Trolling pattern

Herbie Gomez .

ONE will have to be really dumb in order not to see this pattern.

On July 26, 2017, the manilastandard.net posted a news report that quoted President Duterte as admitting to have paid trolls to defend him on social media but he claimed it only happened during the 2016 campaign period.

The report, authored by John Paolo Bencito, also quoted Duterte as saying that he may have spent more than P10 million “all during the campaign.”

Duterte’s pronouncements were a response to a University of Oxford study that found out that the Duterte propaganda machinery spent some US$200 thousand or approximately P10 million to deploy an army of social media trolls against the opposition, non-partisan critics included. (The study, “Troops, Trolls and Troublemakers: A Global Inventory of Organized Social Media Manipulation,” authored by Samantha Bradshaw and Philip Howard of the University of Oxford, can be found in this link: http://comprop.oii.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/89/2017/07/Troops-Trolls-and-Troublemakers.pdf )

Bencito quoted Duterte: “I spent P10 million? Me? Maybe in the elections, in the elections I spent more than that… They were all during the campaign.”

To play down the study, Duterte said the University of Oxford was a school for “stupid people,” unmindful that academics all over acknowledge it as one of the top educational institutions in the world. (Funny. That was like a first grader making an assertion that Albert Einstein had lacked intellectual acuity and had no fundamental understanding of science.)

Although what Duterte wanted to do was to brush aside the Oxford study, he ended up acknowledging, unwittingly, that there was truth in it when he admitted to paying trolls on social media. Everyone knows how the trolls cluttered up and brought down to record lows the level of public discussions during the emotionally charged 2016 presidential election period. Duterte’s admission that he spent “more than P10 million” for the network of social media trolls during the 2016 election period suggests that the massive disinformation campaign had his imprimatur. That suggests that he sanctioned the half-truths, outright lies and, yes, the fake news. These were spread in order to deceive people — a person who deceives is, naturally, a deceiver and a liar.

Yet that admission is typical of Duterte who says things in a way that leaves enough room for his spokespersons to subsequently dismiss as mere jests or hyperboles. And, then, we find the public discussion back to square one — and going in circles.

The thing about the University of Oxford study is that there are available data and statements of people who were actually involved in the campaign. The data show a pattern. These can be tested. These are demonstrable, and these jibe with the statements of insiders who are witnesses.

Take Nic Gabunada, for instance, who served as the director of the Duterte election campaign’s social media team in 2016. In a Rappler interview right after the 2016 elections, he revealed that the budget given his group was P10 million. In that same interview, Gabunda said, “I still have money to return to the campaign financier. It’s all volunteer work… The entire campaign would have been worth millions, but because it’s all volunteer work, it’s not big.”

That settles whether or not Duterte’s response to the Oxford study was a joke, an extravagant exaggeration or simply the truth.

Having established that, is there a way for citizens to determine if the same well-oiled machinery has been upgraded in order to carry out a tax-funded state-sponsored Joseph Goebbels-like propaganda campaign up to this day?

After the 2016 elections, we see the same pattern from time to time. The pattern becomes evident whenever the Duterte administration wants to get something done or whenever it is confronted with a public relations nightmare.

It weaponized trolling. When this administration moved heaven and earth to put its staunchest critic, Sen. Leila de Lima, behind bars, the army of trolls worked ’round the clock to smear the woman’s reputation. Until now, while de Lima is locked up, no one has ever presented unquestionable proof that she has drug links or that she is really the woman in the blurry images supposedly grabbed from a sex video that no one has really ever seen. Here’s a wager: if anyone can present that alleged sex video and show, without a doubt, that the woman there is really de Lima, I will correct myself in this column, and publicly apologize for making a mistake.

The sex-video hoax was an essential ingredient in the black propaganda in that it gave de Lima the Scarlet Letter. By making that message stick in a society where a male President can entertain his audience with boastful talk about his womanizing and where women are frowned upon even on mere suspicion — I repeat: mere suspicion — of promiscuousness, it then became easy for the Duterte black propaganda machinery to make gullible people believe that the “fornicator” or “adulterer,” the “woman of illepute,” was a protector of illegal drug syndicates despite the absence of clear evidence.

It looks like what happened was that de Lima, separated from her husband, had an affair with her driver and from there sprang the half-truths, exaggerations and lies. The witnesses are mostly prisoners being held in the neck by the Department of Justice which controls the New Bilibid Prison. Shortly before they testified, there was a jail riot and a prominent inmate was stabbed to death. It’s not really unthinkable why that was a chilling message to inmates that unwillingness to cooperate would result in lethal consequences for them.

And needless to say, Ronnie Dayan, de Lima’s former driver and lover, has been under duress since Day 1 of his arrest. The man, given this kind of pressure, will likely say anything in the script.

Before the smear campaign, Duterte threatened de Lima. On May 26, 2016, the then president-elect Duterte was quoted in a Philippine Daily Inquirer report as warning the senator: “Hoy, de Lima, tumahimik ka! I will investigate you. I will file charges against you. Do not pick a fight with me, you will lose.”

Here, we see a President telling his critic that she would lose even before an investigation, and even before cases are filed. The warning was clearly a threat that he would use (read: deliberately abuse) his presidential powers by using government resources, and making the investigation arm and lawyers of the state go after his critic. Without a doubt, it was ill-motivated and pre-meditated.

And then the anti-de Lima trolling begun.

The same thing was done to former Chief Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno, and now, to Sen. Antonio Trillanes IV.

Ahh, you know when something is cooking and money is flowing when all of a sudden, the newsfeed is flooded with fake news. Only those with  subnormal intelligence don’t see this pattern. Pastilan.