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We're going to begin this hour, though, with acclaimed journalist. That's Maria Ressa. She's recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. You go, Maria. She was awarded the Nobel a year ago for her work covering the Philippine government's violent anti-drug campaign, which led to a massive protest around the country. Ressa became a target of then Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte. For six years, she has defended herself against criminal charges, including a lead cyber libel for her website's reporting. She faces decades in prison still, but continues to return to the Philippines to fight the charges. Ressa's new book is called, How to Stand Up to a Dictator, The Fight for Our Future. So it's a memoir of her early life and her career, and a call to battle against the lies and propaganda spread on social media. And first, on CBS Mornings, we are so excited and so happy to tell you that Maria Ressa is at our table. It is such a pleasure and an honor to meet you in person. So wonderful to be here. You are such a badass. I have such admiration for you. You're so kind. No, I'm not being kind. Gail says that. She means it. I'm speaking the truth, Ruth. Because you say you don't really know who you are until you are forced to fight. You said you don't know if you have the stomach to fight. In order to change a culture, they will fight back, but you have to have the stomach. And this is the thing that got me about you, Maria, because I think it's important to set the table who you are. You say lies with anger and hate spread faster than facts. Without facts, there's no truth. Without truth, there's no trust. There's no shared reality. Democracy is death by 1,000 cuts. And you put the blame squarely, in part, on Facebook, of which you were a big proponent of in the beginning. What happened? I mean, there's so much there. So first of all, those three sentences, without facts you can't have truth, without truth you can't have trust, I felt like Sisyphus and Cassandra combined, because I've been saying those three sentences over and over since 2016. And with Facebook, the company that is now 10 years old really started on Facebook. I was the truest of true believers. I had hoped for a country like the Philippines that this technology could actually help jumpstart development. You know, if you've been a journalist for a really long time, you know corruption is the problem, right? But how do you expect the top to do it? All of a sudden, there was this problem, maybe, that we could build institutions bottom up. So deeply disappointed when this business model. But you said they knowingly spread lies. Absolutely. What do you mean by that? It is by design, Gail. What do you mean? So MIT came out with a study, 2018, that said that lies spread at least six times faster on social media. You're not just talking Facebook, but I zoomed in on Facebook in the Philippines, because 100% of Filipinos on the internet are on Facebook. Facebook is our internet. We're kind of like your Petri dish, right? Cambridge Analytical Whistleblower called us, said that they tested tactics of mass manipulation, and if it worked in our country, then they ported it to you. So we were the guinea pigs, you were the targets. But you brought it to their attention, that's the thing. You brought it to their attention. So the lies spread six times faster on social media. Why doesn't the truth catch up, right? Because one theory is that, you know, free speech, the answer is just more speech, and eventually the best and truest answers win. Brandeis said that in 1927, before the age of exponential lies, before the age of social media. Right now, it's almost like, you know, if you think about a war for our individual consciences, right, the devil and the angel, the angel tells you do the right thing, the devil tells you, you know, do it, do it, do it. Well, what social media did is it gagged the angel and kicked it off your shoulder, and it gave the devil- Bigger voice. Directly into your nervous system. Social media is a behavior modification system. The data shows it, and we are experimented on, like Pavlov's dogs, changing our behavior, right? So this is evidence-based. If you look, there's several books and research now that has come out that shows the impact, how our emotions are manipulated insidiously to change the way we think. Thinking fast, thinking slow. They come in thinking slow, sorry, thinking fast, and then they change your worldview, which leads to things like violence on January 6th, 2021, and then it leads to the vote. Because if you don't have integrity of facts, you do not have integrity of elections. Yeah, there is some programming that happens when it comes to us and how we interact with social media, for sure. And we don't recognize that we are being programmed simultaneously- I would say war. War. Like information operations. For sure. We talk about information warfare with Russia and Ukraine, but for Americans, where you have the data released in a 1,000-page Mueller report that no one really pays attention to, that data shows that you were targeted. Things like identity politics, Black Lives Matter. Didn't matter which side. They weren't trying to push a side. They hit both sides. When you say a lie a million times, it becomes a fact. Do you think Facebook can fix itself? It could have, right? And the longer it takes- You say could have, do you mean, do you think it's too late? So think about, there's Yuri Andropov, the former KGB chairman, said this, which stuck with me. Disinformacia is like cocaine. You take it once or twice, you're okay. But if you take it all the time, you're a changed person. So from 2016 to 2022, right? Think about that as like a drug addiction and we are slowly, we're physically, this is part of the death by 1,000 cuts. In the Philippines, I was thinking about it like, you know, if you get a paper cut, you'll give in, you look away, it's only a paper cut, but you're bleeding out and you don't know how weak you are. And democracy is weak, not just here. Although where you go, we all go, but globally. Maria, you say you will not become a monster to fight a monster. And I say this with all respect, I don't know how you are still alive. Your life is constantly threatened. You are constantly in peril. You tell a story in the book where you're sitting on the plane at the airport, getting ready to go back to the Philippines. And you're told the minute you land, you will be arrested. You will be illegally detained indefinitely. And before I turned the page, I said, please don't go, please don't go. And you get on the frigging plane. And you still continue to do that. You continue to fight. You say you will always fight, why? Because what happens next? Against misinformation, yeah. Disinformation, that's one of the things. It's not misinformation, it's disinformation. It is information operations. What happens to me depends on what I do now. We have to get back agency, right? For every American, for every person on social media, where is the line between your will and the way the platforms manipulate you? Or the way even anyone who wants power can micro-target you, right? And for me, it's whether I go to jail. If I give up, of course I will. But Maria, how do you fight back? I struggle with this. When people don't believe the facts, don't believe the video, don't believe what they're seeing, how do you fight back against that? In big term, in the long term, it's always education. Legislation is the medium term. Because frankly, why is there not a better business bureau for our minds and emotions? Why are laws not put in place? For genetic research like CRISPR technology where we can customize a baby, Western nations, America put guardrails in place, laws. This one's so insidious, we're left on our own. You know that online violence is real world violence. And impunity online is impunity offline. In the short term, it is just us. It's hand-to-hand combat. And if you have kids, I worry about the next generation. I'm hopeful, but I also worry. Yes, yeah. She is not standing down. And by the way, you won the Nobel Peace Prize. I think that gets a little paragraph compared to what happens in the book. Congratulations. Huge congratulations. So happy to have you here. Thank you for joining us. Your work is so important. You are so brave. Thank you. How to Stand Up to a Dictator is the name of her book. It's on sale tomorrow wherever you like to buy your book.