When former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte was arrested under an International Criminal Court warrant in March, an army of online defenders sprang into action.
The Philippine midterm elections for local and congressional representatives were just two months away, and a group of pro-Duterte Senate candidates was challenging a slate loyal to Duterte’s ally-turned-rival, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.
But according to expert analysts, many of Duterte’s online defenders weren’t real. There were some genuine pro-Duterte influencers, with real people manning the accounts, but they were bolstered by a vast network of inauthentic accounts, all of which pummeled the Philippine elections with a deluge of disinformation, generative artificial intelligence, and deepfakes.
The noise came from all directions. Marcos himself rode an army of online influencers to victory in 2022, spreading false narratives and distorting his family’s dark political history. Many pro-government accounts have attacked progressive candidates by “red-tagging” them, labeling them without evidence as members of the communist New People’s Army, an armed rebel group.
Pro-Duterte influencers are increasingly in sync with online accounts that parrot narratives friendly to the Chinese government, raising concerns of foreign influence.
Just how much this matters on the ground is uncertain. In the end, pro-Duterte candidates had a strong showing in the May elections, winning five of the Senate’s 12 open seats, although Duterte allies also lost seats in local elections. But it’s a sign of how closely Duterte’s cause and Beijing’s interests are being tied together.
There has been an observable rise in Chinese-aligned accounts whose behavior mirrors patterns associated with foreign influence, said Janina Santos, a Philippines-based analyst for Doublethink Lab, a Taiwan-based think tank that researches Chinese influence operations.
Ahead of the election, Doublethink and its India-based partner ThinkFi found a network of accounts on X posting “pro-Duterte, anti-Marcos stuff but also amplifying some pro-China stuff,” Santos said. These accounts were boosting content from a network of seeder accounts that would post content from pro-China influencers, propaganda sites, and state media, she said.
“We noticed that the inauthentic accounts are also promoting pro-PRC narratives,” Santos said, using an acronym for the People’s Republic of China. “We’re not going to say the PRC has a direct hand in it. But there are indications of what we call ‘foreignness’ in the observables that we’ve been monitoring.”
Santos drew distinctions between such inauthentic accounts and those helmed by real people, many of whom echo pro-China narratives as a byproduct of amplifying their support of Duterte. But the presence of inauthentic accounts has exploded, especially on X, with the tech analysis firm Cyabra telling Reuters in April that around a third of all pro-Duterte accounts on that platform were fake.
These patterns are similar to what has been observed in Taiwan, which has spent years as a target of Chinese disinformation campaigns. The Philippines has served as a sort of trial balloon. When Duterte and Marcos began publicly feuding last year, it created a fertile environment for influencers aligned with each faction, especially as Marcos began drawing the country away from China.
Marcos has sharply opposed Beijing’s claims in the contested South China Sea, and the China Coast Guard has confronted Philippine vessels in a series of maritime confrontations. The Duterte administration, by contrast, was friendly to China, declining to challenge its maritime claims and pursuing joint energy exploration in the South China Sea.
In April, a Philippine National Security Council official said there were indications that Chinese state-sponsored information operations were attempting to prop up candidates China wanted to win while attacking those it wanted to lose.
The Senate is currently probing Chinese espionage activities, which can take many forms, such as influencing local and provincial politics. But it can be hard to quantify the extent of Chinese influence, especially when inauthentic accounts wade into already charged domestic issues, such as Duterte’s arrest.
Maria Elize Mendoza, an assistant professor at the University of the Philippines Diliman who has researched disinformation campaigns, said she does not think pro-Duterte influencers were the main factor in the victories of pro-Duterte candidates. She noted that reelected candidates such as Christopher “Bong” Go and Ronald “Bato” Dela Rosa, both staunch Duterte allies during his presidency, have broadened their support bases.
Pro-Duterte influencers were likely responsible for Marcos’s approval ratings dipping after Duterte’s arrest, Mendoza said, by casting doubt on the legality of his arrest and “blaming the Marcos administration for allowing the ‘kidnapping’ of Duterte.”
“The emotionally charged content framing Rodrigo as a frail, old man who’s ‘alone’ in a foreign prison also gained significant traction,” she said.
There has also been a consistent presence of deepfakes and AI-generated content targeting Marcos, she said. Last year, an audio clip went viral in which Marcos appeared to authorize a military attack against China. Later, a video showed an individual resembling Marcos sniffing a powdered substance, helping to amplify baseless claims that Marcos uses drugs made by Duterte and his supporters. The government flagged both clips as deepfakes.
But deepfake content has also been used by pro-government accounts to attack progressive candidates and activists, said Ian Angelo Aragoza, an education officer for the Computer Professionals’ Union who has researched online influence operations in the Philippines.
The rise of generative AI and ease of creating deepfakes allowed such accounts to scale up and produce such campaigns “at a faster rate, with better quality and with a larger reach,” Aragoza said. Some Facebook pages, which are still live, regularly use altered images to label progressive figures, such as politicians representing the leftist Makabayan bloc, as communist rebels.
While Marcos pledged to end the red-tagging of progressive politicians and activists at the outset of his administration, the practice remains commonplace and is often perpetrated by members of the government’s anti-communist task force. Rights groups have repeatedly warned that victims of red-tagging are susceptible to kidnapping or extrajudicial killing.
The Philippine government has partnered in the past with social media giants such as Meta and TikTok, Aragoza noted. “It should maximize its partnerships with them to be able to prevent incidents of red-tagging to happen at all and quickly be able to suppress these posts if any do show up,” he said.
Santos said the China-aligned pro-Duterte accounts she witnessed did not generally engage in deepfakes but did manipulate photos and use generative AI. For instance, when AI images resembling Studio Ghibli characters began trending in late March, pro-Duterte accounts began spreading “Ghiblified” images of Duterte being taken to The Hague, she said. Later, an AI image purporting to show a statue of Duterte in the Netherlands spread among his supporters.
Many of these accounts have been around since Duterte first became president in 2016, aided in large part by a Cambridge Analytica operation to harvest the data of Facebook users and spread propaganda favorable to Duterte—an operation it infamously repeated in that year’s U.S. presidential election. A whistleblower from the company later called the Philippines a “petri dish” for disinformation campaigns. Now, China may see the country in the same way.
“The Philippines is patient zero when it comes to the infodemic,” Santos said. “We’re very susceptible to a lot of fake news.”
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