Maria Ressa on Fighting Back Against Big Tech

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Ravi Agrawal (0:31)

Hi, I'm Ravi Agrawal, Foreign Policy's Editor-in-Chief. This is FP Live.

We keep hearing that big tech and AI are harming democracy. They're hurting media organizations and their funding models, and they're making human beings more addicted to their phones and more lonely and more unhappy. OK, sure. But what can we do about it? Where do you even begin to solve this problem? Maria Ressa is an incredibly brave journalist and media leader who has been leading debates on these issues for years, often at great personal cost. She won the Nobel Peace Prize for her persistence in the face of threats to her freedom, and she is our guest this week, explaining how ordinary citizens can fight back.

That is coming up. First, we're almost at the end of the U.N.'s General Assembly meetings. So much has happened this week on a range of issues, climate change, AI regulation, pandemic preparedness, and of course, resolving conflicts. Here's my read on UNGA week, or at least a small slice of it. I live in New York, so I always look forward to all the world leaders visiting my turf. And I had many interesting conversations that stayed with me. Some even made me feel hopeful. I'll get to that in a minute, but I thought I should start with one thing that chilled me to the bone. We've all become desensitized to Trump's bombastic statements. So I was not shocked when he mused aloud that he would either strike a deal with Iran or annihilate it. After all, he said that before. But when he said the words, to the victor belong the spoils, it stopped me in my tracks. The phrase was initially used after Andrew Jackson's presidential win in 1828 in the US, with the spoils referring to election workers being rewarded with jobs. Whatever you think of that spoils system, it was a domestic matter. But spoils in an international sense means something else. It's imperial, it's looting, it's jungle law. And Trump said those words in reference to taking Venezuela's oil after deposing its leader and putting in place someone who resembles a puppet, rather than someone working in her own people's interest. To say those words, to the victor belong the spoils, on the most important international stage we have, is truly a moment that is worth lingering on. And I see it as yet another reminder of how dramatically US foreign policy has shifted.

But I said I would be hopeful. So here goes. I interviewed Canada's Foreign Minister, Anita Anand, at the start of the week, who described to me how Ottawa was rapidly striking defense and free trade deals with Europe, India and countries around the world. When I asked her if this was a permanent de-risking from the United States, she diplomatically sidestepped my question to talk about resilience and how creating more options was the best form of resilience in the 21st century. Resilience is a theme that I heard again and again from other leaders. Whether it was Ajay Banga, the World Bank president who was on the show earlier this week, or Alexandre Ducroux, the UNDP chief and former Belgian prime minister, who you'll hear from next week on this show. The theme came up in many forms, new alliances between countries, but also the private sector realizing that it was in their best interest to invest in problems that might seem unsexy whether it's job creation or building resilient infrastructure in Ukraine and Afghanistan.

The UN can seem so polarized and paralyzed, and maybe it is those things. Multilateralism is more challenged than it's been in generations. But I felt a sense of hope this week when I attended a Rockefeller Foundation event with their leader, Rod Shah, the former head of USAID, and the UK's former prime minister, Gordon Brown, who together presented some very surprising new polling data. Despite the conventional wisdom that countries are succumbing to nearshoring protectionism and an anti-immigrant mood, 57 percent of people across 34 countries agreed that their country should cooperate with other countries to solve global challenges, even if that cooperation meant compromising on some national interests.

Each of the 34 countries had majorities that favored reversing recent cuts in aid dollars. When confronted with U.S.-China competition, most people surveyed supported multilateralism, even if it meant leaving out the world's two biggest economies.