Mindanao’s president is social media’s first

MANY pundits have offered their election postmortems and see President-elect Rody as the candidate from the margins who won as a cussing, irreverent thunderbolt who grabbed the imagination and frustration of the many and turned it into votes. A closer look, however, reveals that he brings with him not only the obvious realities, but deeper truths that may affect the conduct and the outcome not only of elections, but of present and future politics as well. Miriam Defensor Santiago was right when she bravely told us that social media will determine the outcome of this campaign.

All that said, the Duterte campaign will be remembered for cultivating a horde of committed and passionate social media supporters ready to defend him from critics and correct any misimpressions, or answer black propaganda hurled at him. This campaign, deliberately or not, used social media to the hilt, and created a constituency that listened to him, dominating the Internet and the national discussion, framing and dictating it alongside his strong pronouncements. The kicker is that no funds were spent recruiting any of these online supporters. This proved important as black propaganda hurled at Duterte was effectively parried by his online supporters who professed even stronger support for their candidate. In all, the demolition job backfired. Duterte eventually won, and media outlets which seemed to lend more time to these attacks were vilified, leading to a short “occupy” campaign in front of local TV stations that broadcast negative ads against Duterte.

The dragon of his campaign was the simple supporter, fed and connected through social media, swelling the numbers in his rallies, and waiting for hours to fill sidewalks as his motorcade would pass in the noontime heat or the small hours of the morning. The black propaganda through mainstream media barely made a dent among them, which polls said remained steadfast through the final weeks of the campaign. The culmination, of course, was the roughly two million that gathered at the Quirino grandstand, Davao’s crocodile park, Cebu’s South Reclamation area, and public spaces in Cagayan de Oro, General Santos, and Baguio.

Other candidates did not fare as well in managing social media. Case in point: Amid the deluge of online and mainstream media criticism about the so-called ”rape joke” by the Davao mayor, tweets, Instagram, and Facebook status posts condemning the use of presidential helicopters by Kris Aquino for the Liberal party’s campaign snowballed into a torrent that forced Press Secretary Herminio Coloma, and eventually, the President himself to defend the use of these government assets by his sister. Eventually, Kris Aquino herself asked her fans to protect her from online critics. The three-daylong response of the administration took some attention away from the rape joke, and provided alternative juice to a public already bored with recycled criticisms against Duterte. Malacanang’s reaction by itself gave mainstream credibility and media space to what were mere online posts and comments. It was not how to handle online criticism, and showed what an amateur the Presidential Communications Office was in managing online reactions to the way the Palace managed the presidency.

The immediate and eventual impact on the LP campaign is even more profound. It prevented them from using an estimated 1804,000 of our taxpayer money daily for the campaign to fuel these government choppers, effectively preventing the use of these state assets to reach more prospective voters. A limited and divided LP campaign had to resort to less effective methods, with Robredo and Roxas going on separate sorties.

While Kris Aquino was hit, Grace Poe had to suffer some setbacks of her own due to severe online criticism of her alleged use of provincial buses to ferry supporters to her sorties in Mindanao. This created significant buzz and disgust since practically the entire fleet of the bus company was deployed for this purpose, stranding thousands of angry commuters in Cagayan de Oro’s bus terminal. This was compounded by the fact that one of the buses met an accident, causing horrendous traffic on the normally light Sayre highway. This forced her to respond to ambush interviews denying she authorized the use of these buses in a “hakot” operation. While the denial halted further online attacks, her own supporters called her out for not releasing the 1500 supposedly owed them for attending her sorties. These went viral and landed stories in major TV network news. This led to the steady decline of the Grace Poe campaign which capitalized on a supposed clean image of her as a candidate who would not resort to certain “unbecoming” tactics.

With this, it is clear that social media influenced the way news was reported, and provided the feedback loop that either clarified or muffled the message. The relationship of Rodrigo Duterte and the media will probably be a bit different than his predecessors, perhaps setting the same tone for presidents after him.