Category Archive for: digital platforms

komentaryo

Tiktok and Surveys: The Dutertelenovela and political content

When Pulse Asia’s March surveys—both for Senatorial Elections and Trust Ratings of top government officials—came out, none of it was a surprise. Instead, what it was to me was a by-product of what I had been seeing on social media. And no not my own social media account and certainly not on my algorithm. Neither is it on Facebook or YouTube.

Instead, I’m talking about Tiktok, using an account that I use solely to watch Philippine political content since November 2021, when I realized that more and more people were on the app, watching content I wasn’t seeing on my own algorithms. It was on Tiktok that I saw the deluge of content that was rewriting Martial Law history, reframing those years into a time of peace, order, prosperity, which made the Marcoses the victims of people power that kicked them out in 1986. By the time the 2022 election results were in, all of it made complete sense relative to what I was seeing on Tiktok.

I am reminded of this now, in relation to the way the Tiktok content on the Dutertes have been shifting since March 11, when the patriarch was brought to the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, to face charges of committing crimes against humanity through his drug war. By the time the Trust Ratings and Senatorial Survey came out, all of it made sense, too.

(more…)

komentaryo

Llamas, Heydarian, Esguerra: the post-Duterte macho punditry

The thing with six years of a fascist leadership like Duterte’s, built on fragile masculinity and misogyny and violent rhetoric and male chauvinism is that it changes us culturally. Women and the LGBTQIA+ community are more sensitive, and therefore angrier, and rightfully so. We are also exhausted.

But the men. Oh the men.

It’s one thing to have had to deal with the likes of Banat By and Jeffrey Celis during Duterte years and the first years or so of Marcos governance when SMNI continued to give them a platform. It’s another thing altogether to find that even men who should know better, ones who claim they are better, media personalities even, can use exactly the same tone and tenor, the arrogance, the same machismo, as that which the six years of Duterte had enabled and encouraged.

And of course this could only surface at scale when they are talking about a woman like Sara Duterte. Because there is nothing like a woman in rage to get men frothing at the mouth. (more…)

komentaryo

Media crisis: Eating out of the Dutertes’ hand

If there’s anything six years of Duterte taught us, it’s that a government can survive simply on propaganda, especially one that surprises the populace with its utter kabastusan, its impropriety, where soundbites are all mainstream and social media need to ensure that news cycles keep moving and that they keep and grow their audience.

Now, under a Marcos Jr. leadership, the Duterte propaganda machinery is still at its best, doing what it knows to do: get attention. They know that it doesn’t matter if it’s considered as “good” or “bad”—all that matters is that they take over newsfeeds across our platforms.

Here is where we realize that while algorithms dictate what we see on every platform, i.e., Facebook, X, Tiktok, YouTube, etc., when all those algorithms actually show the same thing, then someone did their jobs right.

And as far as one can tell, it’s the Dutertes that have the power to cross over the different platforms, with as little as a soundbite during an otherwise random ambush interview with the media.

But here’s the other thing with Duterte propaganda: it is relentless. It cares very little about those of us who are critical of that family, or who think them despicable. Certainly it cares little about delivering actual data and facts about what it was like living under that misogynist, sexist, violent leadership. In fact, what it does consistently now is to highlight how much better Duterte years were than the past two years under Marcos. It doesn’t matter that this is untrue in terms of basic human rights, vicious rhetoric, ethical governance, compassionate leadership. All that matters is that they are repeating at scale this propaganda that Duterte was the best, across various platforms.

So close to the SONA though, and now with the rift-made-public between the President and Vice President, it’s also become crystal clear that we are as much players in this two-player game even as we seem to be outside of it. (more…)

komentaryo

Ponder propaganda: Fueling the Duterte machine

If there’s anything that one has consistently been reminded about throughout 2023, it is that we still do not know how to deal with the propaganda landscape that the Duterte leadership had established for six years, and which, regardless of the Dutertes’s “lesser” position politically, is the game we are all stuck playing.

I speak of 2023 because in 2022, we were all just in a post-election haze, regardless of where we were / are on the political spectrum. If you were on the side of Marcos-Duterte, you were just on a high, doing the parties, enjoying the perks that come with having campaigned for the winner. If you were on the side of Robredo-Pangilinan, then you would fall under either of two groups: the ones who disengaged completely from politics and governance, maybe in disgust, probably as a by-product of despair; or the ones who tried to keep the anger going by carrying on as if nothing had changed — after all, a Duterte is still in power, and Duterte himself seemed to have set the stage for a Marcos win.

Presidential sister Imee has said it in so many words: President Duterte had eradicated their enemies.

But also, and this seems important to realize for all of us, Duterte had set the stage for this present, where the opposition, at best, has completely lost its footing, regardless of where we are on that spectrum that spans the Liberals and the Left. (more…)

kultura

Icing on the cake: MTRCB, censorship, conservatism #CulturalCrisis

While it’s easy to jump in on the Movie and Television Review and Classification Board (MTRCB) decision to issue a summons to the producers of “It’s Showtime” for the purported “indecent acts” of real-life couple Ion and Vice Ganda, it is as easy to start finding even more offensive TV content that we imagine the MTRCB should find just as indecent.  But the more difficult conversation that needs to be had is this one: why does the MTRCB continue to exist in a purported democracy whose Constitution completely disallows censorship?

Maybe we can start with easier questions: how can one thing that happened on “It’s Showtime” be offensive, but the same thing happening on E.A.T. not be offensive at all? We could extend that to other shows that continue to use skimpily clad women dancing provocatively to sell products, or to function as counterpoints to macho show hosts and their punchlines.

Contrary to what the dominant mob on Twitter and Facebook (group-)think, it has nothing to do with homophobia, at least not on the part of Lala Sotto or the MTRCB.

Rather, it has everything to do with the way in which the MTRCB was imagined as a government agency that is supposed to “protect” our children and audiences from inappropriate TV and film content through the exercise of regulation-and-classification. It has everything to do with a government agency that is built on deliberately ambiguous notions of morals and public good. It has everything to do with an agency that is nothing more but an outdated vestige of the Martial Law regime, but strengthened and empowered during the Aquino admin that deliberately refused to engage with the cultural sector as a response to the Marcoses’ use of culture to further its oppressive regime.

It has everything to do with us — a public that cares little about cultural regulatory institutions like the MTRCB until it does something that’s “controversial” enough for our social media feeds. (more…)