2 - Curing “Patient Zero”: Reclaiming the Digital Public Sphere in the Philippines

Summary

“Patient zero” was how Facebook executive Katie Harbath (2018) described the Philippines in a public talk in Germany, on the topic of “protecting electoral integrity on Facebook”. “That was the beginning”, she argued, referring to the election of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte in a country that prided itself to be one of Asia's oldest democracies. “A month later it was Brexit, and then Trump got the nomination, and then the US elections”, she added. Describing the Philippines as “patient zero” both illuminates and obscures the role of digital technologies in shaping democratic politics. It is illuminating insofar as it exposes the pathologies associated to strategies of digital campaigning that brought illiberal strongmen to power. In 2016, journalists, academics, civil society groups and even the Roman Catholic Church of the Philippines called out the toxic incivility and proliferation of fake news on Facebook. The Philippines’ Commission on Human Rights was alarmed with the growing extent of cyberbullying and harassment of citizens who posted critical views of President Duterte on social media. Female journalists were often targeted, particularly those who published unsavoury reports about the Duterte campaign (Rodriguez 2016). Meanwhile, 81 per cent of Filipinos reported having read fake news on social media according to a recent national survey (Pulse Asia Research Inc. 2018). These trends have led to international headlines about Duterte's “paid trolls” or “keyboard armies” who spread disinformation and amplify hate speech (Palatino 2017; Syjuco 2017; Williams 2017). For Rappler founder and CEO Maria Ressa (2016)—Time Magazine's Person of the Year for her work on press freedom—the “weaponization” of social media spells the death of democracy in the Philippines. The contagion of fake news and hate speech resulted in a series of proposed “cures” of patient zero. These include fact checking, promoting digital literacy, and anti-fake news laws.

The spread of digital disinformation is indeed a pathology that compromises the integrity of democratic politics. However, describing the Philippines as “patient zero” obscures the longer history of inequalities in economic and political power that created conditions for the proliferation of digital disinformation.