If You Want a Real Digital Commons, Build It Yourself

For more than a decade, the Philippines has been a test case for how technology enables an authoritarian state to capture and corrode the institutions that make democracy work.

The work of Rodrigo Duterte, the autocratic president of the Philippines from 2016 to 2022, would hardly have been possible without that of Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of what was then the most powerful social-media company.

The Philippine state used Facebook to turn bottom-up social-media attacks into lawfare.

I experienced this firsthand as a co-founder and the CEO of the media organization Rappler.

Facebook hosted a state-sponsored campaign of disinformation and harassment against us that culminated in criminal charges meant to send me to jail for the rest of my life.

We fought back in courts and begged Facebook and YouTube to restore information integrity.

After years of this, however, we realized that what we needed to do was to build an alternative to these platforms that would be responsive to the public good.

Infrastructure is law that doesn’t pass through a courtroom.

Whoever builds it makes the rules that no one ever voted on.

The information infrastructure much of the world lives with today was built by tech oligarchs to maximize engagement and profit while concentrating power.

For years, Rappler played whack-a-mole with the lies that permeated the digital commons.

Then we realized that the only way to fix information integrity was to build our own tech: a virtual community anchored in facts.

This wasn’t an easy decision.

I had hoped that other, better-resourced companies would create the alternative.