The House of Representatives has been spending a lot of time, money and resources tackling “fake” news dished out by vloggers, trolls and crones paid with dirty money to commit the worst disinformation campaign in this benighted country.
First of all, these vloggers are not legitimate members of the press or what is now known as the media industry, like the propagators of lies at the Sonshine Media Network Int’l. (SMNI), the propaganda outlet of Pastor Apollo Quiboloy. Second, their job is akin to pimping for pedophiles or necromaniacs, and the lies they dish out provide their bosses with the political orgasm they crave for. Third, they do not know libel laws, or common sense, for which reason they liberally dish out cyberlibel, or cyberdrivel, as one wag says.
Fourth, these are really jukeboxes and dropping some coins into them makes them play the tune demanded by their principals. Fifth, when social media platforms stupidly abandoned fact-checking at the behest of Donald Trump, vloggers now find themselves as the gods of cyberspace. Yet, if Congress were to really put the screws on irresponsible and malicious vloggers, the first step should have been to summon their principals, with the principal armies of disinformation being controlled by the Duterte and Marcos camps.
Then, they can proceed to the myriad ads quoting people who push certain products or services and get-rich-quick schemes, all of them bogus. Lawmakers should not go far in understanding why the propaganda industry is thriving and why Filipino vloggers are swallowing the quaff of the Chinese embassy and its surrogates in promoting the fiction that the Spratlys and Palawan are Chinese territories and perhaps disseminating the myth that the Philippines is not a country at all and is in the same league as Putin’s Ukraine. In cash, they trust. Never mind if the narratives are factual or factitious, its opposite, or kludged to make them look complete. In their propaganda war, the truth is the first victim.
It is fairly easy to know the principal characters in the disinformation drama. On the Duterte camp, there is Sara Zimmerman Duterte Carpio and her best friend forever (BFF) Malou Tiquia, and the unnamed infotech consultants who craft the daily talking points and scenarios. On the other hand, they will find the Marcos Jr. loyalists who have helped him since 1995 and even earlier, who had been busy dishing out fairy tales and pablum about Bongbong’s exploits, from winning the Milo aikido tilt at 42 and becoming the first man to land on the Sun, or announcing the “distribution” of the proceeds of the “Yamashita” treasure and the gold loot of the elder Marcos, none of which passed the smell test.
For straining their family resources, and “contributions” from “patriots,” Duterte diehards and some bakery owners in Quezon City, and crafting the communication plan for political survival, Sara can be immensely qualified to be tagged as a “hasbarista” in Hebrew, which is equivalent to a female shill, even if the term just really refers to an “explanation.” Israeli is notorious for using hasbara to promote Zionist propaganda to justify the killings of 45,000 Palestinians in Gaza, including the 15 medical personnel massacred last month, and the landgrab of land from 700,000 Palestinians in the West Bank and the rest of what is now Israel during the “nakba” or catastrophe in 1948.
Among Zionists, an attack on the wrong policies of Israel, its leaders and institutions is ipso facto anti-Semitism even if the term Semitic really refers to those who speak Semitic languages like Arabic. Nonetheless, Sara is not in the same league as the Ashkenazi Zionists even if her mother really descended from a Jewish family since US Zionists appear to be a separate state in the US who could complain daily about anti-Semitism to gag supporters of the Palestinian cause and get the White House to act on their behalf.
As a hasbarista, Sara’s daily tirade is grist for the Duterte propaganda mill, which spouts stories about Liza Marcos being arrested in the US, Marcos Jr. being rushed to a Metro Manila hospital and Sara preparing herself to assume the mantle of national leadership, as well as the military and police resigning en masse over the fractured national leadership. Moreover, she continues to mock Marcos Jr. for not getting her story about thanking him for giving her the opportunity to be close to her father, which was a left-handed compliment that to her was “sarcasm.” It was like earning a puny political brownie point and proving that the Dunning-Kruger effect really works. (DIEGO MORRA)
