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.”