Maria Ressa does not issue warnings lightly.

She is a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, co-founder and CEO of the investigative newsroom Rappler, and one of the journalists who most clearly documented how social media gets weaponized against democratic institutions. For years she reported on the disinformation networks that helped consolidate power under Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines — watching as coordinated online narratives discredited journalism, fractured public trust, and normalized violence against critics.

That experience is why her latest warning deserves careful attention.

The report is called “First 100 Days of Trump 2.0: Narrative Warfare and the Breakdown of Reality.” It was originally compiled in spring 2025 by The Nerve, a data insights consultancy Ressa helps lead as head of global strategy. The researchers analyzed executive orders, platform dynamics, influencer networks, and narrative patterns across Facebook, X, YouTube, and TikTok during the first hundred days of Donald Trump’s second term.

Then January 2026 arrived. And the researchers watched their framework play out in real time.

They added a preface — and released the report now.

“The chaos of those early months,” Ressa writes, “was not just political turbulence. It was the systematic importation and evolution of the authoritarian playbook we survived in the Philippines.”

The numbers behind that claim are striking.