By Diego Morra
The demise of 19-year-old Emman Atienza, daughter of TV host Kim Atienza and fitness maven Felicia Atienza is a tragedy, particularly when one report says that in November 2023, she joined the League of Filipino Students (LFS) to protest the Israeli genocide in Gaza, joining pickets to denounce the slaughter of children, women and the elderly in Netanyahu’s nakba as a means to exact “justice” for the deaths of 1,200 Israelis during a Hamas raid in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Furious at the carnage in Gaza, Emman should have equally raged against continuing human rights violations in the Philippines, including the insidious surveillance of international solidarity missions (ISMs) to document military and police abuses, the red tagging of activists, the freezing of the bank accounts of people’s organizations and even the unabashed, despicable and horrendous inhumanity of Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant policies. As a sensitive California resident, Emman would have taken kindly to Alpha Phi Omega alumnus and ex-Trump cabinet secretary Rex Tillerson that Trump is genuinely an “effing, grifting moron.”
Writing for the New York Post on Oct. 24, 2025, Alexandra Bellusci noted that Atienza had 875,000 followers on TikTok and 225,000 on Instagram, all of whom might have been attracted by videos of her lifestyle and, later on, her struggles with mental issues. A life anchored on social media is essentially fragile as the inventors of cyberspace are not tech geniuses but profiteers, like Elon Musk, who seeks a $1-trillion payday to stick with Tesla, an amount too much for a backer of apartheid who manipulates his chatbot and large language models (LLMs) of artificial intelligence (AI) as his personal cyberspace propaganda machines. Musk, Sam Altman, Bill Gates, and other AI developers have never found it their duty to control their latter-day Frankenstein’s monsters, with Altman even developing erotic content that will naturally swamp the computer screens of adolescents.
TikTok itself has been bashed for actually promoting vanity, creating illusions and even glorifying suicide and dog-eat-dog culture, sanctifying scams and dubious business ventures, with its manipulators not even feeling guilty of the crimes laid down at the foot of their visual vice. No doubt Emman had been the cynosure of many, particularly in a country like the Philippines now, which reels from the flood control project scams, and despises the use of social media that promote the lives of nepo babies, like one daughter of a resigned lawmaker tagged as a main beneficiary of scams implemented by contractors and officials of the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH.)
We sympathize with the grieving family certainly, just as we condole with all the victims of summary executions, but we find it more horrible that bullying tactics on TikTok have killed a lot of people while social media scams have stolen billions of dollars from hapless victims of pig slaughter schemes hatched by Chinese criminal syndicates operating in Myanmar and even here, disguised as Philippine offshore gaming operations (POGOs.) These POGOS are another source of corrupt wealth for politicians, police and military officials and bureaucrats who have allowed illegal Chinese operations to continue. These debauched elements are all in for the dime, in for the dollar, as Americans would say. Yet, for those who want to have own place in the sun, TikTok and lifestyle videos could do a lot not only to communicate but also to persuade others that what influencers do is alright. Of course, many insist that they plunge headlong into social media to promote the gospel of righteousness and prosperity on the side.
In November 2024, Atienza came under fire after posting a video of herself at dinner with her friends, including Filipino singer Rhaila Tomakin and Miss World Philippines Krishnah Gravidez. The group ate at a Japanese restaurant with Atienza sharing a clip of them playing “guess the bill.” The TikTok trend has people guessing how much the check is going to be and whoever is closest pays the bill. The bill ended up being 133,000 Philippine peso, which is $2,268. The video sparked outrage in the Philippines, where the average monthly wage is around 44,800 Philippine peso which equals $794. She explained that whatever wealth her family accumulated didn’t come from politics. Her father Kim has been out of politics for a while after serving for three terms as a Manila councilor. It was unkind for anyone to lambaste her for being a nepo baby.
For many people, flaunting wealth on social media doesn’t cut the mustard. The contradiction between Philippine reality and what happens in the land of milk and honey only alienates people. Atienza must have been affected by then usual bashing that she deleted the post and took a leave from social media.
Emman’s death should prompt everyone to reexamine the outsize role that social media play in people’s lives. It is the god that will continue to fail them since it has become an autonomous operator that creates illusions, detracts from social reality and makes cyberspace manipulators extremely wealthy. Far from controlling subscribers, TikTok and social media must be controlled with viable guardrails, tamed with operational rules and barred from promoting bashing and stan culture. In fact, the user must be tamed as well and told that like movies, social media have become the world’s most beautiful fraud, as the late Jean-luc Godard once described film. Consider TikTok and other social media as mere vehicles, not the captains of people’s ships, and must be deployed to help in the creative effort. It should not be anyone’s undertaker, even those who suffer from mental issues. Alienation, angst, anomie and anxiety should be recognized by social media practitioners as issues that they have to grapple with sooner or later. How does one do it? Give purpose to life and define its meaning by overcoming the odds, and not succumbing to it. Marx said alienation kills daily but its victim is never interred while Viktor Frankl often refers to Friedrich Nietzsche’s words: “He who has a Why to live for can bear almost any How.” There is always a reason for one to live, not leave.
