social media – Page 12 – Katrina Stuart Santiago

It was a little over a year ago, in July 2016, when President Duterte first talked about pardoning policemen in the name of the drug war. He had been turning defensive because of constant criticism about the human rights violations of his war on drugs and its contingent, growing body count.

In a speech in front of San Beda batches 1971 and 1972, Duterte spoke of how he is the President and therefore is not required to respect due process. And instead of addressing questions about human rights violations, he talked about how the police could point a finger at him for whatever crime they commit in the name of the drug war, and as long as they did not lie to him about what they’ve done, he would pardon them. (more…)

This is all very simple, really. The Philippine News Agency (PNA) has made enough mistakes, has been in the news often enough for being nothing more than a laughable excuse for a newswire service, and ultimately responsibility falls on Communications Secretary Martin Andanar.

After all, I have personally heard him talking about how much he idolizes China’s Xin Hua News Agency, and how he would like to emulate its technology, its offices across the world, its professionalism. The fundamental problem with this of course is that Xin Hua is a state news agency in a country with censorship, where there is no freedom of the press, or of speech. And unless that’s what Andanar hopes for the Philippines, there is absolutely no reason to even think of emulating Xin Hua.

But PNA’s foreign news section is filled with news taken from Xin Hua, and that can only fall on Andanar’s shoulders. Why are you even thinking this news service to be credible source of news about China, and about the world? (more…)

It seems the learning curve is steep for Martin Andanar — and everyone else on the Duterte communications team. A year in, and this week’s mistakes and mishaps can only be symptoms of the bigger crisis that is Presidential and government communications. We are also reminded (yet again!) that we are wasting public funds on the salaries of officials who have no idea what they’re doing.

After a year, instead of actually evolving in his knowledge of social media, Andanar is still stuck on his simpleton assessment of what social media is about. He’s still working with the nonsense of counting followers like it matters. Department Order 15, which seeks to accredit “social media practitioners” to cover PCOO and Presidential events even asserts that social media is where “the citizenry” might be “engaged” in order to “enrich the quality of discourse.”

Was Andanar in the Philippines the past year? At what point did partisan social media (that is, pro-Duterte and pro-Dilawan) “enrich the quality of discourse”?

(more…)

It escalated quickly and shows no signs of stopping, but the past three days of the Andres and Patricia Bautista show, with a cast of characters of lawyers and banks and bank owners, and don’t forget social / media that can’t quite keep its hands off the oh-so-juicy details slowly being revealed, is just too exciting to let go of.

Or ask questions about.

After all, there is nothing like the unraveling of the elite, this one with millions in their bank accounts, not to mention wads of cash on hand. Tish is almost the archetypal kolehiyala, no strand of hair out of place, speaking eloquently about what she had discovered, issuing warnings to an ex-husband about how much more dirty laundry she’s got on him, while also playing the victimized wife, who knows not what her husband’s been doing. And then there is Andy, the portrait of the government official as husband, powerful and well-connected, articulate and self-assured. He who pushed Smartmatic despite all protests, who was charged for being biased, and whose leadership of the COMELEC was questioned by his own commissioners.

The possibilities for this story’s unraveling are multifarious, but of course while we’re all waiting with bated breath for the next juicy tidbit, one realizes that the question we do not ask is who stands to gain from this scandal at this point in time? (more…)

In the five years that I’ve been doing this column, and the nine years of writing independently full-time, the most fulfilling parts of it have been about being able to talk to students who wonder about writing. Often the questions revolve around notions of fear, which automatically go to the presumption of courage: that it is brave to write about things that others wouldn’t write about, or to have a contrary opinion from what dominates the discourse.

Yet it would be delusional to imagine that sitting in front of a computer, in the safety of my own home (or my middle-class spaces), writing about issues that to me are important, is bravery defined. In the provinces, broadcast and community journalists are being killed, activists are being illegally detained and threatened, communities being militarized.

To be trolled or threatened on social media is nothing compared to that. (more…)

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