The Philippine Government’s Losing War on Disinformation

The results of the 2018 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), an achievement test taken by 15-year-olds globally, turned the country inside out in December.

Emblazoned across broadsheets and news chyrons alike was the splashiest takeaway: among 79 countries that took the test, the Philippines ranked dead last in Reading and was second lowest in both Math and Science. It was reported—accurately so—as a watershed moment.

But buried beneath the deluge of think pieces, policy papers and glossy reports to emerge from the results was one particularly alarming, if largely overlooked, statistic. Only 8.7 percent of test-takers worldwide on average demonstrated the ability to distinguish between fact and opinion.

When limited to data from Filipino test-takers, that figure sunk even lower. 

A minuscule 0.1 percent displayed skills associated with being able to separate fact and fiction. And these students weren’t fed abstract questions. Reading passages on the PISA have the look and feel of a social media post—material these kids almost surely consume on a daily basis.

Anyone with a Facebook account will hardly see this as a surprise. The rise of disinformation globally has been felt acutely in the Philippines, often referred to as a petri dish for the pernicious tactics of information warfare that ultimately worm their way into western democracies.

But it should still do quite a bit to shift our perspective. Fake news isn’t just about troll farms in China or Russia. It’s about the failure of everyday systems—education, health, economic—to equip citizens at the most basic levels to deal with the vastness of information available to them. 

At no time has this been more pronounced than now, amid the global pandemic caused by the coronavirus disease (COVID-19).

“We’re not just fighting an epidemic; we’re fighting an infodemic,” said World Health Organization director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. In just the three weeks after COVID-19 spread outside China, the US State Department recorded 2 million tweets peddling conspiracy theories.

These ranged from bizarre fare like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation creating the virus to ideas that have crept into the mainstream, like the notion that it was cooked up as a bioweapon—an allegation parroted by our very own Sen. Vicente “Tito” Sotto III during a Senate hearing.

Disinformation is already dangerous. But against the backdrop of a fast-moving and highly contagious disease, we’re no longer just talking about the undermining of trust in democratic institutions. COVID-19 has raised the stakes exponentially. This is now about life and death.

The virus has laid out the most fertile possible ground for the spread of false information. Because as chaos and confusion has amplified, traditional gatekeepers—the media, fact-checkers and content moderators—have forcibly receded.

All the while, modern psychological research suggests the prevailing sense of uncertainty makes us more likely to accept any information that provides even a modicum of security or control.

The government, however, is taking on fake news in all the wrong ways. President Duterte’s rambling, sporadic addresses to the nation have never been about allaying our fears. He has long relied on fear as a tool of governance—he only knows how to magnify it.

This is the lens through which we understand the veiled language in Section 6 of Republic Act No. 11469, or the Bayanihan to Heal as One Act, which penalizes “individuals or groups creating, perpetrating or spreading false information” with up to two months in jail and a P1-million fine.

“The fact is that Section 6(6) seeks to punish people for an offense that, legally, does not even exist,” a group of media organizations and press freedom advocates wrote in a joint statement.

“The law will leave it up to the government to be the arbiter of what is true or false, a prospect that cannot invite confidence given the fact that many administration officials, including the chief executive, have been sources of disinformation and misinformation,” it added.

Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director of Human Rights Watch, similarly flagged the provision as prone to misuse by authorities and a likely pretext to a broader “crackdown on online criticism of government efforts.”

The reality since then has only cemented these concerns.

The Philippine National Police arrested at least 32 people between March 9 and April 5 for sharing news on social media that supposedly “caused panic among people.” These suspects  hailed from all over—Quezon City, Calabarzon, Mimaropa, the Visayas, Zamboanga, Caraga.

News of the arrests were packaged in a vague release sent to the media in early April. It did not contain any details on the nature of the “fake news” spread by those arrested and charged. I asked the PNP spokesperson, Brig. Gen. Bernard Banac, who said he would need to check.

Police this month even tore down placards at Sitio San Roque, an informal settlement in Quezon City, that demanded nothing other than an end to their hunger.

The PNP is far from the only law enforcement agency suddenly concerned with disinformation. It was also revealed that the National Bureau of Investigation has issued over a dozen subpoenas in relation to investigations regarding alleged fake news.

Like the PNP, it has not cared to let the public know what this misinformation was.

The aggressive nature of these efforts—taken in the totality of the government’s fraught history with free expression—leave little doubt that state agents are cloaking the criminalization of free speech in the benevolent premise of a war on disinformation.

The experience in China, a country with one of the most heavily censored media industries in the world, is particularly instructive. The grand bargain of authoritarianism has always been the surrender of liberty in exchange for security.

But excellent reporting on President Xi Jinping’s early response to news on the virus clearly showed how COVID-19 spread because of—and not despite—his iron-fisted rule. Its swift and aggressive purge of information was paid for with the loss of life.

Suppressing criticism and stifling the press never makes a society safer.

If the government was serious about combating the spread of disinformation, it would do well to learn from the mistakes it has made in its war on drugs and even the national response thus far to COVID-19.

Just as it can’t afford to substitute public health solutions with brute force to stem the virus, disinformation cannot be fought with an ever expanding menu of penalties. The PISA results showed the widespread inability to process information is less a product of malicious intentions than institutional failures.

Former Sen. Joey Lina, who I spoke to about the PISA results, underscored that discernment was a function of intellect, which in itself is intimately connected with education, health and socioeconomic power.

The response must be equally holistic. It means training our public school teachers to be media literate—and paying them a fair wage. It means grappling with our alarming rates of child stunting and malnutrition. It means an economic safety net that stops kids from dropping out.

Especially in a time of crisis, we must vigorously reassert the need for more—and not less—speech and expression. The health of our people and our democracy relies on it.