Online disinformation in the Philippines, particularly its use in partisan political activity, only grew sharply after 2016. The President, Ong says, benefited from a savvy social media campaign “that many now regard as a harbinger of the tactics and phenomena that later came to global attention.” “Before the world learned of Cambridge Analytica and Russian trolls (to skew public sentiment), there was Rodrigo Duterte’s presidential campaign in the Philippines,” Jonathan Corpus Ong of the University of Massachusetts Amherst wrote in an August article for AsiaGlobalOnline. In fact, the 73-year-old leader has been dubbed “patient zero” of the modern disinformation era. In truth, the war on the online front has played a major role in the story of Duterte’s rise to power. ‘Patient zero’ of the modern disinformation era Its backdrop is the Philippines’ heated political landscape – and the deep, often emotional and angry divisions between those who support President Duterte and those who have been against him since he won the 2016 presidential election. This example captures how online disinformation in the Philippines is – distilled. Subsequently, a network of Facebook pages shared the fake Hontiveros report and made it viral, riding on the wave of public emotion stirred by the real video clip of the weed users, analytics from the online tool CrowdTangle show. Instead, it contained a tampered thumbnail that had crudely stitched together separate images of Hontiveros and the young men, and added a fake quote card to boot. Upon checking however, this clip did not bear out Hontiveros’ supposed remarks. The fake report also urged social media users, in all capital letters, to watch the supposed proof themselves in a Youtube video clip. So brazen, or so stoned, they were seen laughing at one point and calling for marijuana legalization.ĭays after the video was posted on Facebook, a web page calling itself Online Balita (Online News) published a fake report whose screaming headline claimed that an opposition senator, Ana Theresa ‘Risa’ Hontiveros, had defended the seven cannabis users and said they did nothing wrong. ![]() ![]() The young men filmed in the video clip did not seem to care. Since 2016, the Duterte government has been waging a bloody war on drugs that, by the police’s own estimates, has killed over 4,800 people as of Aug. What propelled its spread through social media was how men puffing on weed were openly taunting President Rodrigo Duterte, known for his tough crackdown on illegal drugs in this Southeast Asian country of some 105 million people. It went viral, but not so much because smoking cannabis is illegal under the country’s Dangerous Drugs Act. MANILA – In late August 2018, a video clip showing seven men, in their early twenties, smoking weed made the rounds of Philippine social media.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |