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BY AMBASSADOR BAYANI V. MANGIBIN (Ret.)
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Thursday, September 7, 2017
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IN A STATEMENT sent by his lawyer Raymond Fortun, Customs broker Mark Taguba cleared Vice Mayor Paolo Duterte and the presidential son-in-law Atty. Manases Carpio “from any involvement in the shipment of illegal drugs into the country, and any anomalies in the Bureau of Customs.” He stated further that “I also hereby apologize to Vice Mayor Duterte, Atty. Carpio and to the first family for the proliferation of fake news out of my testimony at the Senate.”
Taguba’s apology is unsettling. It creates a presumption that his testimony was distorted or manipulated by the media (both the traditional and social media) when he asserted “proliferation of fake news.”
This assertion could have been prompted by the accumulation of observation of recent events. There was this incident when opposition senators and other personalities were implicated without evidence by Justice Secretary Vitaliano Aguirre II to the terror attack in Marawi City based merely on a photo shared in social media. The Philippine News Agency (PNA) has been criticized by detained Sen. Leila de Lima as “fake news machinery” due to misrepresentation of facts when it reported that 95 states at the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) in Geneva, Switzerland were convinced that extrajudicial killings were nonexistent in the Philippines.
UPR, through its official twitter account, rebutted immediately the said claim. The National Union of Journalists of the Philippines (NUJP) sent a letter of inquiry and protest to PNA c/o Presidential Communications Operations Office’s (PCOO) Secretary Martin Andanar on the use of PNA to “legitimize the blatant manipulation of the truth”, particularly highlighting the UPR diplomatic faux pas.
There were several incidents when PNA used wrong photos in their news reports. PNA was subjected to ridicule when it used the logo of Dole Philippines instead of the official seal of the Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE). While this Dole pineapple incident might not be intentional, it has the same effect of fake news: misinformation and irresponsible reporting.
In the University of Oxford Computational Propaganda Research Project Study entitled “Troops, Trolls and Troublemakers: A Global Inventory of Organized Social Media Manipulation (2017)”, the Philippines was one of the 28 countries included in the study where political parties or individuals used social media manipulation as part of the campaign strategy. According to Sam Williams (2017), many “keyboard trolls” were hired in the campaign to promote the candidature of now President Duterte and they still continue up to this time that he is already the President. In an interview, President Duterte admitted using people to defend him in social media during the campaign period but not after he won the election.
The assertion of Mr. Taguba on the “proliferation of fake news” could also be attributed to the fact that almost half of the total Philippine population are active members of the social media. This makes the Filipinos one of, if not, the top users of social media worldwide. It is reported that Filipino users spend an average of four hours and 17 minutes a day. A substantial number of Filipinos have active accounts on Facebook as its access is provided free while other web sites including those of the newspapers incur data charges; thus, Filipinos rely on social media rather than traditional media for virtually all of their news and information, making them vulnerable to social media manipulation leading to the “proliferation of fake news.”
Indeed, fake news has become widespread like fake hair, false teeth, etc. Just like the fake hair that is used to cover the truth about one’s state of head, fake news is used to cover the truth in our heads. It is, then, imperative to clear our heads on what is true and false in absorbing all the news and information by subjecting them to careful examination or investigation in order to search for the truth.
We should, therefore, PROBE to PROVE. (ambaniman@gmail.com/PN)
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