"This report examines why the precarious middle class in the Philippines has been particularly susceptible to digital disinformation. It focuses on two key imaginaries that disinformation producers weaponized in the year leading up to the 2022 national elections. The first was
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a long-simmering anti-Chinese resentment, which racist social media campaigns about Philippines-China relations targeted. The other was a yearning for a “strong leader”, which history-distorting campaigns about the country’s Martial Law era amplified. Ironically, some practices adopted by members of the public to protect themselves from the toxicity and vitriol of online spaces increased their vulnerability to digital disinformation. The cumulative impact of these was for people to dig deeper into their existing imaginaries, something that disinformation producers targeted and exploited. We offer two suggestions for future counter-disinformation initiatives. The first has to do with addressing people’s vulnerability to the weaponization of their shared imaginaries. Counter-disinformation initiatives can move past divisive imaginaries by infusing creativity in imparting information. Collaborating with well-intentioned professionals in the media and creative industries would be key to these kinds of initiatives. The second has to do with addressing people’s media consumption practices. These practices tend to open them up to sustained and long-term digital disinformation campaigns, which provide them with problematic imaginaries to dig into. To establish a similarly robust common ground of reality, counter-disinformation initiatives should themselves be programmatic, not ad hoc." (Executive summary)
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"[...] Filipino youth characterize bullying and harassment on social media as an intersection of three key dimensions: targets, acts and, spaces. We thus need to account for this by rethinking our understanding of how young people identify and experience them. Bullying and harassment on social media
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happen both in social and technological contexts and, as such, include a wide range of targets [individuals, groups and ideas], acts [direct or veiled], and spaces [bounded and open]. Since the youth interpret the many configurations of these dimensions in personal ways, we should broaden how bullying and harassment have been traditionally defined [...]" (Executive summary)
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"The study explains how strategists set campaign objectives based on input from their political clients, then delegate political marketing responsibility to a team of digital influencers and fake account operators. These operators infiltrate online
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communities, artificially trend hashtags to hijack mainstream media attention, and disseminate disinformation to silence enemies and seed revisionist history narratives. While the Philippine public’s moral panic about fake news is often directed at high-profile digital influencers and celebrities such as Mocha Uson who are seen to incite political divisiveness and harass journalists, Ong and Cabañes argue that the real chief architects of disinformation are hiding in plain sight—wearing respectable faces as leaders in their industry while sidestepping accountability." (http://newtontechfordev.com)
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