"Internet trolls have been using this to tarnish reputations and to bully those who take an opposing point of view on hot-button issues."
It was ironic that the country’s largest telecommunications provider felt the need to issue an advisory Monday to explain that the six-hour global outage that hit millions of users of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp was not its fault.
“We wish to clarify that the said service interruptions were not caused by a PLDT network outage as other sites and online services remained accessible throughout the duration,” the advisory posted on Twitter said.
Whoever issued that advisory was probably unaware that some PLDT subscribers did, in fact, suffer a loss of internet and phone service that started at midnight Monday and lasted 12 hours–twice as long as the Facebook outage.
Still, the advisory emphasized the major role that Facebook and its other social media platforms play in the lives of millions of Filipinos
This influence was noted as early as 2019, when the Social Weather Stations (SWS) found that 21 percent or one in every five Filipinos—about 13.9 million people—used Facebook as their source of news. This was more than the 15 percent or 9.7 million adults who consumed news by listening to radio, and far more than the 2 percent or about 1 million who got their news from daily newspapers.
Television, the survey results showed, was still the top source of news in the country for 60 percent of adults or about 40 million people.
Of about 30.4 million Filipino adults who have at least one social media account, 31 percent or about 9.4 million people “like” or promote political or social issues-related posts shared by others.
Meanwhile, 14 percent use social media to follow political figures, 6 percent post their own thoughts on political or social issues, 5 percent repost political or social content shared by other users, and 4 percent share links to political stories. Only 2 percent use social media to “encourage other people to take action on important political or social issues” while 1 percent urge other people to vote.
The survey also found that Facebook is the most popular social media site in the Philippines, with 99 percent of adults who use the internet or about 30.3 million individuals using the platform. Youtube, Instagram, Twitter, and Viber trail, respectively.
All this influence should fuel concern among policymakers, given the recent revelations of a former Facebook employee, Frances Haugen, who testified before the US Senate that “Facebook’s products harm children, stoke division, and weaken democracy.”
“The company’s leadership knows how to make Facebook and Instagram safer but won’t make the necessary changes because they have put their astronomical profits before people,” said the whistleblower, who released tends of thousands of pages of internal research and documents that showed the company was aware of various problems caused by its apps, including Instagram’s potential “toxic” effect on teenage girls.
“Thirty-two percent of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse,” Facebook’s own internal research showed. “We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls.”
Haugen isn’t the first former employee to come forward with troubling details about Facebook.
In August 2020, Yael Eisenstat, a former CIA analyst, diplomat and national security adviser at the White House who worked at Facebook as the head of its elections integrity operations for political advertising, spoke at a TED Talk about how Facebook algorithms were poisoning the prospects of reasoned discourse by appealing to people’s worst instincts and weaknesses and sowing hatred, all in the name of “user engagement” that would keep people on the website longer.
Closer to home, we have seen how Facebook and other social media have been used by internet trolls to tarnish reputations and to bully those who take an opposing point of view on hot-button issues. We have also seen how Facebook has been used to spread misinformation, often from fictitious accounts.
In her testimony before the US Senate, Haugen, who worked as a product manager for civic integrity issues, urged lawmakers to regulate social media platforms, telling senators that Facebook “won’t solve this crisis without your help.”
Given the influence that Facebook has in the Philippines, this is an idea that our lawmakers should also look into—when some of them can take some time away from defending questionable government deals with shady companies.