How to Stand Up to a Dictator
  • Published: 3 January 2024
  • ISBN: 9780753559215
  • Imprint: WH Allen
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 336
  • RRP: $30.00

How to Stand Up to a Dictator

Radio 4 Book of the Week

Formats & editions
Paperback
3 Jan 2024
Audiobook
17 Nov 2022
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Inspirational 2021 Nobel Peace Prize WINNER Maria Ressa's personal frontline manifesto in the war against authoritarianism's sinister uses of big tech

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
  • Published: 3 January 2024
  • ISBN: 9780753559215
  • Imprint: WH Allen
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 336
  • RRP: $30.00
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About the author

Maria Ressa

Maria Ressa is CEO, co-founder and President of Rappler, the Philippines's top digital news site. She grew up in America and studied at Princeton University before working as a journalist in Asia for over 35 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 is nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize 2021. She 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 Newspapers and 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.

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

Shoshana Zuboff, author of the international bestselling Surveillance Capitalism

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

Carole Cadwalladr

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

Amal Clooney

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

Hillary Clinton

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

Guardian

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

Observer

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

Irish Times

An inspiration

Zoe Kleinman

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

Andrew Marr, LBC

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.

Anna Bonet, inews.co.uk

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.

Telegraph