An award winning journalist based in the Philippines, Ms Maria Ressa works at the nexus of social media and terrorism. She is the founder and CEO of Rappler, a social news network in the Philippines launched in early 2012 that is well-known for the free spirited and open nature in which it reports news.

Ms Ressa is the author of two books on terrorism.  The first is Seeds of Terror, a book published by Free Press that contains blow-by-blow account of the hideouts of Al-Qaeda in Asia. She also served as an author-in-residence at The International Center for Political Violence and Terrorism Research at Nanyang Technological University’s S.Rajaratnam School of International Studies.  Following her tenure there, she published her most recent book, From Bin Laden to Facebook: 10 Days of Abduction, 10 Years of Terrorism, which traces the spread of terrorism from the training camps of Afghanistan to Southeast Asia and examines the social networks which have helped spread terrorism in the past decade.

In this public lecture, Ms Ressa will discuss how emotions and ideas spread through social networks and how this challenges law enforcement in the 21st century.