Fake news and dirty politics flood Philippine social media

• Duterte arrest unleashes deluge of disinformation
• Analysts say worse is to come as elections near
• 'People don't care about facts'

MANILA - When former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte was arrested in March for crimes against humanity, social media was soon awash with messages of love and support.

U.S. President Donald Trump was quick to offer his backing.

Huge crowds - the kind you only see at World Cup games - came out chanting in a wave of loud support.

And local celebrities echoed Trump - word for word - in their glowing endorsements of the disgraced ex-leader.

The only problem: all of it was fake.

Duterte's arrest had unleashed a disinformation overload - a torrent of bogus news and videos that digital analysts only expect to worsen in the run-up to Philippine elections in May.

"Everywhere you look, it's the same false narrative appearing on different platforms … on Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, so it feels like there’s a concerted effort to spread them," said Celine Samson, head of digital verifications at Vera Files, a media nonprofit.

"I think we can relate this to the elections. While this volume of disinformation started with Duterte’s arrest, I think it’s possible that disinformation will be more politicised in the coming days," said Samson.

Duterte was arrested on March 11 under an International Criminal Court (ICC) warrant charging him with crimes against humanity for the thousands of deaths related to his government's punitive war on drugs.

Critics say the wave of disinformation post-arrest was engineered by pro-Duterte social media accounts with the aim of casting doubt on the ICC's case.

Duterte has made no comment on the allegations.

But the Philippines is especially vulnerable to disinformation as voting nears, experts say, with a ramp up in manipulation of social media aimed at exploiting political tensions.

Tech firm Cyabra, who researched the slew of fake accounts that has hit the Philippines, said it could not trace their origins but called it a deliberate, organised campaign.

The government is taking steps to tackle the disinformation, be it fake news about Manila's row with Beijing over the South China Sea, Duterte’s arrest or about the May 12 elections.

On April 8, lawmakers in the House of Representatives conducted a hearing on the role of social media and algorithms in spreading myths.

"Disinformation campaigns and the proliferation of fake news not only mislead citizens but also undermine trust in our institutions … especially at this time when fake news among candidates proliferate," Johnny Pimentel, the politician who chaired the hearing, said in his opening speech.

Rafael Frankel, Meta's head of public policy in Southeast Asia, defended the tech giant's policing of Facebook, the main source of news for more than half of Filipinos.

Frankel told the hearing that controlling misinformation among the world's 3.2 billion Facebook users was "practically impossible".

Meta said it works with independent fact-checking bodies in more than 60 languages to identify, review and rate viral misinformation on its platforms, including Facebook and YouTube.

Role of big tech

Vera Files is one of Facebook’s three outside fact-checking bodies in the Philippines; it has been abnormally busy of late.

Samson said her media nonprofit had received about 300 tipoffs reporting misinformation in the two weeks after Duterte’s arrest, well above average.

Most of the posts identified as fake were aimed at discrediting the ICC judges or gaining sympathy for Duterte, who is now in the custody of the ICC in the Netherlands.

Experts say the fake posts spread quickly and before Meta could take them down or flag them.

In January, Meta ended its U.S. fact-checking programmes on Facebook and Instagram, and said that it would instead rely on users to add context to any misleading posts.

While third-party fact-checking with Meta continues in the Philippines for now, experts predict the company will extend its U.S. policy worldwide, according to the Reuters Institute.

Meta’s Frankel told lawmakers that Meta would continue to moderate false content, "protect and preserve freedom of expression" and ensure the safety of platform users.

But he said "that comes with some real tradeoffs and difficult questions … on where we draw the line between the kind of content we allow and what kind of content we prohibit."

Marlon Nombrado runs Out of The Box Media Literacy Initiative, a local nonprofit that aims to fight disinformation through education.

And he said that whatever policy Big Tech adopts to fight malign accounts, viral posts or trolls, it would struggle to counter "coordinated inauthentic behaviour" of the type currently roiling the Philippines.

"In spite of all the supposed developments and interventions of social media platforms … old methods to spread disinformation remain effective and can circumvent the platforms’ policies," Nombrado told Context.

"We can't rely any more on fact-checking to change people's minds," said Nombrado.

Samson said constantly debunking the mountain of myths to clean up Philippine politics or win over voters' hearts and minds can be tiring and overwhelming.

"People don't care about facts," said Samson. "But I would never lose hope in what fact-checking can do in [preserving] information integrity online."

(Reporting by Mariejo Ramos; Editing by Lyndsay Griffiths)