đź“·: Social media troll | Social Pilot
The entire trouble with investigating bloggers, vloggers, glurge writers and plain liars armed with keyboards is that the probers, who should be intelligent enough to see whether the stories spun are completely false, should have carefully studied the law not only on cybercrime but the Revised Penal Code (RPC) as well, with the former being mocked by Duterte vloggers as fundamentally subversive of the right to free expression and press freedom.
Rather than dwell on the facticity of the claims made by vloggers, who straddle between tagging themselves as journalists who write stories for the broadsheets and as commentators expressing their views for a principal, the inquiry has devolved into a spirited discussion on character assassination. Technically, opinion writers and commentators differ from journalists who gather the facts and write the news or developments coming from all directions, just as news readers on radio and TV are just news readers who should not be considered celebrities.
Public service shows like the ones promoted by the Tulfos are actually complaints desks for “vigilante journalism” that tackles issues related to the lower rungs of the armed services, including the police, which is civilian in nature. If these shows do not end up convicting any erring soldier, policeman, politician or bureaucrat, then it fail in achieving the goals of “new journalism.” As we have seen in the past several years, the Tulfos have effectively used their programs to promote themselves. “Journalism” has become too small a world for them so they are running for the Senate despite not returning the P60-million they got from Tourism Secretary Wanda Tulfo Teo, who claimed not knowing that her award for a tourism promotion project went directly to the company controlled by dearest brothers Erwin and Ben.
Ombudsman Samuel Martires wanted the P60-million returned as promised by the Tulfo brothers before they reneged on their promise. The amount certainly could finance the operations of a political dynasty comprised of Tulfos and Teos with different “logics,” “political viewpoints” but with no “bailiwicks.” Since the Tulfos reject any misconduct on the tourism scandal, those in the troll armies of the Dutertes and the Marcoses deny they are misleading people, or are conditioning the minds of voters. In effect, they are saying they are “competing” in the marketplace of ideas, if you can call deception an idea whose time has come. Yet, the best gauge is facticity, and lawmakers should pounce on vloggers who do not know the difference between a clavicle and a clavichord, or between “lie” and “lay” (Trump does not pronounce “lie” and prefers to say “lay” inasmuch as he is allergic to “lie”) or between political asylum and mental asylum.
Trolls are engaged in promoting a personal medium via internet platforms and their principals pay them handsomely (or poorly) to support a bigger objective, which is to promote the interest of their paymasters. Today, these trolls are divided into the Duterte trolls and cronies, vloggers and bloggers, and glurge writers and the Marcos Jr. propaganda army. Both groups should be yanked out of the so-called “social media) like X, TikTok, Facebook and other platforms for distributing fiction and promoting factitious nonsense. These platforms have insanely afforded respectability to troll armies and their caving in to Donald Trump’s demand that fact-checking cease proves their stupidity; they are not responsible for what their platforms spew, all because the ignorant Trump and the narcissistic Elon Musk demand that their lies be treated as gospel truth. So Meta, TikTok, X and others should be disciplined for not nipping these sham news factories in the bud.
Internet has become a notorious den for the commission of digital crime and even internet child sex trafficking, with some estimates placing the number of abused Filipino children at 3-million, the highest in the entire world, and poverty has been pinpointed as the reason why children are pimped, in many cases by their own relatives. TikTok admitted on April 12 that 4.85 million posts from the Philippines were taken down from October to December 2024, or 1.61 million posts monthly, all of them bogus. It was a huge increase from the 4.5 million disinformation posts in the same platform in the previous quarter. TikTok was created by ByteDance in China, where the state exercises control of all forms of media, and it goes without saying that there is built-in state control on the platform. Douyin is the Chinese version of TikTok.
Cyabra, an Israel-based firm that monitors disinformation worldwide, conceded that the Philippines is the epicenter of the disinformation epidemic, with the situation worsening after March 11, 2025, when the unlamented ex-president Rodrigo Duterte was arrested and bundled off to The Hague by the International Criminal Court (ICC). The ICC actually obliged Duterte, who demanded that he be arrested in Nov. 2024, but true to his duplicitous nature, he protested his arrest. Cyabra’s CEO, Dan Brahmy, said the Duterte troll has become more sophisticated and is now engaged in seamless “digital warfare” that can reach 54 million people through sock puppets, avatars, and bots. A new study that Reuters hopes to reveal soon showed that up to 45% of the messages posted backing Duterte came from sock puppets, avatars, and bots.
On this basis alone, the government can already start cleaning up this “digital warfare” scandal by investigating the Duterte network and holding Sara Zimmerman Duterte Carpio, her consultant Malou Tiquia and their digital warfare consultants responsible for what their cohorts dish out. Similarly, those who propagate factitious content about Marcos Jr. should likewise face the music for duping the public and generously dispatching bogus information to promote the electoral campaigns of their underlings. By sweeping the truth under the rug, these troll armies want lies to be the coin of the realm. (DIEGO MORRA)
