{"id":1779,"date":"2025-07-16T05:15:12","date_gmt":"2025-07-16T05:15:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pronews.in\/index.php\/2025\/07\/16\/ai-and-disinformation-fuel-political-tensions-in-the-philippines\/"},"modified":"2025-07-16T05:15:12","modified_gmt":"2025-07-16T05:15:12","slug":"ai-and-disinformation-fuel-political-tensions-in-the-philippines","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pronews.in\/index.php\/2025\/07\/16\/ai-and-disinformation-fuel-political-tensions-in-the-philippines\/","title":{"rendered":"AI and disinformation fuel political tensions in the Philippines"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Manila, Philippines \u2013<\/strong> When former Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte was arrested by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in March, Sheerah Escuerdo spoke to a local television station, welcoming the politician\u2019s detention on charges of murder linked to his war on drugs.<\/p>\n

Escuerdo, who lost her 18-year-old brother, Ephraim, to Duterte\u2019s war, clutched a portrait of her sibling during the interview with News 5 Everywhere as she demanded justice for his killing.<\/p>\n

Days later, she was shocked to find an AI-generated video of her slain brother circulating on Facebook, in which he said he was alive and accused his sister of lying.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m alive, not dead. Are they paying you to do this?\u201d the computer-generated image of Ephraim said.<\/p>\n

The video, posted online by a pro-Duterte influencer with 11,000 followers, immediately drew thousands of views on Facebook.<\/p>\n

One of the comments read, \u201cFake drug war victims\u201d.<\/p>\n

It was Escudero and her brother\u2019s image from her News 5 Everywhere interview that the influencer had used to falsify their family\u2019s tragedy. The video has since been reposted countless times, spreading to other social media platforms and resulting in Duterte supporters hounding Escuerdo daily.<\/p>\n

\u201cI wake up to hundreds of notifications and hate messages,\u201d she told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe worst thing is reading comments of people who believe this is real!\u201d she added.<\/p>\n

The same kind of harassment has been levelled at other vocal drug war victims, especially those under the group Rise Up, who actively campaigned for the ICC\u2019s intervention.<\/p>\n

Duterte\u2019s arrest in March came amid a bitter power struggle between the ex-leader and his former ally, the incumbent president of the Philippines, Ferdinand Marcos Jr. Their alliance collapsed last year due to disagreements over policy, including Marcos Jr\u2019s courting of the United States. The president\u2019s supporters are now leading an effort to impeach Duterte\u2019s daughter, Sara, from her post as the country\u2019s vice president.<\/p>\n

As tensions have escalated, supporters of Duterte and Marcos Jr have stepped up digital smear campaigns, using disinformation. Apart from fake accounts and doctored images, the disinformation mix has noticeably included AI-generated content.<\/p>\n

Both the Marcos Jr and Duterte clans have been known to deploy disinformation tactics. Marcos Jr won the election in 2022 following a disinformation campaign that sought to whitewash his father Ferdinand Marcos\u2019s brutal rule during the 70s and 80s.<\/p>\n

But fact-checkers and experts say the recent uptick in posts peddling false narratives can be attributed more to the Duterte camp.<\/p>\n

Disinformation nation<\/h2>\n

Victims of the drug war, their families, supporters and even their lawyers say incessant online disinformation has targeted them.<\/p>\n

In a statement, the National Union of People\u2019s Lawyers (NUPL), which represents Rise Up, a group of drug war victims, said the \u201conline hate\u201d was being \u201cdirected at widows, mothers, and daughters of drug war victims, attempting to intimidate them into silence\u201d.<\/p>\n

Both NUPL and Rise Up have now formally requested the government to investigate the increasing online harassment.<\/p>\n

The campaign by Duterte\u2019s supporters aims to discredit the ICC, demonise their detractors and paint their family as persecuted victims leading to and after the May 2025 mid-term polls, according to Danilo Arao, mass media expert and convener of election watchdog Kontra-Daya.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Duterte camp aims to deodorize the image of both patriarch and daughter. They will resort to disinformation to get what they want, even if it means twisting certain data,\u201d Arao told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n

He pointed to posts circulating online that the ICC consented to grant Duterte\u2019s request for an interim release, which in reality was denied.<\/p>\n

The surge in disinformation has caused worry among Filipinos.<\/p>\n

A report released in June by Reuters Digital News found that a record number of Filipinos \u2013 nearly 7 out of 10 \u2013 were more concerned with disinformation than ever before.<\/p>\n

In the same month, Duterte-allied senator, Ronald Dela Rosa, shared an AI-generated video on his official Facebook page. The video, which showed a young man criticising the \u201cselective justice\u201d targeting Sara Duterte, was posted on June 14, garnering at least 8.6 million views before it was taken down.<\/p>\n

The vice president defended the video, saying there\u2019s \u201cno problem sharing an AI video supporting me as long as it\u2019s not for profit\u201d.<\/p>\n

Arao, the mass media expert, countered, saying the politician is trying to normalise disinformation, and that she \u201cbadly needs media literacy\u201d.<\/p>\n

Tsek.ph, the Philippines\u2019 pioneer fact-checking coalition, noted that fact checks on posts about Duterte\u2019s ICC arrest over a six-week-period account for almost a quarter of the 127 news articles curated by the group.<\/p>\n

The figure surpasses the two dozen pieces of news related to Sara Duterte\u2019s impeachment.<\/p>\n

On Sara Duterte\u2019s deepfake defence, Tsek.ph coordinator Professor Rachel Khan told Al Jazeera that \u201cfor the educated, it reinforces their already tainted image of disregarding truth. But for followers, it could reinforce the dictum that \u2018perception is truth.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

In reality, the popularity of the Duterte family has waned significantly.<\/p>\n

Opinion and approval surveys conducted in March indicate that at least 51 percent of the public want Rodrigo Duterte to be tried for his alleged crimes. Likewise, polls in June found that at least 66 percent of people want Sara Duterte to confront allegations of corruption against her through an impeachment process.<\/p>\n

AI growth<\/h2>\n

The government of last year launched a task force to mitigate disinformation and the use of AI. However, spikes in disinformation were already noticeable in December as the Marcos-Duterte rivalry heated up.<\/p>\n

Tsek.ph tracked the increasing use of AI in disinformation before the mid-term elections held in May this year. It found that from February to May, out of 35 unique altered claims, nearly a third \u201clikely involved deepfake technology to impersonate public figures or distort reality\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is a problem of human behaviour, not AI. It\u2019s a disinformation influence operations problem, exacerbated by the unethical usage of AI tools,\u201d Carljoe Javier, executive director of Data and AI Ethics PH, told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n

All mainstream political forces in the Philippines have, to some extent, deployed AI technologies to boost their agendas. The latest OpenAI Safety Report revealed that Comm&Sense, a Manila-based tech firm, used AI for a campaign using thousands of pro\u2011Marcos Jr and anti\u2011Duterte comments across Facebook and TikTok.<\/p>\n

Besides generating content, the firm also used AI to analyse political trends and even draft public relations strategies.<\/p>\n

The report said Comm&Sense manufactured TikTok channels to post identical videos with variant captions while handling shell accounts to post comments and boost engagement.<\/p>\n

The use of AI to outline plans, not just create content, marks a shift away from the Marcos Jr administration employing troll armies as he did in his 2022 campaign.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you have the resources and the bully pulpit of the government, you can afford to keep on swatting the Dutertes and their partisans for whatever statements they have made against the Marcos government,\u201d said Joel Ariate Jr, a researcher tracking political developments at the University of the Philippines Third World Studies Center.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you put AI in the hands of an already good public relations or marketing team, the capacity for disinformation is amplified by so much. They can have one message and instantly generate 20 different versions of it,\u201d explained Javier.<\/p>\n

The Philippines has several pieces of legislation in congress concerning the responsible use of AI. For a healthy policy approach, Javier believes that technical and ethical experts would be crucial.<\/p>\n

He said he hoped the country\u2019s leaders can take important steps, but said he has doubts about their appetite for ethical AI legislation.<\/p>\n

\u201cIs there enough push for legislators to advance a policy given that they may be benefitting from the current state of political operations?\u201d he asked.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Manila, Philippines \u2013 When former Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte was arrested by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in March, Sheerah Escuerdo spoke to a local television station, welcoming the politician\u2019s detention on charges of murder linked to his war on drugs. Escuerdo, who lost her 18-year-old brother, Ephraim, to Duterte\u2019s war, clutched a portrait of … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1780,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1779","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pronews.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1779","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pronews.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pronews.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pronews.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pronews.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1779"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/pronews.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1779\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pronews.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1780"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pronews.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1779"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pronews.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1779"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pronews.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1779"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}