“HAVE you seen this page?” My friend asked while we were hanging out in his house, scrolling over Facebook over our respective phones. “I think he’s making a good point.”
He showed me a page of an avid Duterte supporter, with around 225,000 followers, and his latest video commentary about the dispersal by the police against the Lumads and Moro protesting at the US Embassy.
What appalled me was what this Duterte supporter was saying about the protesters. He ripped every ounce of truth away from the cries of the bloodied, bruised bodies and turned them into villains.
“These are people who got paid to create such scene. Haven’t you noticed why the biased media such as ABS-CBN and GMA were able to get footage right away? It’s clearly a setup against the President” he said straight-faced to the camera.
I would have liked to brush this away, knowing the extent of some Duterte-die-hards to believe their own truth. But this was different. This time, it was my friend who seemed convinced of his version of truth. Him and thousands more others sharing, liking and commenting on this video.
“Indeed, the protesters could have been paid,” he said. “I heard one of their leaders, didn’t she appear with de Lima before? They’re conniving.”
I have to inject the truth. “I know these people. I wrote stories about them and talked with them. C’mon, don’t you understand these Lumads and Moro people were protesting on the US Embassy because of American corporations and military encroaching on their land. Isn’t this what Duterte was opposed too,” I explained.
That night didn’t end with much debate, but it ended with me bothered with what I saw.
In that one minute video, there was nothing about asking what the Lumads and Moro were protesting about. There was nothing about condemning police brutality. There was no truth, just conspiracy.
There’s an article I read at vox.com that said “the internet — and social media in particular — is destroying … trust by filling people’s heads with prejudicial nonsense. If we don’t find ways to help people find more reliable information, it’s going to cause big problems in the long run.”
Social media helped propelled Duterte to the presidency with the army of online “Duterte diehards and warriors”. Now these groups continue to defend him, but they’re doing a disservice for the country’s unity.
They brand corporate media as biased, which is partly true. Media doesn’t own the truth, they say. But what truth do these “warriors and die-hards” possess? The “truth” that anyone criticizing or raising concerns on killings and poverty are “yellow-tards”, “addicts/pushers” and “noisy useless activists”.
I worry about this kind of fanaticism online. Because there are people like my friend who believes in Duterte, but online Duterte is a god who should not be questioned.
In this time of major reforms under Duterte, their dogmatism hurts the search for discourse and truth, the search for justice for Lumads, Moro people, and even those victims of drugs and crime on both sides of the fence.
The problem should not be defined by them as me-and-Duterte-against everyone. We should rather use social media as a tool for truth-seeking and empowerment, and not just simply an outlet for bashing and trolling in the comfort of anonymity on Facebook.
But more importantly, social media or any media is just an outlet, the truth is still out there in our third world blues. So there’s a need to log out from our phones and laptops for a while and plug in to the reality of a struggle for change.
tyvelez@gmail.com
