Comelec not keen on regulating online poll ads

MANILA, Philippines - The Commission on Elections (Comelec) disclosed yesterday that the poll body is not keen on regulating Twitter and Facebook amid concerns over the plan to regulate political propaganda on the Internet.

In a forum on online campaigning held at the Comelec in Manila, poll commissioner Christian Robert Lim said the poll body would be focusing on “pop-ups and banners” as possible tools for online advertising of candidates.

“We are also looking at online advertising as a way to circumvent the traditional thing like television ads. That’s why we came up with the rules, and if you look at the rules we are focusing on pop-ups, banners, rather than Twitter or Facebook. So we only have the paid ads,” he said.

Lim, also the chairman of the Comelec committee on campaign, said they deemed it necessary to put control on campaign propaganda in the Internet to “level the playing field among candidates.”

“Our primordial concern is online advertising because there’s a (cost) involved. This is basically monitoring how much they are spending in online advertising,” he added.

The Comelec yesterday met with Internet stakeholders to get inputs on how to monitor election propaganda in cyberspace.

Comelec Chairman Sixto Brillantes said the plan to monitor campaign propaganda on the Internet is “very broad” so they decided to consult stakeholders in social networking sites.

“We find some difficulty in our discussions after we came out with our rules. So what we really wanted is some assistance from the experts on this issue of social media, online and we hope that in our discussion, we could gather some guidelines,” he said during the forum.

The forum was attended by bloggers, social media consultants and anti-Epal advocates.

Epal is short for “mapapel” or people desperately trying to do everything just to be recognized.   

Sen. Miriam Defensor-Santiago had filed Senate Bill 1967 or the anti-epal bill, which seeks to prohibit public officials “from claiming credit through signage announcing a public works project” and use them for campaigning.

Brillantes said the Comelec is trying to have a grasp of “new and innovative campaigning” on the Internet so they could strictly regulate it.

“Our feeling is we need strict monitoring and this is difficult on our part. Therefore, we like to get some help in forming some clarificatory provisions in our resolution where we can point out how we intend to monitor this – the use of social media, online and all other related forms,” he added.

Participants raised many issues during the forum that was attended by members of the Legal Network for Truthful Election, No More Epal Group, Anti-Epal Movement and Baratillo Pamphlet.

Tony Ahn, chief digital architect of Tony Ahn & Co., said he observed that the Comelec did not include the advertising companies, public relations firms and social marketers in its monitoring activities while they are usually the ones tapped by candidates to handle their campaigns.

“In my experience, all of them operate on the right side of the law and they want to do the right thing. If there’s a law to disclose, for instance, how much my company was paid by a candidate, then I’ll definitely be telling my clients,” he said.