Duterte’s not running anymore!”
My friend declared this loud and clear while we were in school yesterday afternoon. She was scrolling through her Facebook feed when she came across a post with a link to an article saying that Davao City Mayor Rodrigo Duterte decided not to run.
Another friend interjected, asking her if she checked the date of the article. True enough, it was old — from that period where Duterte was still being vague about his decision. We all sighed.
Fact checking has become the norm these past few months leading to the 2016 presidential and vice-presidential elections. As the day gets closer, the political sphere is just getting dirtier and dirtier.
Monday’s BPI Julia Vargas drama was the first in the life-imitating-viral social media posts department. In the vein of that random Suntukan sa Ace Hardware Facebook event that got everyone talking last April, Senator Antonio Trillanes IV challenged Presidential candidate Rodrigo Duterte to a showdown at the Julia Vargas branch of the Bank of the Philippine Islands. Senator Trillanes accused Mayor Duterte of hiding millions of pesos in his bank accounts — a fact that he dared the presidential frontrunner to prove wrong by appearing at the bank last Monday.
Duterte didn’t show. Trillanes called him a coward. It was a drama fit to be the plot of a teleserye, complete with footage of Trillanes walking out of the bank — signature stoic face on full display — shielded by security officials and hounded by the press.
The evening news came out with the appropriate headlines. “Walang nangyari,” blared Mike Enriquez on 24 Oras. The reports made it seem like we were just waiting for something to happen.
I followed the news on Twitter and laughed. I laughed at the Suntukan sa BPI Julia Vargas event that popped up on my news feed (over 5,000 users clicked “going”). I laughed until it dawned on me that we had just reduced Philippine politics to a random Facebook meme.
While social media has played a big part in keeping people informed and aware of what’s going on through the dissemination of witty memes and serious infographics, there also exists a side that is the source of planted misinformation. It’s no secret that black propaganda from political camps is common during election season, but this year they had the advantage of social media.
Misinformation when people share fake articles with completely bogus information and legitimate articles, but use the captions to misguide people into thinking a certain way.
I asked people who like to share political posts on social media about how they use it. First of all, where did they get all of their election-related information? How did they process it? And more importantly, how did they choose what to share on their timelines?
Everyone had similar answers—they get their election-related information by watching the news, but mostly though Facebook and Twitter. When they find something interesting enough to share, they fact-check by looking at credible news websites and by using their own judgment to see if those articles are biased or not. According to them, what they share usually aligns with their values or the greater interest of the country.
As a way of testing out that method of verification, I looked at the recent articles circulating under the hashtags from the country’s top news organizations (ABS-CBN’s #Halalan2016, CNN Philippines’s #TheFilipinoVotes, GMA’s #Eleksyon2016, and Rappler’s #PHVote).
And since what matters these days is going viral, people will do anything and everything to get the most shares out of a story.
It turns out that after the whole Duterte-Trillanes bank drama, dozens shared an article with the headline “BPI Finally Admitted And Guaranteed That No P211-Million In Duterte’s Account.” The source was a website called pinoytrending.org, and most of the captions called Trillanes a “BIG LIAR”. All of the information in the article was based off on quotes from Duterte’s lawyer, Atty. Salvador Panelo. The article in question seemed to be written withslanted quotes and sounded far from being objective or credible.
People are also sharing old articles and trying to pass them off as new — some even with misleading headlines and captions. Aside from all the links about how “Duterte isn’t running,” there was a New York Times article on how the Philippines is the most corrupt in Asia dated March 2007. People were sharing it as if it was posted in 2015, pointing out that the current administration hasn’t done its part to reduce corruption.
Another headline that’s circulating states that Quezon City representative Kit Belmonte said that “There’s nothing wrong to use Yolanda aid for Roxas’ campaigning.” It turns out that someone used a Facebook feature to change headlines on posts, and eventually made it go viral. The actual headline of the article linked to the post was “Wrong to fault Mar for Yolanda housing.’
I can’t prove that any of this is part of the agenda of black propaganda, but I am worried by the fact that people are blindly sharing wrong information believing that it is true. The most responsible thing to do at this point is to read beyond the headlines. All news is biased to some extent, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t credible.
Trusting news from unverified sources is dangerous. While most of the effects of believing in them are limited to online hate and nasty instances of cyber bullying, there are those that go even further.
After Duterte’s banking information was made public, some of his supporters (including action star Robin Padilla) threatened to close their BPI accounts. They claimed that the bank breached client confidentiality even if Trillanes was quoted as saying that he didn’t get the bank records from BPI. Boycotting an entire institution for something that wasn’t even verified? Not cool.
Some of them even deposited money into his account using the published account numbers (fact: a Facebook event page called “DEPOSITO FOR DUTERTE @ NEAREST BPI BRANCH also exists. 36 people are “going”).
But again, if what’s written is perfectly true, then that’s great. Being lazy isn’t an excuse not to check your facts, because then you won’t be doing your country right. After all, we’re voting for the next leader of the Philippine republic, not the next Pinoy Big Brother big winner.