Category: social media

“facebook is the new EDSA” ?!? LOL

this is to disabuse the duterte diehard who, at the senate’s jan 30 fake news hearing, dared suggest, propound, push the notion that facebook is the new EDSA.  it is NOT.  and i’m glad, on the one hand, that no senator dignified the statement by making patol —  committee chair poe was more interested in how many followers the guy had, even promising that from 30,000 it would be more than double that after the hearing.

on the other hand, it makes me wonder if it was her underhanded way of making patol sort of?  as in, you know, it’s all about the numbers?  as in 60 million fb users! say ng diehard, which is more believable, i must say, than ressa’s 97% of pinoys (!) because that’s like saying even the poorest of the poor? are online a lot?  with what, the 4Ps pantawid cash?  but i digress.

even if it were true that practically all pinoys (except the very young and the very old?) are active online, such great numbers would far from an edsa make.  EDSA 86 was about throngs of unarmed people gathering in the streets, united behind, and ready to die for, a common cause: ousting marcos.  on facebook there is no getting behind a common cause.  duterte diehards are forever bickering among themselves while the various opposition factions can’t get their act together on anything under the sun.

and if the duterte diehard was thinking of the arab spring revolts in tunisia and egypt in early 2010 that we thought were waged and won on and through facebook and twitter, think again.  facebook was more like the GPS lang.  read So, Was Facebook Responsible for the Arab Spring After All? 

… Facebook is what guided the protests, but the true vehicle for change was the protests themselves.

… In the end, no matter the importance of the online tools, “history happened on the streets” … But how those streets became flooded by so many, well, it wasn’t random, and social media’s role boils down to two simple but central accomplishments: First, Facebook and elsewhere online is where people saw and shared horrifying videos and photographs of state brutality that inspired them to rebel. Second, these sites are where people found out the basic logistics of the protests — where to go and when to show up.

in EDSA 86 everyone was on the same page — pro-marcos peeps knew enough to stay away because they would be booed out, like nora aunor was, just because she had been identified with the marcoses at one time or another; in fairness, bumalik siya anyway and eventually got through to enrile in camp aguinaldo and was welcomed with open arms.

but wait, meron din nga palang fake news sa EDSA!  on day 3, monday 24 feb, soon after the defection of sotelo’s 15th strike wing, when fvr and enrile had opened the gates of crame to let the people in, there came the BIG NEWS from june keithley via radyo bandido that the marcoses had left the palace.  nakoryente si ketly, but so were fvr and cory who also received, and believed, the news.

it was a psy-war kind of thing, say ni fvr after.  the hope probably was that the fake news would send the crowds home — tapos na ang boksing — leaving only enrile and fvr and RAM in crame so that the marines (positioned in camp aguinaldo’s golf course) could proceed to bomb them without hurting civilians.

fortuitously, the crowds grew larger in number instead, and there was dancing in the streets until an hour or so later when it was confirmed that the marcoses were still holed up in the palace, and it was back to the barricades, no prob.  lalo pa ngang dumami ang tao sa EDSA.  it was as if the people smelled victory and were bent on making the fake news true.  and they did, some 30 hours later.

in that sense, ok din ang fake news, like when it gives you something great to aspire for?

When the #DDS can do no wrong: victimizing #HarryRoque

Katrina S.S.

One of the more interesting things to come out of this short period of having Harry Roque as Presidential Spokesperson: it has revealed that the frontline informal communications team of the President cannot be told that they are doing something wrong.

Read on…

waiting for cocoy, what about sotto, calling out grace

sometime during the senate hearing on fake news by the committee on public info and mass media last wednesday, i said on my facebook wall that i found the talk refreshing, it was good to see and hear edwin lacierda, abigail valte, and manolo quezon, nakaka-miss ang intelligent discourse. (public status. 13 likes.)  we kinda took it for granted back in pre-duterte days.

not that the trio said much, except to deny that they were responsible in any way for the anonymous dilawan blog silent no more or that its webmaster was once part of pNoy’s comms team — though cocoy dayao wasn’t around to confirm the denial, so correct me if i heard wrong — and to demand that rj nieto prove his allegations, produce evidence, that mar roxas was responsible for the nasaan-ang-pangulo anti-pNoy campaign in the time of mamasapano.  nag-buckle lang si lacierda on the question of whether he is part (or something like that) of silent no more, and justifiably, because does one become a part of silent no more when one “likes” and / or shares the link of any of its blog posts on facebook?

smart of cocoy dayao not to show up.  but he should show up next time or he might have to go into hiding and then be tracked down by the cops a la ronnie dayan, ewww.  that would be so uncool.  cool would be if he came to the next hearing with bells and whistles, including a hotshot IT lawyer.  i expect that he would refuse (even in an executive session) to name his clients, i.e., the writer/s and / or owners of silent no more (and other anonymous blogs under his admin) on grounds of confidentiality.  it would be a test case on a citizen’s right to anonymity and privacy.

it would be interesting to see how sotto, and other feeling-aggrieved senators, will deal with that.  sotto, in particular, who was tagged a rapist in the controversial seven-sens post (6,600 likes, 2066 shares, 780 comments) has reason to cry LIBEL!  but then that would mean opening himself up to questions re the pepsi paloma rape case back in 1982.  under oath he would be crazy to insist that no rape happened as he has claimed in recent years.  the rape hit the front pages just 35 years ago.  marami kaming adults na noon na buhay pa ngayon, and we remember what a scandal it was, and we still marvel at how they managed to get away with it, dared brazen it out, the show must go on, eat bulaga!  no fake news that.

and because dayao was a no-show, napagtuunan tuloy ng oras at pansin at puna si mocha uson, duterte’s social media muse (5 million followers), at si rj nieto aka thinking pinoy (700K followers) who is second only to mocha when it comes to bashing dilawans and others critical of duterte, imagining scenarios based on iffy data, yet whom committee chair grace poe couldn’t praise enough for his “neutrality” and “excellent research,” never mind the times that nieto has had to issue “errata” dahil nagkamali, tao lang daw.  argh.  i’ve been blogging 10 years now and i don’t remember ever having to issue an erratum.

anyway, the next morning, on my fb newsfeed, a u.p. prof was wishing for the likes of recto, laurel, salonga and santiago in the chamber; the discourse would have been so radically different daw. (for fb friends only. 142 likes and counting.)  hmm.  miriam too?  “I lied!” was one of her favorite punchlines.

pero recto, laurel, salonga, oo naman, except what’s the point in wishing for better, based on a romanticized past, when there’s work to do confronting what is, now, and looking to the future.  roby alampay, tony la viña, and florin hilbay were outstanding.

as for senator poe, she can redeem herself by pushing through with the committee’s promise to plug legal loopholes that allow bloggers earning undeclared income from advertisements to avoid payment of taxes.  and senator nancy binay is right, tax also the so-called “influencers” promoting products and services on their social media accounts, said to be an underground billion (peso) industry.  better late than never.

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.