Friday’s hearing at the House tri-committee — the committees on public order and safety, information and communications technology, and public information — exposed some social media personalities’ practice of bending the truth or fabricating stories to capture clout, or a certain amount of popularity or influencer status among internet users.
Subjected to hours-long grilling by lawmakers, Krizette Laureta Chu, MJ Quiambao Reyes, and Mark Lopez eventually apologized for making sensationalized baseless claims. They were among the 11 initially invited by the three committees to shed light on their role in the spread of misleading, if not downright false, online content. They refused to attend at first and in fact sought relief before the Supreme Court, claiming that the probe could courtail their freedom of speech.
Now that disinformation has taken an ugly surge anew given the arrest of former President Rodrigo Duterte and his detention at the International Criminal Court, the hearing could not have been conducted at a timelier day.
One of the resource persons, Chu, posted that there would be mass resignations in the military and police following Duterte’s arrest. “They cannot be part of this government daw,” she wrote, even as she admitted in the hearing that no police officer had ever personally come forward to her to talk about restiveness in the force.
Chu, also identified as a newspaper editor, insisted she made sure she put the word “daw,” as if it would diminish her accountability for the gravity of what she was saying . “Daw” – “allegedly” – implies some form of hearsay, or secondhand report, rumor, or gossip.
Unfortunately, many Filipinos are bound to look past the use of such qualifiers, and make no distinction between a sentence that uses “daw” and one that does not, in effect stating what is claimed as an indisputable fact.
Chu and company may put the burden of distinction on their readers, but the very nature of their enterprise itself banks on the inability of people to do exactly that. It is here that they would be able to advance their skewed narrative, plant seeds of doubt, suggest a germ of an idea, and eventually mislead or spin a lie. And when a group of people is too emotional to read objectively, that could spell disaster for the collective psyche. Unfortunately, that same disaster would be a success in terms of achieving these influencers’ very aim.
It’s good to hear these social media personalities get a public dressing down from lawmakers – how many of them have themselves engaged or benefited from disinformation in less enlightened times, we wonder. Still, the public needs to be vigilant. Our reliance on technology for nearly all aspects of our lives makes us vulnerable to manipulation whether we realize it or not. It is our duty to build our resistance to such influence peddlers — who revel in fame but abhor the demands of verification – in their place.