With the May 12 polls fast approaching, the Commission on Elections has organized its own “keyboard warriors” of truth tellers, according to Comelec Chairman George Garica, who said that 30 of the poll body’s personnel have been assigned to man an information monitoring center in Quezon City, established in partnership with the Department of Information and Communications Technology.
“If they have keyboard warriors, we also have our own who would tell only the truth,” he said. “You see if we remain silent to (false) allegations and comments in social media, our elections will suffer,” Garcia said.
He noted that the Comelec has been requesting different social media platforms to take down misinformation and disinformation. However, it takes time to remove fake news from cyberspace.
The poll body chief stressed that they have to deal not only with vote buying and illegal campaigning, but also with massive misinformation and disinformation that threatens to tarnish the integrity of Monday’s elections.
With the polls just days away, he sees the disinformation and misinformation proliferating even more.
The DICT has admitted that Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, is not acting fast enough to take down spurious accounts and fake news. DICT Secretary Henry Rhoel Aguda met with Meta on May 2 to thresh out measures for strengthening existing enforcement mechanisms and improving response timelines.
“Filipino content carries cultural nuance – humor, sarcasm, regional dialects. Without deeper engagement from Meta’s moderation teams, critical context is missed and legitimate content may be wrongly removed or harmful content can slip through,” Aguda said. “They need to invest in localized moderation and clear escalation channels.”
With mere days to go before the elections, Comelec’s 30 or so keyboard warriors in Quezon City may not be able to make a significant difference, especially with the government still unable to get the response time it requires from social media companies like Meta. Although the effort is appreciated, it looks like another case of too little, too late.
Either way, we can only hope the effort can have an impact, if not lay the ground for future initiatives against misinformation and disinformation.*
