Duterte supporters fall for ‘gullible’ posts, online experiment finds

MANILA — Amid the proliferation of fake news, an experiment revealed how supporters of President Rodrigo Duterte tend to react online.

In a now viral post, a certain Janjan Gonzales came up with a social media experiment involving supporters’ knee-jerk reaction to online contents highlighting the Duterte administration.

On his first experiment, Gonzales asked the staunch supporters of the president if they are “credulous to Duterte” to see if they would react differently.

Surprisingly, members of the group have agreed quite instantly without analyzing the meaning of credulous.

A screengrab of Gonzales’ post showed that almost all of the members have commented “yes” while others praised Duterte and the current status of the administration.

Others, however, took the opportunity to criticize and blame the Liberal Party for what appears to be a “positive” result for them.

In a different post, Gonzales shared a 2017 impunity index infographic of Philstar. com, showing the Philippines on the top spot with 75.6 points.

Along with the impunity index was Gonzales’ sarcastic remark on Duterte to test if members would notice the meaning of impunity.

But similar to his previous post, a majority of supporters seemed to agree that Duterte should be commended for the country’s high score in the impunity index.

Meanwhile, another netizen who goes by the name of Joshvic Castillo commented on Gonzales’ post, saying that his own experiment got similar responses from supporters of the president.

Asked if they are willing to fight for Duterte until death, a majority of the members gave their swift approval.

While a majority of the supporters responded positively to Gonzales’ post, others, however, admitted defeat and said that they were tricked by members supporting the LP.

As Gonzales’ posts continue to make rounds on social media, he shared that the experiment revealed that a good number of Duterte’s supporters tend to fall prey to fake news or believe any content showing the president.

Last July, the University of Oxford released a study saying cyber troops were hired to post propaganda in favor of Duterte while those critical of the president were harassed.

The study also found that fake accounts which were usually “bots” were used to inflate the number of likes, shares and retweets of posts favoring the president to create “an artificial sense of popularity, momentum or relevance.”