‘No place for fake news among Duterte supporters’

SINGAPORE – Supporters of President Duterte do not have to rely on “fake news” to show their support to the government, according to a Palace official.

Speaking on the sidelines of an event hosted by social media company Facebook here on Tuesday, Communications Undersecretary Lorraine Badoy stressed the importance of addressing the spread of fake news, including among supporters of the President. 

“If there are pro-Duterte supporters who think that they have to spread fake news, I think we need to tell them that you don’t need to. The President is doing a wonderful job. Please don’t lie about him. He does not need that,” Badoy told Filipino journalists. 

“With this kind of President, whichever side of political fence you’re on, we cannot deny that he’s very hardworking... For us, the easiest is to just say the truth. We don’t want fake news,” she added.

Badoy said they have been active in promoting digital media literacy to combat misinformation in cyberspace. 

“They have to be educated. That’s precisely my point, I’m very pro-Duterte, but why am I not spreading any fake news? If I’ve done that, maybe it was an honest mistake, not something with malicious intent,” she said. 

Badoy lauded Facebook for its efforts to address misinformation in the region, including the recent takedown of a spam network that included pages supposedly supporting Duterte. 

“I’m really glad that they did that,” she said. “The cyber ecology, we are creating that world for our children. What you want is a place that is safe and respectful, inclusive.”

Badoy said they did not object to the takedown, noting that they are not aware of many of them. 

“You’d also have to agree that a lot of anti-Duterte will pretend to be pro-Duterte supposedly,” she said, adding the administration did not object to the list that was taken down.

Facebook last month took down over 100 pages and accounts belonging to a “spam network” discovered to have been making money by taking advantage of Filipino users.

The company said it took down 95 pages and 39 accounts with political and entertainment content “for encouraging people to visit low quality websites that contain little substantive content and are full of disruptive ads.”

Addressing fake news

Facebook on Tuesday held its first community standards feedback forum in the Asia-Pacific region to discuss various policies, including efforts to address hate speech, terrorism and sexual exploitation. 

Monika Bickert, Facebook’s global head of policy management, also discussed efforts to address fake news and misinformation on the platform. 

“We don’t have a whole sub-policy of removing false content. We will generally counter the virality and surface educational content,” she said. 

She said two exceptions to this policy are false content that suppress voter information and those that contribute to ongoing violence. 

Bickert said they have been working with third-party fact-checkers to look into content flagged as possibly false. 

“If we see something that could be false, and we work with outside third-party fact-checkers to help us determine this, then we will reduce the virality of that content in Facebook by an average around 80 percent,” Bickert said.

“We will share related information from around the internet so that if somebody sees that story, they are seeing it in context with other information around the internet,” she added.