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Opinion: Facebook vs. Duterte
Photo Credit: Yel Brusola
A giant social networking site with over 2.7 billion monthly active users, Facebook is a popular website that is used for sharing ideas and communicating with people worldwide. But, according to President Duterte on September 21, Facebook is pushing another agenda by “laying down a policy for the government” and is targeting his supporters by taking down groups, pages, and accounts that support his policies.
Nathaniel Gleicher, head of Facebook Security Policy, said in an online conference on September 22, that they removed two networks of fake accounts. These two networks comprise over 100 Facebook accounts, 43 pages, 9 groups, and 39 Instagram accounts and have over 276,000 followers on Facebook and 55,000 on Instagram overall.
The first one was traced to a group of individuals in China’s Fujian province. They mainly posted about issues in the West Philippine Sea and Beijing’s interests while also being supportive of President Rodrigo Duterte and the possible 2022 presidential bid of his daughter, current Davao Mayor Sara Duterte-Carpio.
The second network, which was based in the Philippines, was traced and found out to be managed by people affiliated with various police and military agencies. The domestic network, according to Gleicher, posted content primarily in Filipino and English. Local news and events, such as domestic politics, the military’s fight against terrorism, the draft of the pending anti-terrorism bill, and criticisms on communism, youth activists, the opposition, the Communist Party of the Philippines and its military wing the New People’s Army, and the National Democratic Front are the topics.
Because of this, Duterte lashed out at Facebook by asking if the site served any purpose to the country if they don’t help the government in the “fight of ideas.” He then seemingly threatened the social network site by saying he doesn’t know if there’s “life after Facebook.” He told them that their reasons for taking down the “advocacy” pages were “so convoluted” that he couldn’t even understand them. After the president questioned Facebook about the take down of his “advocacy” accounts, Presidential Spokesperson Harry Roque explained that the president will not ban the social media site and would only like to have a talk with them.
But is Facebook at fault for taking down these accounts? There are two main points that need to be addressed. First, the main reason behind why the accounts were taken down is most of them were fake and were coordinating with one another. This violated Facebook’s policy against Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior (CIB). CIB is defined as “using deceptive behaviors to conceal the identity of the organization behind a campaign, make the organization or its activity appear more popular or trustworthy than it is, or evade enforcement efforts.”
This was not the first time that Facebook took down networks that supported the Duterte regime. In fact, there were already two instances prior, but neither were due to political reasons. In 2018, a couple of Facebook pages were removed because all the pages were found to be “sharing links to the same advertising click farms off Facebook,” which violates spam and authenticity policies. Another network of fake accounts, which were managed by President Duterte’s former social media strategist, was removed last year because of “coordinated inauthentic behavior” that misled the public.
They were not taken down because of the content they posted, nor was it because of who posted the content. It was because the owners of these fake accounts were violating Facebook policies. In other words, Facebook does not care for the “fight of ideas,” just as the President suggested, because the only ideas that Facebook is following are its community rules.
The second point to be addressed is that there are foreign organizations meddling with the country’s politics. Now, the question is why are there individuals from China who are trying to influence our political interests? This issue is a possible threat to our sovereignty and status as a democratic nation. Our citizens should be the ones to choose who will lead the country, without the influence of foreigners. We should all be worried, especially when a foreign country as big as China is trying to interfere.
The ironic thing is that last September, Duterte hit back at some European lawmakers for allegedly meddling in the country’s affairs. Roque also said that the president considers any foreign interference with another country’s sovereign affairs unacceptable.
Imagine what may happen if these China-handled fake accounts weren’t taken down and continued to influence Filipino citizens, especially given the fact that the Philippines has the fourth highest number of Facebook users in Asia, with around 62 million people. Many people would be seeing the disinformation and propaganda that were shared by these accounts and perceive it as legitimate information. We would have been dancing into the palms of foreign powers without us realizing it.
Facebook was right to take down these networks because they violated community rules and the government was the one at fault for using fake accounts for their propaganda. They also shouldn’t let China interfere in our politics, because it doesn’t have the right to do so. If the president really believes that foreign interference is unacceptable, then he should also include these Chinese fake accounts. //by Simon Delfinado
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