Just after the bombing at a concert in Manchester, England, over the weekend and just after President Rodrigo Duterte declared martial law in Mindanao in response to the ISIS-inspired Maute group’s attack on Marawi City, various chain messages and stories found their way into mainstream and social media.
One such message purports to be from the Red Cross, warning about an intelligence report, allegedly confirmed by the staff of Philippine National Police Chief Ronald dela Rosa, that four women from Basilan were already in Manila and plotting to do suicide bombings in malls here.
All malls were on high alert, the message said, even if it implored the public to both “take the warning serious [sic]” and to just pass it on as private messages, never on one’s Facebook wall.
The warning is dubious, even at first blush. A more critical reader would know that it is a chain message designed to sow confusion and fear. And yet it got passed on, anyway, numerous times.
It is sad that Filipinos could easily fall prey to false or misleading information, and could not sometimes tell satire from a real story. Campaigns for more responsible consumption of information are being done by many institutions, even schools. But the learning process might be long and difficult.
Unfortunately, we struggle to learn all these alongside real experiences of threat and uncertainty.
There is no doubt terror is upon us. We hear reports of chaos in a land that would have been beautiful if it were not torn by strife. Here in the capital, we do not feel safe in crowded places, knowing that terrorists want to catch us most when our guard is down. We also do not believe those who assure us that the recent bombings in Manila are isolated incidents.
We understand that intelligence reports, being precisely that, are not communicated indiscriminately to the public, let alone through text messages or social media. What we need to have is trust in our law enforcement officers, to know that they are not too preoccupied with other wars to play their part in this war on terror.
We need to sit still and refuse to pass along false or unverified information, even if we had good intentions. And while we have to be mindful of our routines and observant of our surroundings, we should not in any way allow ourselves to be driven by fear such that we can no longer separate good information from bad.
