2026: The mother of all battles

Character is built on the small decisions we make. 2026 will demand great — even greater — character. Or we lose it all.

That was my waking thought on Christmas Day. If 2024 was the tipping point year for democracy, when half the world voted with fewer safeguards than ever before, 2025 taught us what happens when we don’t #HoldTheLine, when we don’t fight for our rights. 

We’ve watched technology make everything faster, meaner, more polarized — insidiously manipulating us for profit. The information armageddon accelerates: from social media to chatbots. We’re alone together, trusting machines with our most intimate secrets.

If the battle that began more than a decade ago was for our attention, today, the battle is for intimacy.

Trust has been systematically destroyed and our youth crippled, battling for meaning against incredible odds. Some have paid with their lives, from Sewell Setzer, 14, whose mother, Megan Garcia is suing Character.AI and Google for causing his suicide, to our own Emman Atienza, whom I watched grow as a baby and whose untimely death at 19 sparked the “Emman Atienza Bill” to protect our youth. 

From the Vatican to Manila 

In January, 2025, I kicked off the Jubilee at the Vatican, standing before the massive “Resurrection” sculpture inspired by Hiroshima. I reminded the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics of what I said in the Nobel lecture: that an atom bomb has exploded in our information ecosystem.

From the Vatican to keynotes in Warsaw, Athens, Paris, to New York, where I helped open the 80th UN General Assembly, to Munich, where thousands of young leaders gathered under flags from every nation, to Manila and Rappler’s Social Good Summit with Amal and George Glooney, this year taught me that 2026 is when we either turn this around or watch democracy (and journalism) crumble.

What 2025 showed us

Big Tech stopped pretending, wielding political power to take off any guardrails on their platforms. Mark Zuckerberg abandoned fact-checking, declaring that lies and facts deserve equal standing. Elon Musk and DOGE attacked the US government bureaucracy at its core. As I told the Vatican, the men who control transformative technology wield godlike power, but they lack the wisdom of God. 

The brutal statistics:

• 72% of the world now lives under autocratic rule.
• More than 240 journalists killed in Gaza alone since the October 7 attacks — more than World War I, World War II, Vietnam, and Yugoslavia combined.
• Lies spread at least six times faster, turbocharged by generative AI and the transformation of Twitter to X.
• Romania became the first country to void elections because of social media manipulation; a nation finally acted to protect electoral integrity.

But 2025 also proved that radical collaboration works and may be the only way forward. 

At Rappler, our Matrix protocol chat app became the largest news community in the Philippines. In September, we federated with the 65-member Philippine Press Institute, SunStar Cebu, and the Daily Guardian. We’re showing you can build alternatives to Big Tech. Now we’re working with regional news organizations.

At our Social Good Summit in November, the Clooneys set concrete plans to use AI for good (and filled our hall with love  —  yes, they did), Oleksandra Matviichuk, whose Center for Civil Liberties won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022, made us all cry and brought Ukraine’s war home to Manila. Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Carole Cadwalladr and Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s first digital minister, outlined the problems and satisfied our country’s hunger for solutions.  

That became clear in Rappler’s anti-corruption investigations, when our community came together both virtually and in public protests, to hold government officials accountable. 

I joke that the Philippines has moved from hell to purgatory, but Western democracies can learn much from what we have gone through. There is no silver bullet. In the worst of times, you live by your values, taking your family, your community with you. Building character choice by choice — but it’s not easy.

When I look at Europe, I see its democratic leaders standing on wood being eaten by termites. If they do nothing, that wood will rot and break. Right now, they still have strength and laws, some of which have yet to be implemented. But pressure is building.

Why time is running out

Every indicator shows that journalism has six to eight months before our business model collapses and our communities splinter further. Democracy follows within a year: not a line, but a gradual death by a thousand cuts. 

The Trump administration’s December National Security Strategy abandons democracy promotion and treats alliances as purely transactional. Days ago, Secretary of State Marco Rubio banned five Europeans from entering the US, including Thierry Breton, architect of the EU’s Digital Services Act, and leaders of organizations fighting against disinformation. The US government now treats democratic regulation of platforms as “extraterritorial censorship.” 

American platforms shape global information ecosystems, but now American policy actively opposes democratic governance of these systems. When governments try to regulate Big Tech for public safety, they face US sanctions. 

If America falls, the world tilts. 

What happens in America in 2026 determines information integrity globally, but its citizens are starting to fight back. Americans are pushing Trump approval ratings to record lows, handing significant wins to Democrats in the November off-year elections.

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I see the shift in my own experience: speaking with Jon Stewart in a special show after the cancellation of Jimmy Kimmel’s late night show in September 2025. It became the line in the sand for free speech, triggering outrage. In March, How to Stand Up To A Dictator, my book published in 2022, hit #10 on the New York Times bestseller list; by October, it was #3. Citizens around the world want to know how to protect their rights. 

The mother of all battles

Crisis is opportunity. When governments abdicate, citizens step up. I’ve seen it in daily protests in Georgia (393 days as of December 26), in Romania’s courage, in the countless struggles at the front lines — whether in academe, civil society, or government. 

This time last year, the Nobel Women’s Initiative held a private zoom with Narges Mohammadi, the 2023 Nobel Peace Prize winner, temporarily released from Iranian prison. She was smiling, resolute. “Women. Life. Freedom.”

Rappler won all its cases. Me? 11 criminal cases down to one. From hell to purgatory. That’s progress — proof that we can #HoldTheLine and #ReclaimOurRights.

So don’t be overwhelmed. Don’t be depressed. Don’t disengage. 

Every authoritarian system depends on our exhaustion and resignation. They want you to believe that nothing you do matters. 

They’re wrong. We held the line in the Philippines with the support of so many here and abroad. Join Rappler+ if you are not yet a member. Or consider a year end donation for journalism that looks for systemic solutions.

We are not alone. In Brazil, Bolivia, Moldova, Zambia, South Korea, their democracies bounced back. It starts with knowing the difference between facts and lies — with information integrity.  

For 2026, the mother of all battles is Information integrity. Win this, and we can win the rest. Lose this, and we lose everything. So build character in every choice in 2026. It’s what this year demands. – Rappler.com