
That was evident this week as she spoke at Dartmouth’s Division of Institutional Diversity and Equity Social Justice Awards. The most insidious aspect of this campaign is how academic and other groups regularly portray Ressa as a free speech advocate.
A couple of years ago, I spoke at the World Forum in Berlin on free speech. It would be my first in-person exposure to Maria Ressa, the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, who also spoke about free speech. However, as I wrote at the time, rather than an ally on free speech, I found a diehard advocate for censorship. Ressa has been embraced by Europeans as a champion of speech regulations, using her status to call for limiting speech around the world.
A supporter of Hillary Clinton (who has also called for Europeans to use the infamous Digital Services Act to censor Americans), Ressa has attacked figures like Elon Musk for dismantling censorship systems. For the anti-free speech community, she is the perfect Trojan horse speaker. She is billed as a champion of human rights, yet she spreads the same anti-free-speech narratives.
In her speech at Dartmouth College, Ressa pushed back on attacks on her comparisons of Israel to Nazi Germany. While such criticism is the exercise of free speech, she told the Dartmouth College student paper that the state of free expression in the U.S. is “horrific.”
The statements to The Dartmouth are vintage Ressa. She declared
“I think we are living through the Filipinization of America. America has long been the beacon of freedom and democracy that you aspire to. It’s horrific to see that change and to see the country that anchored the post-World War II world begin to destroy it. I’m shocked to see Americans afraid to speak out.”
The problem is that Ressa is selective about who can speak and about what she declares “false information.” She views conservative governments as virtually synonymous with “authoritarianism” and demands “accountability” for social media companies that do not censor disinformation. That includes cracking down on anyone she considers to be “online trolls” or people who engage in “misogynistic and racist attacks.”
She has continued to espouse the same narrative that Russian disinformation was behind the 2016 win of Donald Trump. In her prior remarks, she declared:
“If the tactic worked on us, then it was deployed for you. That’s what happened in 2016, when 126 million Americans were targeted by Russian disinformation, and on January 6, in the violence on Capitol Hill when Silicon Valley’s sins came home to roost.”
She often demands censorship to combat conservative governments and causes that she opposes because she is right and they are… well… fascists, of course. At Harvard, she proclaimed:
“In Cambridge Commons just on the other side of that gate, there’s a marker to American patriot William Dawes, who, like his more famous friend Paul Revere, rode through here sounding the alarm: ‘The British are coming.’
…I will say it now: ‘The fascists are coming.'”
She wants regulators in control of speech to guarantee that the “truth,” as she defines it, is given greater attention:
“Now, Big Tech is now choking traffic to news sites, which means you will get less news in your feeds. How do you know what’s real, how do you know what’s fact when your emotions are what’s manipulated, when our biology is hacked? Instead of facts, And instead, the “enshittification” of the internet is in full bloom: more trash, more propaganda, more information operations that push our emotional buttons. Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo deleted X last year, calling it a human sewer.”
Dartmouth shows how many in academia will continue to use Ressa to spread this anti-free speech narrative under the guise of a champion for human rights. Some of us believe that free speech is a natural right, a human right. That makes Ressa less than an inspiring figure on the world stage when she campaigns for speech controls and censorship.
Ressa is a reminder that censorship in the United States is more likely to come from the left under the guise of fighting fascism than an actual fascist government. It will be rationalized as an act of tolerance by enforcing viewpoint intolerance.
Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University and the author of “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage.”
PROFESSOR TURLEY (and website administrators).
Please modernize your comment section such that we don’t have endless “Anonymous” commenters. It’s ludicrous.
Are they talking about the Philippines – Ressa’s Rappler?
Turley Writes:
“Some of us believe that free speech is a natural right”.
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Does Turley believe disinformation is ‘free speech’?
Should there be a right to misinform?
And should the right to misinform apply to foreign trolls deliberately spreading false information?
The truth is that Turley is never that clear about where free speech ends and malicious lies begin. But if malicious lies qualify as free speech, there are no barriers to combat extremist groups from stoking civil unrest for the purpose of destabilizing the whole country.
Trump Freely Misinforms
President Donald Trump on Monday accused Maryland officials, including Gov. Wes Moore, a Democrat, of illegally sending hundreds of thousands of mail-in ballots to voters in an effort ensure victory for Democrats.
Here are the facts:
TRUMP: “In Maryland, they sent out 500,000 Illegal Mail In Ballots, and they got caught! So now, they’re going to send out 500,000 more Mail In Ballots, but nobody knows what’s happening with the first 500,000 they sent. In addition, many of these ballots went to Democrats, so any Republican running in Maryland doesn’t have a chance! This was done by the Corrupt Governor of the State, Wes Moore. He allowed this to happen in order to make sure that Democrats win.”
THE FACTS: This is false. No illegal mail-in ballots were sent to voters. The Maryland State Board of Elections said some voters received a primary ballot for the wrong party due to a vendor error. Voters who may have been affected will receive a replacement ballot and any of the original ballots already sent to election offices will be voided. Voters have been instructed to destroy their original ballots if they have not yet returned them.
Safeguards such as unique identifiers on ballot envelopes ensure that each voter can only vote once. Additionally, the error won’t give one party an advantage over the other. In Maryland, Republicans and Democrats vote in separate primaries to determine who their candidates will be in the general election.
https://apnews.com/article/fact-check-trump-maryland-ballots 3ffa16cbc93dd02dc39302c31b3f3bcf
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One can see a world of difference here between Trump’s lies and the actual facts.
Is the AP story still posted? Where did it go?
The AP has misinformed us for decades.
Vendor Error – How convenient.
Who’s the vendor any what penalty are they going to have to pay?
https://apnews.com/article/fact-check-trump-maryland-ballots-3ffa16cbc93dd02dc39302c31b3f3bcf
Your problem with Free Speech and malicious lies, is that you want to decide what the malicious lie is. You can’t be the arbiter of truth. The world is full of lies that were told by people, declaring it to be the truth, while trying to stop the speech of people telling us the real truth. One look no further than “If you like your plan, you can keep your plan”. Obama was declared the truth, and the people that read the law and told the truth, were ridiculed and silenced. Toss in the climate change lies, COVID lies, I could go on and on… I don’t want you silencing speech because you have decided it’s a malicious lie. I can figure that out for myself.
The answer to bad speech is more speech, not less. You would be very comfortable in Jacobin France.
Double dip: if you needed any more confirmation that the Nobel is pretty much just a vac-metallized trophy in 2026, look no further. Honestly: who cares? We invented these things, and we can just as easily un-invent them. The recipients are sparing us the work. Again: who cares? The aristocracy overestimate their influence or importance, that is for sure. No awards for that, but who gives a s***, other than them?
Ressa merely carries on Marcuse’s neo-Marxist call for repressive intolerance of ‘politically incorrect’ speech. As such, she is part of the radical leftist vanguard attacking Western Civilization’s enlightenment legacy. She is merely perpetuating Marcuse’s most unfortunate PC censorship politics – which must be vigorously opposed, employing Jurgen Habermas’ call in support of free, open debate, the lifeblood of the free society, ‘communicative rationality’, the antithesis of ‘repressive intolerance’, the lifeblood of the totalitarian state.
Freedom vs Dictatorship of the Philosopher King Aristocracy, being chauffeured around to their dachas as the People suffer the Dark Night of Totalitarian Dystopia.
Only solution
END FEDERAL AID TO COLLEGES
TAX ALL NONPROFITS where anyone gets $100k
Defund democrats
I’ve not read Ms. Ressa’s Rappler. I looked her up on Google. She was once arrested in the Phillipines for criticizing Duterte. I really can’t say much else about her except she’s the ugliest lesbian I’ve seen sort like Xavier Becerra’s ugly little brother.
Truth? After the gaslighting of the biggest ass to walk earth, Obama? You can’t handle the truth. The oichol of Mexico are close relatives of the plains Indians. They can have it.
^^^ just 1 correction: sort of like…
1st Amendment
Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press….
_______________________________________________________________________________________
And speech and press absolutely include slander and libel, which are the very defamation of defamation laws.
edwardmahl says:
Please specify how and when “Russian trolls” helped Trump. Specifics, please.
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The 2016 Election and the Internet Research Agency (IRA)
During the 2016 presidential election, the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency (IRA)—often referred to as a “troll factory” and funded by Russian oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin—conducted a massive, multi-million-dollar audience-development campaign targeting American voters.
Pro-Trump Amplification: The IRA created thousands of fake social media accounts that posed as American grassroots activists to directly support Trump. These accounts circulated fabricated articles, memes, and videos designed to boost Trump’s campaign at pivotal moments, such as during debates and conventions.
Anti-Clinton Strategy: The trolls focused heavily on communicating derogatory information about Hillary Clinton to harm her electoral prospects.
Intelligence Findings:
Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation and subsequent Senate Intelligence Committee reports documented millions of Russian social media posts explicitly aimed at helping Donald Trump.
Continued Operations
Russian interference did not stop after the 2016 election. U.S. intelligence agencies and cybersecurity researchers have continuously tracked Russian information warfare targeting subsequent U.S. election cycles.
Weaponizing Divisive Issues: Troll networks frequently latch onto hot-button U.S. topics—including race relations, immigration, and gun laws—to sow chaos, amplify discord, and polarize voters in a manner that generally aligns with the Kremlin’s agenda.
Fake Media Campaigns:
State-backed operatives have manufactured fake news articles and deepfake videos designed to cast doubt on election integrity and suggest widespread voter fraud.
Putting aside any debate on the truth of your claims, you do not provide any evidence that this Russian interference changed a single vote. Every election cycle is awash with “information”, mostly half truths at best from “trusted” sources. Both parties, and associated ancillary organizations, spend untold millions of dollars (far outspending any Russian attempt) to influence voters. If the Russians were indeed able to swing the election with such a modest budget, why wouldn’t the thousands of paid professional domestic political consultants not figure this out and direct their party to spend accordingly to promote their candidate? The truth about the 2016 election is that both candidates had very large negatives in a country that was (and still is) politically divided and a voting public that was more than a bit weary of the prior Obama administration. For those backers of Hillary Clinton claiming that she coulda, woulda, shoulda won – get real about her negatives.
Arnold, Hillary Clinton’s Popular Vote lead over Trump was twice that of Trump’s lead over Harris. So Hillary was literally more popular than Trump.
Hillary Clinton was by conventional credentials a far superior candidate to DJT. That the race was as close as it was is a testament to her unpopularity, dislike of Obama’s policies, and general public distrust of Hillary Clinton. She did receive a plurality of the popular vote but the fact is that most of the voters did not vote for Hillary Clinton and of course most of the voters did not vote for DJT either. But outside of California, DJT’s popular vote total in the rest of the country actually exceeded that of Hillary Clinton’s – this despite DJT’s inexperience, huge negatives in public perception, rather poor debate performance, and being outspent. He had a message that resonated.
Memo to Ressa: how ’bout you STFU until you have something rational to say?
Ms. Ressa has latched unto her academic niche and she is going to run with it as long as it brings in awards, honors etc. Academia doesn’t seem to graduate students any longer–it just lets them limp away from the wreckage with a credential in hand.
If Obama can win the Nobel Peace Prize for being a black man with a great crease on his trousers, I guess Ressa can win one for repressing speech. If there was no speech it would seem more peaceful wouldn’t it?
What in the name of world peace is filipinization??? Me thinks she doth insult too much!
You mean i get to say what I want but I say you don’t.
When Professor Turley says, “rationalized as an act of tolerance by enforcing viewpoint intolerance,” Maria Ressa and other on the left actually and truly believe it. They see only one viewpoint as tolerable, in spite of the excessive corruption by their party. They are unconcerned that sworn enemies of this country help them in material ways. They are indifference to their language of violence. They seem unaware that methods used to obtain power are precisely those they will use when power is achieved.
They seem to have deluded themselves into believing they have every right to use any methods to get there and finally govern justly if and when. Not only that, they believe everybody will agree if only they could also see the truth. Quintessential academic thinking.
Ressa is all for free speech in the Philippines. Not so much elsewhere.