Press freedom is fundamental to a democracy, to an informed citizenry, and to hold people and institutions accountable.

Maria Ressa is someone who has fought hard for these freedoms. So much so that in 2021 she and another journalist won the Nobel Peace Prize. They were the first journalists to win the prize since 1935.

Ressa is the co-founder of Rappler, an online news site in the Philippines.

If you don’t know who Ressa is, you will want to. She’s a formidable powerhouse who literally stood up to a dictator.

Some of her accomplishments listed on Rappler’s website: “For her courage and work on disinformation and ‘fake news’, Maria was named one of Time magazine’s 2018 Person of the Year, was among its 100 Most Influential People of 2019, and has also been named one of Time‘s Most Influential Women of the Century. She was also part of the BBC’s 100 most inspiring and influential women of 2019 and Prospect magazine’s world’s top 50 thinkers. In 2020, she received the Journalist of the Year award, the John Aubuchon Press Freedom Award, the Most Resilient Journalist Award, the Tucholsky Prize, the Truth to Power Award, and the Four Freedoms Award. In 2021, UNESCO awarded her the Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize.”

How to Stand Up to a Dictator: The Fight for Our Future (HarperCollins, 2022) is Ressa’s memoir about what it took as a journalist and head of a media entity to fight back against a dictator in the Philippines. There are lessons for all of us.

This book will give you great insight into how Facebook is such a powerful tool for disseminating misinformation, how its algorithms benefit the company and not users, and how it can be manipulated for untoward outcomes.

This book was educational, captivating, alarming and inspirational.