Gaming democracy

doing it and not the political opposition. Second, it also makes it appear that the use of propaganda in politics is a new irregularity in the operations of democracy in late capitalism where social media has taken over traditional platforms of communication.

It would have been a balanced article had the researchers of the study provided a total picture of the use of social media by both government and the opposition, and perhaps made a comparative picture by contrasting it with the previous administration of Noynoy Aquino.

And it would have been fairer if it and information manipulation are something that politicians have been doing on both sides of the political divide, and that what has only changed is that instead of traditional media, or of the use of campaigners on foot knocking on every house, they now use social media.

Obviously, the main intent of the article was to once again paint President Duterte in a bad light, and to smear his army of supporters by accusing them of gaming the rules of democracy.

Democracy has always been gamed. It is an adversarial exercise between political partisans where the goal is to get the people’s votes. Ideally, it should be done in a fair manner, but in reality morals and ethics have both escaped political practice, and where propaganda is no longer also blackening the other side with lies. Squid tactics, character assassination, black operations and negative campaigning were already practiced even before the onset of the internet. What social media has done is simply to give it a platform to be reinvented.

What makes the practice more intense in the Philippines is the fact that we have a predisposition to be more personalistic about our politics, that