Patient zero
It’s a painful eight minutes and 39 seconds. Last week, in the aftermath of the elections, I watched in numb silence as a so-called whistleblower conducted a short phone-in interview with DJs of Magic 89.9, a local news station.
The caller admitted to being part of the “misinformation train” (words from one of the DJs) and admitted to receiving compensation of around P2.5 million during the campaign period. He gave glimpses of the network and his work as part of a “think tank.” The work included acquisition of paid accounts and Facebook meme pages, managing trolls, and coming up with scripts for trolls to reply when attacking social media posts. He said that the trolls he managed were not just in the thousands but in the “tens of thousands.” While the caller didn’t admit to spreading fake news directly, he was apologetic about being part of “the disinformation drive” and “the propaganda.”
“But a job is a job,” he said at the end. Some accounts that reposted the video called the caller a “whistleblower.” In reality, there isn’t much whistleblowing to be done, especially since the active disinformation campaign is more like an open secret, long outed by journalists, their exposés doing little to curb the tide of hostility and fake news.
In April, The Washington Post reported on “coordinated keyboard warriors” being used to spread fake news and propaganda to rehabilitate the Marcos reputation. Recently, The New York Times reported on a “flourishing ecosystem” for the disinformation being peddled on Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube, this time focusing on the use of streamers and bloggers. The BBC, right before the elections, also reported with the help of an anonymous source who identifies as a “troll” or a “social media marketing consultant” with the pseudonym Jon. Jon admitted to managing hundreds of Facebook pages and fake profiles for Filipino politicians and their campaigns as part of the “disinformation ecosystem” to boost support for clients.
But the exposés began long before the 2022 elections. Studies and reports from 2016 to 2022 have discussed how technology has been weaponized for political deception, with repeated warnings to crack down on fake accounts, improve regulation and ad transparency, and support an informed electorate. In a 2018 Facebook event on global politics, a Facebook executive called the Philippines “patient zero” in the global epidemic of disinformation, its most vulnerable victim.
But then, of course, no matter which outlet reported on the disinformation, the very same architects of fake news would find ways to discredit the information. Rappler, they say, and Maria Ressa are in cahoots with the US government holding power over the Philippines, and must not be believed. The same, too, can be said for The Washington Post, The New York Times, and the BBC—all “biased” sources with vested political interests, lambasted further for publishing the work of Filipino journalists who have been connected to Rappler and other “non-credible” outlets. Local news sources including ABS-CBN, GMA News, and the Inquirer are “dilawan” or “biased” when they call attention to disinformation campaign. Attempts by Facebook and Twitter to delete fake accounts and flag coordinated inauthentic activity are painted as censorship, and fake news peddlers create yet more news about nebulous ties between social media giants and the so-called yellow, or pink, or red movements.
For years, media experts everywhere, this paper included, have called out how fake news harms political and election integrity. This is the case, especially in a place like the Philippines, where lack of access to some news media and phone data, plummeting reading comprehension, and poorly supported education make the public more and more vulnerable to the fake news that is being carried on the back of populist sentiment. Social media platforms have been repeatedly called out for the reprehensible neglect that has allowed hate speech and fake news to run unchecked.
These are cautions that were being said before, during, and long after the election victories of Donald Trump and President Duterte. These are lessons that ultimately ended up being useless against the sheer machinery of disinformation that ultimately decided our political landscape, rendering moot even the biggest volunteer-led movement in the history of the Philippines. It is a machinery that will continue to feed into itself, setting and following the template for how elections will continue to be done in our country. We can continue to do exposé after exposé about the disinformation network, but in a society now inured to fact-checking and bombarded by the output of paid think tanks, truth-tellers and journalists will find the battle more uphill and more difficult than ever.