In a conversation with Ravi Agrawal at Foreign Policy’s forum, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate connects the power of technology companies, the independence of journalism, and citizens’ ability to retain freedom of choice and democratic participation. Her remarks open a discussion about AI governance grounded in the protection and promotion of human rights.
The debate about artificial intelligence is no longer confined to its technical capabilities or economic opportunities. As its use expands in producing and distributing information and influencing decisions, questions are growing about its effects on freedom of expression, privacy, access to information, and participation in public affairs.
These issues featured in a conversation between Maria Ressa, the journalist awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021, and Ravi Agrawal at Foreign Policy’s Tech and AI Forum, held on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly.
Ressa’s remarks intersect with an approach that places people and their rights at the centre of digital transformation. She connects the design of digital systems, the commercial incentives governing them, and the distribution of power within societies. At the heart of her argument is whether people can retain control over their attention, time, and decisions—and whether public institutions can hold accountable those who influence their lives.
Ressa serves as co-chair of the United Nations Independent International Scientific Panel on Artificial Intelligence, alongside Yoshua Bengio. This role adds an international dimension to her concern with the relationship between technology, information, and democracy.
From Capturing Attention to Influencing Autonomy
Ressa traces AI’s expanding influence through three interconnected stages: social media that captures attention, conversational systems that can create a sense of intimacy, and AI agents capable of acting on a user’s behalf.
In her account, this trajectory began with platforms that gather information about users, predict their behaviour, and select content most likely to keep them connected. The problem is that incentives rewarding engagement can favour inflammatory or misleading material, affecting public debate and people’s perceptions of events.
From a human rights perspective, this model raises questions extending beyond time spent online. It touches on individuals’ ability to form opinions independently, understand how their data is used, and access diverse and reliable information.
Freedom of choice cannot be assessed without considering the environment in which it is exercised. When systems that users do not fully understand organise information and repeatedly expose them to particular messages, transparency about these mechanisms becomes a matter of autonomy and informed decision-making.
Digital Intimacy, Privacy, and Trust
With conversational AI, influence moves into a more private setting. Conversations may involve personal fears, emotional needs, or requests for advice, beyond the scrutiny available for public posts.
Ressa cautions that fluent language and apparent empathy can encourage users to place considerable trust in a system, even though neither establishes factual accuracy nor creates the responsibilities associated with human relationships.
This observation highlights the importance of protecting privacy and clearly explaining the nature of the system with which a person is interacting, as well as the limits of relying on it. It also raises questions about how sensitive information shared during these conversations is handled.
Within a human rights approach, safeguards should account for differences in people’s ability to understand and navigate these systems. Particular attention should be given to children and people whose circumstances may increase their exposure to exploitation or manipulation. This is an editorial interpretation of the discussion’s implications, rather than recommendations quoted directly from Ressa.
Delegating Tasks Does Not Remove the Need for Oversight
These questions become more significant with the emergence of AI agents capable of carrying out tasks rather than simply providing answers.
Ressa argues that users need to understand the authority they delegate to a system, what it can do with that authority, and the consequences of its actions. Ease of use alone cannot guarantee that decisions remain under human oversight.
Protecting rights requires clarity about responsibility and the ability to intervene and correct mistakes. As systems affect decisions with significant consequences for people’s lives, the need grows for understandable explanations and mechanisms through which errors can be challenged and their effects addressed.
These questions remain relevant even when someone uses a system voluntarily. Agreeing to use a service does not necessarily mean understanding all its limitations or the potential consequences of its use.
Reliable Information as a Foundation for Participation and Accountability
Ressa describes interconnected crises of trust, institutional order, and accountability. A deteriorating information environment makes it harder to establish a shared understanding of events and weakens societies’ ability to cooperate and hold powerful actors accountable.
This analysis has particular relevance to human rights because exercising rights requires knowledge. Citizens who cannot verify decisions affecting their lives, or distinguish reliable information from misleading material, face barriers to meaningful participation in public affairs.
This applies to health, climate, and inequality, alongside elections and politics. Reliable information helps people understand risks, assess policies, and claim their rights.
Protecting the information environment also requires preserving freedom of expression and critical debate. Addressing disinformation calls for transparency, pluralism, independent journalism, and media literacy, while avoiding its use as a justification for restricting opinions or silencing critical voices.
Protecting Journalists and the Public’s Right to Know
Ressa’s analysis draws on her experience of digital attacks and political pressure in the Philippines. She explains how repeated online accusations can alter public perceptions and help create conditions in which intimidation outside the digital sphere becomes more acceptable.
Online abuse may therefore form part of a broader pattern of pressure involving reputational attacks, coercion, and attempts to limit journalists’ ability to continue their work.
From a human rights perspective, journalists’ safety is connected to the public’s right to access information. When threats silence journalists or push them towards self-censorship, the consequences extend to a society that loses a source of verification and factual reporting.
Ressa calls for solidarity within the profession and public support for independent journalism. She also acknowledges journalism’s own mistakes and the influence platform incentives can have on editorial choices. Her argument combines defending professional independence with the need to review practices and strengthen verification and accountability.
Journalism’s Sustainability and Equitable Access to Information
Ressa raises an economic question with direct implications for the right to information: how can reliable journalism continue to be produced when news organisations bear the costs of gathering and verifying information, while other systems reuse it without providing sufficient economic benefit?
She notes that AI-generated answers may reduce users’ need to visit the original publisher. She also describes the operational burdens associated with automated content scraping, at a time when news organisations already face pressure on their resources.
The outcome she fears is the weakening of institutions that produce the information on which systems of distribution and reuse themselves depend.
Subscriptions, however, do not provide a complete solution in her account. In societies with high levels of poverty, placing reliable information behind paywalls can exclude people who need it to understand decisions affecting their lives.
Journalism’s sustainability is therefore connected to equitable access to information. The challenge is to fund independent reporting while keeping it accessible to a broad audience, including those unable to pay.
International Cooperation That Takes All Societies into Account
Ressa stresses that technology’s effects cross borders and that national responses alone are insufficient. Systems developed in one country can influence people’s lives and institutions in many others.
In this context, she discusses the role of the Independent International Scientific Panel on Artificial Intelligence, which she co-chairs with Yoshua Bengio, and the Global Dialogue on AI Governance. The panel provides a scientific and knowledge base for understanding AI’s opportunities, risks, and impacts, while the dialogue offers an institutional space to build on that knowledge and discuss appropriate responses. morocco.un.org
Ressa acknowledges frustration with divisions that obstruct international institutions, but argues that cooperation remains necessary because societies face shared consequences.
Even countries that do not develop the most advanced models have a stake in participating. Their citizens use these systems, and their institutions deal with the effects. Remaining outside the discussion may leave them exposed to risks with limited influence over the rules.
From a human rights perspective, this requires attention to differences in languages, resources, and social conditions, as well as the ability of underrepresented communities to help determine governance priorities. Equity in digital transformation includes access to technology and participation in decisions governing its use.
Competition Does Not Remove the Responsibility to Protect
Ressa challenges the idea that technological competition justifies postponing safeguards. Competitive pressure does not absolve governments of their responsibility to protect people, nor does it answer questions about harm and accountability.
She urges journalists to examine this argument and the interests it serves, rather than treating it as a given.
She also proposes a practical approach to uncertainty: distinguish what evidence establishes, what remains unknown, and what would be irresponsible to ignore. She uses the example of a building’s emergency exit: installing one does not require knowing in advance whether a fire will occur.
This idea supports a human rights approach that examines impacts before harm occurs, adopts measures proportionate to the risks, and reviews them as new evidence emerges. The need to protect people does not depend on complete knowledge of every possible consequence.
Ressa also argues that communicating evidence clearly strengthens accountability: explaining what happened, what it indicates, what remains uncertain, and which responses are available.
Citizens as Partners in Protecting Rights
Ressa does not limit democratic participation to voting. She calls for supporting independent journalism, defending institutions that provide oversight, and examining the information people consume.
She notes that individuals’ choices about their time and attention help sustain particular platforms and publishers. In her account, the internet’s current commercial organisation can be changed, and citizens can support alternatives and demand greater accountability.
A human rights reading of this discussion, however, does not place the burden of protection on users alone. Individual knowledge and informed choices require institutions capable of oversight, companies that take responsibility for their products’ effects, and channels through which affected people can be heard and their complaints addressed.
Meaningful participation includes enabling civil society, researchers, journalists, and national human rights institutions to contribute to assessing digital policies and their impacts, while creating space for people whose rights are directly affected by these systems.
At the heart of Ressa’s message is the importance of preserving a shared reality grounded in facts. As AI becomes increasingly present in everyday life, protecting that foundation becomes essential to people’s ability to understand events, exercise their rights, and hold accountable those making decisions that affect their lives.
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