komentaryo – Katrina Stuart Santiago

There are many reasons to be entertained by the news that Rodrigo Duterte’s legal defense has decided to request that the International Criminal Court (ICC) “adjourn hearing indefinitely” because he is “not fit to stand trial.”

It is especially entertaining if one considers that for the past six months since his arrest, and since the family has been able to visit Duterte at the ICC Detention Center in the Hague, visiting family members have consistently stepped out to talk to the crowd, big and small, on what they call Duterte Street. And each and every time, they reassure this people: Duterte is okay.

If you’re on the Tiktok algorithm of the Dutertes, this is in fact what props it up. With the Vice President away from the Philippines most of the time, and her brothers not really worth any media coverage, what is here is massive content on Duterte based on updates from these family visits. And at no time did it seem like he has “cognitive impairment in multiple domains” that would make him unfit for anything at all.

During the June 2025 visits of Congressman Paolo Duterte, the image painted of the old man Duterte was of someone who has all his mental faculties together. According to Pulong, on June 16, Duterte had this message for his followers who were waiting outside the detention center: “Alagaan ang Pilipinas, alagaan ang mga Pilipino. Kaming mga pulitiko dadaan lang, ang importante bumuti ang Pilipinas during their time.” (Take care of the Philippines, take care of Filipinos. We politicians will be passing through, the important thing is to make sure the country become better during our time.)

And while both Pulong and his sister Vice President Sara Duterte would talk about how thin their father had become, the narrative was also consistent: thin, but okay.

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What is the size of a controversy? And how is a story magnified, amplified, expanded at this time when anyone at all can manufacture digital noise, generate so much content that it will make it to our newsfeeds despite our algorithmic bubbles?

The Rodrigo Duterte presidency was a grand display of how government propagandists could make mountains out of molehills, be it about the purported achievements of their beloved president, or about his declared political enemies. We now know what it takes to keep any narrative going, where content is constantly and consistently generated to feed it, to repeat what is being said, until it starts moving on its own. Case in point: the criticism against the elite, the label of dilawan, the terrorista-komunista tag, and even, the label bobotante.

This, to me, is how we know for sure that even the worst, most baseless false narratives, when un-addressed and un-dealt with, can and will fester. To the point that there is no curing it—not with the truth, and certainly not with the tools that are familiar.

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The recent Pulse Asia survey that shows the high approval ratings of the Duterte father and daughter should be reason for alarm for those of us who are: (1) on the side of democracy and freedom, justice and accountability, and (2) honest enough to admit we live in real fear of having a Duterte Version 2.0 (ala Trump Version 2.0) in 2028.

The old man Duterte himself has said, as have their propagandists, that Sara is worse than her father. I tend to believe them all. After all, if there’s anything we now know for sure, while she might not have the same kind of “charm” that her father did, she has built a powerful woman vibe, the kind that gets away with saying she imagined beheading the President; or that she will have him, his wife, and his cousin conditionally assassinated; the kind that gets away with saying she wants a bloodbath. The kind that went on stage at various 2025 local campaign sorties to publicly take down, with photos and videos, those she considered as “enemy”.

That she has approval numbers like this despite an impeachment she deserves, as does her father jailed and on trial for crimes against humanity and the thousands killed in the drug war, should be reason for alarm—and urgent, focused, strategic action—if we care at all about our freedoms.

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It was difficult not to be transfixed, watching pro-Duterte social media personalities in the TriComm hearing respond to questions about things they have said, posted online, screencaps and all.

It was much like that meme called expectation vs reality. The expectation was for a grand display of arrogance, a show of force, from people whose voices and faces inundate political social media algorithms with their brand of incendiary commentary. This expectation is not unfounded: they had already shown a united front by ignoring the first invitations to attend this same inquiry, and they had seemed to quite enjoy the mainstream attention, including the support of people like veteran journalist Vergel Santos who believed, as Duterte social media personalities did, that the invitation in and by itself was a violation of the right to free speech.

The reality though was this: faced with screencaps of the things they’ve said recently on current issues, and questioned about the truth these opinions carry, they were cut down to size. There were raised voices, pleading and whining, and then calm, quiet engagement—and agreement—with the heightened elderly macho emotions of the dominantly male Committee. Apologies, forced and otherwise, were made; fear and harassment were invoked; vlogger tears fell.

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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.

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