If you want to know where the FAKE NEWS!!! regime of Donald Trump's use of social media and FOX News as state media is heading, ask somebody we know that Trump admires and wishes to emulate.
In August 2016, a handful of crude images began circulating widely throughout Facebook’s Filipino community: a middle-aged man and woman having clumsy sex atop a tacky floral bedspread. The man’s face, obscured by shadows, was impossible to make out. The woman’s was not. She appeared to be Sen. Leila de Lima — a fierce critic of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte and his bloody war on drugs.
But the woman was not de Lima.
The senator issued a strong public denial (“That’s not me. I don’t understand”) and internet sleuths subsequently tracked the provenance of the images to a porn site. Still, the doctored photos very quickly became part of a narrative propagated by Duterte, who had accused de Lima of accepting bribes from drug pushers. Duterte, who’d previously threatened to “destroy” de Lima in public, touted the pictures as stills from a sex tape featuring the senator and her chauffeur — the person she'd allegedly ordered to collect illicit payments on her behalf. “De Lima is not only screwing her driver, she is also screwing the nation,” Duterte said in September. If he were de Lima, the president added, he would hang himself. (“We believe the president was referring to another video,” Martin Andanar, communications secretary of the Duterte administration, told BuzzFeed News.)
De Lima was soon beset by disparaging fake news reports that spread quickly across Facebook: She had pole-danced for a convict; she’d used government funds to buy a $6 million mansion in New York; the Queen of England had congratulated the Philippine Senate for ousting her. Six months later, her reputation fouled, de Lima was arrested and detained on drug charges, though she vehemently disputes them. She has now been in jail for over a year, despite outcry from international human rights groups over what they consider a politically motivated detention.
For all the recent hand-wringing in the United States over Facebook’s monopolistic power, the mega-platform’s grip on the Philippines is something else entirely. Thanks to a social media–hungry populace and heavy subsidies that keep Facebook free to use on mobile phones, Facebook has completely saturated the country. And because using other data, like accessing a news website via a mobile web browser, is precious and expensive, for most Filipinos the only way online is through Facebook. The platform is a leading provider of news and information, and it was a key engine behind the wave of populist anger that carried Duterte all the way to the presidency.
Yet some Filipinos say Facebook treats the Philippines as an absentee landlord might, occasionally dropping by to address minor issues but often shrugging off responsibility for the larger, more problematic stuff: the conspiracies that helped land de Lima in jail, the misinformation that has clouded the public’s understanding of a brutal drug war, and the propaganda that continues to damage the democratic process in the Philippines.
“Until we find an effective way to counter” the misinformation problem in the Philippines, de Lima wrote to BuzzFeed News from Camp Crame, where she is imprisoned, “we cannot hope to repair the damage [it’s] already caused and to ensure it can never hijack our democratic way of life again.”
Facebook told BuzzFeed News the images violated its policies and were removed. The company also noted that it eventually prevented links to bogus reports about de Lima from being shared on its platform — but only after de Lima had been arrested.
Yet it is the photos, more than the links to fake news, that show what Facebook and the Philippines are up against. Unlike the fake news scandals in the US, which often sought to drive readers to third-party sites, misinformation campaigns in the Philippines live largely on Facebook itself. It is images, Facebook Live videos, and posts written directly on the platform; a never-ending meme-driven propaganda campaign that’s easier to share and harder to police.
If you want to know what happens to a country that has opened itself entirely to Facebook, look to the Philippines. What happened there — what continues to happen there — is both an origin story for the weaponization of social media and a peek at its dystopian future. It’s a society where, increasingly, the truth no longer matters, propaganda is ubiquitous, and lives are wrecked and people die as a result — half a world away from the Silicon Valley engineers who’d promised to connect their world.
"Weaponized social media" is a very good term, because it's what America is facing under Trump. It's been fully weaponized by a bloody dictator in the Philippines, and it's being used to destroy and detain Duterte's political foes.
We're not that far away from that happening in the US, either.
Maybe just one election away, at most.
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