Since the 2016 national elections, social media has played a huge part in electoral politics. In a BBC report, Rodrigo Duterte’s former social media manager, Nic Gabunada, said that the former president’s campaign relied heavily on digital platforms due to budget constraints.
In 2017, a University of Oxford study found that Duterte had spent around P10 million on the social media campaign, which employed automated fake accounts to target individuals or groups, either to influence their opinion or to silence dissent.
During the 2022 elections, a “social media marketing consultant” with the alias Jon told the BBC that he oversaw a team of 30 other “trolls” in managing fake accounts and pages on Facebook “for the benefit of his clients,” governors, congressmen, and mayors.
PH Disinfo Hub
Non-profit organization and think tank Sigla Research Center’s response to the political disinformation machine is the Philippine Disinformation Hub (PH Disinfo Hub), an online collection of studies and free learning materials that Filipinos can refer to as they navigate the web.
Learning materials include an eight-step lesson plan with explainer videos that tackle the history of disinformation in the country, the disinformation industry, related laws, and solutions. The hub also boasts of a syllabus that consists of eight modules written in Taglish “to make the content more accessible and relatable.” The syllabus was designed specifically for teachers and students who are “interested in the critical study of social media and their impacts on Filipino politics and public culture at large.”
The platform also has its own growing collection of studies on disinformation and politics in the Philippines, with research dating as far back as 2017 and as recent as 2024. Sigla also encourages other researchers and scholars to pitch in and share their work to expand the database.
Behind PH Disinfo Hub is Sigla’s team of Filipino researchers and community organizers based here and abroad. They collaborated with Out of the Box (OOTB), a media literacy initiative of University of the Philippines Journalism graduates.
According to a press release, Sigla is also working on a national elections research project that will “monitor the flow of information” during the campaign period for the upcoming midterm elections. Sigla’s head of partnerships and engagements Juan Felix said that the study aims to “outline national trends and characteristics of electoral disinformation and influence operations” and uncover “hyperlocal forms of political influence work online and offline” nationally and regionally.
Over the years, various companies, sectors, and organizations have made an effort to combat trolls and the disinformation they facilitate. Meta, for example, has tried to crack down on fake accounts through their policies and terms of service. Various news outlets have taken to forming fact-checking teams to verify the information they report. Projects like PH Disinfo Hub seek to equip citizens with the necessary tools to sift through the loads of information they’re met with daily.
With the midterm elections happening in May 2025, we have yet to see how effective these initiatives truly are in combating disinformation. For now, Sigla hopes that with the resources they provide, “we get the government we rightly deserve.”
