bad english and fake news, anonymity and discourse, in a time of trolls

this post started out lamenting the decline of our english-speaking skills…

Pinoy nurses recruited for jobs in UK fail English test
Fifty-two out of 59 nurses recruited in Manila for a job in Medway Maritime Hospital in the United Kingdom have failed an English language test, stalling their employment.

Medway Maritime Hospital in Kent said 52 out of the 59 candidates had failed one or more of the listening, reading, writing and speaking tests.

… that i meant to tie up with randy david’s column that begins with The president as purveyor of fake news and ends on the uphill battle against misinformation and disinformation on social media courtesy of trolls with bad grammar, and who seem to live in a different world.

So huge is the battle against fake news that it cannot be left to the mainstream media to fight it alone. Neither can we expect scholars, experts, and specialists to weigh in all the time and correct the misinformation and disinformation that clog social media. For, there is a public out there that has long harbored a resentment against experts, that trusts in the power of its own commonsense, and that is sustained in its comforting delusion by the bits of information it picks up from Wikipedia.

This fight ultimately has to be waged in the internet itself by digital activists who refuse to have their reality defined by trolls that can neither spell right nor write grammatically, that resort to exclamation points to call attention, and that, most importantly, paint a world we cannot recognize.

agit na agit, of course, ang mga ka-dds sa facebook, and not because david said the president purveys fake news (!) but because david dared call out the bad english of trolls in general.  offended na offended both the ones who feel alluded to and the ones who don’t feel alluded to, and this from dswd usec lorraine badoy is priceless:

There is an eloquence in the faulty grammar and badly spelled words of the unlettered. But it is the kind of eloquence you can only hear with your heart—if you care enough to listen to them and not default on denigration—this denigration they’ve had to bear all their lives—and in the hands of those who ought to know better.

eloquence.in.the.faulty.grammar.  wow.  on a fine day i might concede that it’s not unimaginable, but only if the faulty grammar were not a reflection of faulty reasoning (thinking) because based on slanted (inadequate) information, the kind that the ka-DDS cohort specializes in doling out.

puwede rin namang i-level up ang discourse, aminin na we do have language problems (from english to tagalog) as a nation and let’s do something about it.  after all, badoy herself belongs to the smart educated class and if her heart is in the right place, she would want to do something about it?  smart-shaming denigrating david does not help the cause of the “unlettered.”

anyway, that got quickly overtaken and overwhelmed when ka-DDS heavyweights declared virtual war on anonymous dilawan blogs like silent no more that tagged as “malacanang dogs” seven senators who did not sign kiko pangilinan’s resolution asking the president to stop the killing of minors.  senator sotto, one of alleged “dogs” is so angry, “pakakain ko sa kanila computer nila hindi lang yung words nila.”

sino sila?  sass et al. have managed to identify the webmaster, but did he write that particular blogpost?  is he obliged to identify who wrote the post?  i’m not sure anymore.  anonymity has its uses.  one is braver, i think, when one is writing anonymously, but also maybe prone to errors because, you know, hindi nakataya ang pangalan?

it was careless of silent no more, tagging tito sotto a rapist when in fact the 1982 pepsi paloma rape case was vs vic, joey, and richie.  a little googling and some reading would make such a difference.  pero walang oras, ano?  nagmamadali kasi, para makarami, kaya bara-bara na lang.  this latest post on silent no more‘s fb wall says it all:

SNMph says
We have deliberately left the door open for the TROLLS to earn a living. Thank you for the valued engagements.  #SNMph have just hit the 10m engagements mark because of them. Those familiar with how FB algorithm works knows that we have just hit the jackpot! Salamat po!

pera pera lang talaga, ano?  trabaho lang, ika nga, but this time with walang patumanggang personalan at bastusan.   a new low in pinoy discourse.  to think that in 2008 i was complaining about intellectual doldrums and filipino voices, the group blog.  as it turns out, those were good times for the blogosphere; it never got any better than that.

by 2012 i was blogging in the wind, lamenting the loss of filipino voices, and feeling my way into facebook.  a completely different world meant to promote freedom of expression in aid of democracy but which has now evolved into a weapon for destructive propaganda worldwide.  so now, on top of everything that’s wrong with the world, we have to contend with fake news.  read Why Fake News Spreads So Fast on Facebook and Social media and democracy: optimism fades as fears rise.

Oxford University researchers said in a June report that social networks like Facebook and Twitter, which were intended to be a platform for free expression, “have also become tools for social control” in many countries.

Governments employ large numbers of people “to generate content, direct opinion and engage with both foreign and domestic audiences,” said the report by the university’s Project on Computational Propaganda.

The researchers, who studied social media in 28 countries, concluded that “every authoritarian regime has social media campaigns targeting their own populations.”

… Zeynep Tufekci, a North Carolina University sociologist who studies social networks and activist movements, said the platforms which helped enable the Arab Spring are now being used against dissenters.

“This is not necessarily Orwell’s 1984,” she writes in her 2017 book, “Twitter and Tear Gas: How Social Media Changed Protest Forever.”

“Rather than a complete totalitarianism based on fear and the blocking of information, the newer methods include demonizing online media and mobilizing armies of supporters or paid employees who muddy the online waters with misinformation, information overload, doubt, confusion, harassment, and distraction.”

the senate hearing on wednesday should be interesting.  the ka-dds camp is siccing senator sotto on LP senators kiko pangilinan and bam aquino who are allegedly behind the well-organized and well-funded propaganda machine run by cocoy dayao et al of silent no more.  of course it’s not as if these ka-dds aren’t part, too, of a well-organized and well-funded propaganda machine with matching anonymous questionable-news sites na sino kaya ang nagpopondo.  ayon kay kit tatad:

The regime has begun to unravel. Ninety-five percent of the social media trolls that used to support everything DU30 said or did are gone, only 48 pro-DU30 troll sites remain, according to IT experts familiar with the subject.

if true, this could be why the ka-dds vs dilawan war on facebook seems to be escalating.  maybe the dilawans are smelling victory and the ka-dds are feeling threatened?  or is it the other way around.  revolutionary government, anyone?  we will know soon enough, i guess.