I never would have heard of this book if it weren’t for my book club so I’m very glad this ended up on my radar! Because it was SO enlightening to read while the TikTok ban and the inauguration were happening in the background.

 

Maria is a queer Filipino American journalist who runs a news website Rappler in the Philippines. She won the Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts to bring FACTS back to journalism in a country run by a fascists dictator. Sound familiar?

 

That’s cuz the Philippines and America are not that far off in lots of ways. One being that, after Americans, Filipinos are the number one users of Facebook. And social media is a tool manipulated by their violence-seeking president…sound familiar??

 

I found it so eye opening to read this book about how social media can be manipulated by the people not only in charge of it, but they can make it worse! It all reminded me of the recent TikTok ban and how the app seems to be changing after its “savior” came to rescue us 🙄

 

My only issues were with the sometimes dense and statistical writing style, which just made my eyes glaze over, more of a me problem. I also feel like after we got to the founding of her news site we loss the more intimate part of her memoir, about her personal stories. Which could indicate that she was a workaholic  of course but it just seem to grow personally detached over the course of the book. This also could have been to put some distance between her and this recent trauma of always fearing an arrest.

 

But this book was amazing and I highly recommend it!