Upping the Ante

Cong Corrales .

LATE last week, a politician ranted on a live Facebook session about trolls, allegedly maintained by city hall, who were attacking him. It was surreal.

On one hand, it was interesting to see the man, fairly or unfairly referred to as the “father of trolls,” squirm at the proposition that his group is getting a dose of its own medicine — trolling. For the politician to go online and preach about the ills of trolling is nothing short of a standup comedy. It was full of irony, not to mention, nonsequiturs.

I doubt if we can trust anyone seeking an elected government position who spends a lot of time lurking on social media platforms than engaging people in the real world setting. I’ve always found that sinister. Case in point: The Donald.

On the other hand, you have a mayor wannabe who has all the time in the world to be concerned with the social media buzz about him.

I’d like to point out that the man has been referred to as the social media director the President’s cyber troops during the 2016 presidential campaign.

No less than a study of the University of Oxford found that the President’s group spent around P10 million to hire trolls who would spread propaganda for the then presidential candidate and to target those who were against him.

The study, titled “Troops, trolls, and troublemakers: A global inventory of organized social media manipulation,” found that the poison of choice of trolls and their handlers involve “verbal abuse, hate speech, and discrimination against the values, beliefs or identity of a user or a group of users online.” Netizens were dumbfounded and couldn’t help but be silenced online.

I found the rant of the “social media director” last week to be ironic. Given what his group’s social media operators did in 2016, he should be the last entity to lash out at trolling.

I have always believed that negative or “black” campaigning will never prosper in a relatively small town of electorates. This scheme of deception online might have worked in the national scale as we have seen in the last national elections, but I doubt it would work in a more intimate and constricted space like Cagayan de Oro, a city where almost everyone is either related or at least knows everybody in government service.

It is what I love about this city. Although it has been included in the Top 10 list of the most competitive cities in Mindanao (ranked second), it has managed to maintain its “barriotic” character. While it has become a relative metropolis, one could still ask a neighbor for cooking oil, salt, and other mundane domestic needs.

In the end, what matters is how well our politicians have presented themselves in the real world because, by now, people have realized about the machinations in the social media platforms.

The city electorate cares much more about how these candidates are going to forge a better city than to listen or read their mudslingings. That is why we have launched the “100% Politics” in our paper.

Through that democratic space, we do not write about what the candidates intend to do once in office but their group’s representatives do. Through this space, voters would see which group has the intellectual stamina and zest for public service.

One editor puts it this way: “If the groups cannot present and articulate their ideas, more so submit articles about what they stand for and about their platforms of government, then why are they running in the first place?”

I agree with that. So far, at least two groups have articulated their visions for the future of the city and the province based on my own scorecard. The others have contained their articles to praising the exploits of their individual candidates.

The city’s or the province’s experiences have shown us that it doesn’t take one individual but a collective effort of a group to realize their vision of development. It is elementary to deduce that without a clear vision, mission, and goal, these groups could be bereft of public service in mind but individual political ambition. In both characteristics, by the way, the city or the province lose.

Ever hopeful as I am, I am looking forward to more substantial and intellectually stimulating articles in this paper’s “100% Politics.” Anyway, there’s still time to make a turnaround and show their respective constituents what they’re made of.

I’ll be crossing my fingers and toes.