Should Leni Robredo Start Hiring A Troll Army?
Getting the ball trolling for 2022
If you are like me who has made it a noble duty to give a ray of hope in the form of sharing social media posts about the excellent COVID-19 response of the Office of the Vice President (OVP), then we are coming from the same place. And it’s an echo chamber, unfortunately.
To be frank, more than celebrating the brand of leadership Leni Robredo is showcasing, I also repeatedly share any content involving her because I wanted my DDS friends and relatives, who are the usual victims of misinformation as well, to see the genuine public service she is doing. That she doesn’t deserve the hate she’s getting. And, sure, I always get a decent online engagement with my reposts but it’s always coming from the same people. The day you admit that the pro-Leni Robredo online space that you have is just a social media bubble between a small number of people who have similar values, will be the day you entertain an uncomfortable question: should she just start playing dirty and hire a troll army?
If you still haven’t thought about that, then maybe the recent Pulse Asia poll could open your eyes. When asked who people would vote for in the 2022 elections, the results showed that she wasn’t even part of the top five. With just 6% of the respondents choosing her as president, she is in 6th place after Sarah Duterte, Isko Moreno, Bongbong Marcos, Grace Poe, and Manny Pacquiao. This is the troubling public perception still despite what we have witnessed as nothing but a clean execution of her mandate for the past five years. It can feel jarring to confront these numbers because we felt there was already a big media mileage of how the vice president was filling in the gaps of the administration’s handling of the pandemic. But that’s the problem, the “we” here refers to just us, a small chunk of the voting population.
This exposes the same problem of low awareness ratings that she had in the 2016 campaign period. Back then it was due to her being a neophyte, but now it was because she still refuses to dignify the non-stop trolling she receives. Keyboard warriors utilize different weapons: memes, fake news, spliced video interviews, and photoshopped images. All suggesting that she’s not doing anything or she’s of bad character and an incompetent vice-president. This well-crafted fabricated narrative is being shoved in the mouth of Filipinos all over the nation. And it’s a reasonable conclusion that this affects voter perception.
This disheartening low rating is one of the primary reasons why Leni Robredo is hesitant to run for president. A Rappler source disclosed that if we compare how many people online are being reached by OVP’s official page versus the disinformation campaign run against her, it’s 1:10. So if winning is the goal in 2022 and you have these figures, you know that what you’re currently doing is somehow deficient.
Comparing that to the social media mileage that the Duterte regime has, it’s no surprise then that his daughter, Davao City Mayor Sarah Duterte is topping the presidential candidates’ survey. Even President Rodrigo Duterte himself is even the preferred choice for vice president. So we could potentially see a Duterte-Duterte tandem in next year’s election. This, many believed, can be attributed to what their camp is willing to use that Robredo’s team has been dismissing — a troll army. An Oxford study found that Duterte’s presidential campaign team spent around PHP 10 million to hire “cyber troops” to spread pro-government propaganda and conduct smear campaigns against the opposition in 2016. And an RSF special report said that Duterte supporters have “call center hubs” to target media companies and journalists critical to government actions.
Could the answer to the VP’s dilemma just be a counter-troll army? And no, I don’t just mean us reporting fake news, flagging troll pages, and blocking cyber-bullies. Because we have been doing that for five years now and it’s not leading us to a permanent solution. Back in April 2020, Twitter suspended hundreds of fake accounts that were suspiciously duplicating content and hashtags that express support to Duterte. But we all know how easy it is to just make new Twitter accounts, right? The vice president herself even admitted that she regretted the ‘ignore the trolls’ instruction she gave her team in the first two years of her term. That was her way of taking the high ground, but the black propaganda kept on coming and worsening, and it completely overshadowed the actual work she’s doing.
Since then, we have seen a more vocal and visible Leni Robredo, giving tasteful clapbacks every time she’s on the receiving end of the tirades of the administration. The OVP team has already improved their social media presence about their programs as they acknowledged that there will always be skeptics if people can’t see “receipts” online. This is the “disente politics” that the Liberal Party (LP), which VP Leni chairpersons on, has been espousing. And it sounds all nice but this approach is proven to be ineffective in boosting the needed numbers. Who here also had their hearts broken when not even one of the Otso Diretso senatorial candidates of LP got in the magic 12 last 2019 midyear elections? They were all qualified, with impressive legislative backgrounds, and have performed well in public debates during the campaign. But administration bets knew that a public display of intellect is not what’s attracting voters, so many of them skipped such fora.
There is a power imbalance between the administration’s use and abuse of state machinery and troll army and the vice president’s insistence on decent and respectable politicking. Not only is there a lack of any offensive strategy in the online space by Robredo’s team to highlight the failures of the president, but their defense mechanism seems pointless because the people who needed to hear her side are not even being reached online. Yes, we celebrate how the OVP debunks the fake news against her but we (the ones stuck in our echo chamber) are not the ones who needed some convincing.
Entering the political arena inherently means you’re getting into one messy fight, but with how cyberspace became a crucial factor in campaigning in recent times, it seems Leni is not even on the same playing field as Duterte anymore. So should she pursue the presidency next year, I can’t help but wonder if having her own troll army could solve, or if not, at least provide a counterbalance to the online black propaganda aimed at her. Naturally, if you’re one of the politicians gunning for the presidency, you would be preparing your weapons and bullets for any contender. And with that Leni Robredo seems to be a sitting duck.
So if we’re going to entertain the idea, what exactly do I think is the mode of operation that a troll army for presidential candidate Robredo will most likely employ? It’s reasonable to believe that violating any law is not something a lawyer-turned-state leader would even consider (Don’t we just wish some could just be like Leni?). So slander and libel (fake news) or any criminal act are out of the picture. But there is no shortage of valid criticisms towards Duterte and other questionable candidates; one does not have to lie to expose them. It’s just that the packaging and delivery should not only be done in debates and public fora. We have to engage DDS trolls in the language they speak and in the territory, they occupy. And it’s dirty politicking in the online space. We should unapologetically ridicule, hit below the belt, and be savage in social media!
But there is a big risk in this approach. It’s possible that instead of reclaiming what democracy should really be, the unintended consequence of engaging on this level could mean election discourse morphing into a mosh pit of extreme divisiveness and hate, far worse than we have ever witnessed. What’s stopping a Robredo supporter from submitting to character assassinations? Will they do personal attacks as well? Would they also disrupt and swamp the other candidates’ Facebook pages? We are seeing these online activities from our friends doing it independently nowadays. What more if it has become an organized cyber work?
Pitting two troll armies against one another will be online warfare that is going to damage the social fabric. After a few years of Duterte politics and the DDS troll army turning the Philippines into the broken country it is today, Leni Robredo doing the same thing could normalize it further for everyone. And the VP — the bastion of hope during the Duterte regime — ending up like that could be seen as a seal of approval. And mind you, she could still lose the election. And ultimately, she would’ve lost her integrity and character in the process. That is the opportunity cost that we’re seeing here. The biggest casualty of troll warfare is completely losing our sense of democracy because someone who has safeguarded it for so long caved in and compromised.
So, should Leni Robredo utilize a troll army?
If you say YES, know that I completely understand where you are coming from. It’s not an easy decision. We are fed up and I’d like to believe we did try to be decent. But that’s futile when you’re talking to a paid troll. But if you are seeing this as a viable option, you have to factor in the cost of hiring paid trolls. And the campaign budget is already a big deterrent for Leni’s bid for the presidency. Moreso, you also have to picture the opportunity cost. How are we going to handle the Philippines that we’ll be welcoming post-2022 elections? How to do damage repair? How do we justify and sanitize the course of action we did to everyone, especially those who are undecided? Don’t you think the DDS troll army will take it as a trigger for launching more vicious attacks?
But if you’re like me who says NO to this, we have to first acknowledge that we are not on the higher moral ground compared to those who said yes. Because it’s a choice between better winnability versus staying true to your principles. And winning could mean an end to tyranny. Isn’t that the best outcome? Both end goals are equally important.
And so with that, if you preclude Leni from hiring trolls, know that it means more work for her. And we have to take our share of the burden. Just because we want to feel good about ourselves by pushing Leni to keep everyone’s morals intact doesn’t mean she has to do this solo. That’s selfish of us to expect. There’s real action needed if we want her to win. The kind of volunteerism we’ve been doing before is no longer enough. We will most likely lose if we just do the same things we did in the 2016 and 2019 national elections. She will be facing trolls that are paid to hijack the election discourse for at least eight hours per day, five days a week, and the labor force is strong on this one. They are an organized unit and have a few years of “work experience” already. They have varying skills and could deliver different media output — from memes, anecdotes, edited videos and images, and down to fake news. They have a wide network of micro-influencers and a good knowledge of social media algorithms. Do you think our reposts or hashtags or profile photo banners are commensurate responses to these? Knowing the inner workings of troll farms, you should calibrate that to the commitment and online engagement level you’re going to offer. And we have to convince others to do the same voluntarily.
Should Leni Robredo run as president in 2022, she will not just be running against the other candidates. She will be facing a massive troll army. We asked her to be on the frontline. But will you stand by her throughout the war?
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Andrew Beso is a Manila-based content creator who is exploring different ways of sharing art — whether it be written, spoken, and visualized. Aside from being in Medium, his work can also be seen on Youtube, Instagram, and Tiktok.
He is using his undergraduate and master’s degree in Economics and Political Economy, respectively, in discussing social issues through creative expressions.
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