"How has the Philippine disinformation landscape evolved since 2016? How different was the 2022 presidential election from previous electoral cycles? And what lessons can we learn from electoral triumphs and defeats often associated with disinformation? This report goes to the heart of these questio
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ns. Our aim is to understand the evolving character of disinformation—the tactics used, actors involved, the wider context in which disinformation unfolds, and the responses of the government, tech platforms, and civil society to these trends. In doing so, we hope to generate actionable insights on impactful responses to disinformation, with a view of preparing for the 2025 midterm election." (Introduction)
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"This report examines the characteristics and consequences of influence operations in the 2022 presidential election in the Philippines. The report makes three main claims: a) the term "influence operations" provides a broader frame to identify personalities, platforms, and practices that hack publi
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c attention, mobilize publics, and influence electoral out; b) influence operations build on cumulative impacts of longitudinal disinformation; c) The main consequence of influence operations in 2022 is the creation of parallel public spheres or two separate information ecosystems aligned with hardened political identities. The document concludes with pathways forward as the nation seeks to rebuild today's distorted public sphere." (Executive summary, page 7)
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"[...] this article contributes ethnographically grounded and comparative research of two democratic Southeast Asian countries dealing with urgent threats to media freedom and democracy: Indonesia and the Philippines. Our research identifies the main disinformation work models in Southeast Asia, mos
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t notably through the use of buzzers (Indonesia) and trolls (the Philippines). Our research examines the increasingly gray area between trolls, buzzers and disinformation, and their increasing relationship to political elites. By explaining recent practices of political disinformation campaigns and journalist harassment, we aim to deepen understanding as to how these campaigns are organized in order to prevent them in the future. This article ultimately calls for a critical collaboration with diverse stakeholders in countering 'fake news' by examining four dominant disinformation work models." (Abstract)
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"Recent years have seen the expansion of critical scholarship on humanitarian communication across a range of academic fields, sharing recognition of the centrality of media and communications to our understanding of humanitarianism as an agent of transnational power, global governance and cosmopoli
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tan solidarity. The Handbook brings into dialogue these diverse fields, their theoretical frameworks and methodological approaches as well as the public debates that lie at the heart of the contemporary politics of humanitarianism. It consolidates existing knowledge and maps out this emerging field as an important site of interdisciplinary knowledge production on media, communication and humanitarianism." (Publisher description)
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"The Multistakeholder Dialogue on Electoral Disinformation (MDED) project sought the perspectives of pro-democracy actors and key agents in the electoral process to map out election integrity initiatives, assess organizational capacities for disinformation mitigation, and identify influence operatio
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ns trends for 2022. Phase 1 of the project cast a wide net in sampling diverse participants both old and new players to fair elections projects. This report summarizes common themes from the focus groups and individual interviews with my own critical assessment of important gaps in coalition work and donor programming that MDED aims to enhance." (Page 8)
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"This report summarizes powerful research on the Philippines’ human rights sector in “survival mode” under Rodrigo Duterte’s violent regime. Historically known as the most active civil society in Asia, the Philippines human rights movement has faced an unprecedented crisis of legitimacy whil
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e burdened with the responsibility to advocate for the many victims of abuses. Drawing on interviews with human rights workers and their allies in journalism and the academe, this study captures diverse interpretations as to how human rights has become “broken,” “tarnished,” and “a bad word” within a short span of four years. It also describes sectoral, organizational, and generational conflicts in how seasoned veterans and younger activists have been strategizing differently in their efforts to win back public trust. This study identifies the long- and short-term trade-offs behind organizational strategies of frontlining and speaking out on the human rights abuses of the Duterte regime versus more under-the-radar backchanneling work focused on service delivery and grassroots organization. Taking a strategic communication perspective and worker-centered approach, our study specifically places the voices of the communication and technology workers in the human rights sector at the heart of our analysis. What our research uncovers is that despite their many creative experiments to connect with diverse constituencies, human rights organizations have still failed to invest material resources in sustainable communication infrastructures and empower their communication personnel. Almost half of the organizations we interviewed still had no staff member dedicated to communication or branding; communication workers continued to play peripheral roles in their organizations." (Executive summary, page 8)
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"The Philippines is one of the first countries where the potential for online disinformation threats to undermine democratic processes, especially during elections, was noticed [...] This report takes a deep look at an online survey that Internews conducted, explores the cultural and emotional dimen
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sions of disinformation and how they form part of the broader political transformations taking place in the Philippines, examines how the Philippine disinformation ecosystem fits into the regional landscape, looks into financial incentives and legislation, and formulates a set of strategic and programmatic recommendations to better tackle the issue of disinformation in the Philippines." (https://internews.org)
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"The euphoria that has accompanied the birth and expansion of the internet as a "liberation technology" is increasingly eclipsed by an explosion of vitriolic language on a global scale. Digital Hate: The Global Conjuncture of Extreme Speech provides the first distinctly global and interdisciplinary
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perspective on hateful language online. Moving beyond Euro-American allegations of 'fake news,' contributors draw attention to local idioms and practices and explore the profound implications for how community is imagined, enacted, and brutally enforced around the world. With a cross-cultural framework nuanced by ethnography and field-based research, the volume investigates a wide range of cases-from anti-immigrant memes targeted at Bolivians in Chile to trolls serving the ruling AK Party in Turkey - to ask how the potential of extreme speech to talk back to authorities has come under attack by diverse forms of digital hate cultures." (Publisher description)
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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 communities, artificially trend hashtags to hijack
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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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"Based on an extensive ethnographic study of television and audiences in class-divided Philippines, this is the first book to take a bottom-up approach in considering how people respond to images and narratives of suffering and poverty on television. Arguing for an anthropological ethics of media, t
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his book challenges existing work in media studies and sociology that focuses solely on textual analysis and philosophical approaches to the question of representing vulnerable others. Current questions in media ethics, such as whether to portray sufferers as humane and empowered individuals or show them ‘at their worst’ have so far used textual and visual analyses to convey the researcher’s own moral position on the matter. In contrast, this book, inspired by the anthropology of moralities, accounts for the different interpretations and moral positions of audiences, who are positioned in various degrees of social and moral proximity to those they see and hear on television. Winner of the 2016 Philippine Social Science Council Excellence in Research Award." (Publisher description)
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"Voice—understood as the ability to give an account of oneself and participate in social processes—is increasingly recognized as significant for humanitarian action and disaster recovery. Giving disaster-affected people the opportunity to make their voices heard has the potential to democratize
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humanitarianism and correct the power asymmetries on which it is based. Humanitarian agencies have embraced interactive communication technologies as tools for voice and participation. Drawing on a yearlong ethnography with communities affected by super-Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines, this article assesses the potential of new communication technologies for voice. Our findings highlight a disconnect between assumptions about technology present in humanitarian policies and the actual uses of technology by affected populations. The article traces the factors that facilitate, or hinder, participation and finds that communication technologies enable voice only if other parameters, such as a strong civil society, are present. Further, we observe that opportunities for voice are stratified, mapping onto existing social inequalities." (Abstract)
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