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She exposed Duterte's drug war, now she faces prison in the Philippines

By James Griffiths, CNN
Updated 2037 GMT (0437 HKT) December 1, 2018



(CNN)Images and stories from Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte's brutal war on drugs have shocked audiences worldwide, as bodies have stacked up in cities across the country, many of them victims of extrajudicial and vigilante killings.

While the government has hardly been shy about its intention to go after both dealers and users, hard data on the number of killings has often been tough to come by. One indispensable source of information, both for the international media and readers in the Philippines has been the upstart news site Rappler, which is now facing a reckoning with the government it has been a dogged check upon.

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'Ridiculous'

In January, the Philippines Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) temporarily revoked Rappler's registration on the basis that it had violated the country's constitution over foreign ownership rules.

Philippines officials claim Rappler and Ressa failed to declare about $3 million in 2015 on tax returns from an investment by the Omidyar Network, a fund created by eBay founder and philanthropist Pierre Omidyar.

At the time, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) called the charges a "direct assault on freedom of the press." The rights group Amnesty International, meanwhile, claimed it was "an alarming attempt to silence independent journalism."

Ressa, an award-winning journalist who previously served as a CNN bureau chief in Manila, has defended Rappler's ownership structure as "100% Filipino," and maintained the charges against her company are politically motivated.

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Drug war

At least 5,000 people have been killed as a result of Duterte's drug war, his landmark and most controversial policy. That figure is the official police count, however, and opposition lawmakers and rights groups estimate the true death toll could be in the tens of thousands.

Those killed have included children and innocents, as well as ordinary drug users and criminals executed extrajudicially.

Among Philippines media, Rappler in particular has focused on the human toll of the drug war, and often contested the official death counts put out by the government under the social media campaign #RealNumbersPH, a self-described effort to counter what it calls a "false narrative" on the war on drugs.

This has attracted criticism from both supporters of the President and Duterte himself, who has long had an uneasy relationship with the press since before he was elected in a landslide in May 2016.

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Dangerous job

Journalists who push back against the official narrative on the drug war, both in the Philippines and overseas, have faced online harassment from supporters of Duterte, who organize on Facebook and other platforms to go after media critical of the President.

Ressa has previously called out the effect of Facebook in enabling the spreading of disinformation and attacks against journalists online, saying this has become a key policy for the Duterte administration.

"We were the first, two-and-a-half years before the United States started talking about disinformation, we saw because of our partnership with Facebook, we saw these exponential attacks on social media that began in July of 2016, the same month that the drug war began," she told ReCode last week.

"In August of 2016, I gave that data to Facebook and I said, this is really alarming. These people are targeting anyone who attacks, who asks questions about the drug war. The drug war began in July of 2016. It's targeting journalists. It's targeting anyone who's perceived to be critical of President Duterte. Those attacks are heinous. It brings out the worst of human nature."

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