I happened upon the case of Nacho Domingo too late. It was Sunday, September 29. I asked a friend who had posted about social media responsibility and online mobs what he was talking about, and he told me to do a Twitter search for his name.

It yielded little, though the few tweets that came up were ones of mourning and condolences, a lot of regret. By later in the day more and more tweets surfaced that were turning defensive: this is about frat culture, they said. The system is to blame for his death, many others said.

The blame game on Twitter seeped through the rest of the week, with some accounts coming out with names of “people who killed Nacho,” which just continued the cycle of blaming and shaming, bullying and mob rule that brought upon us this death to begin with.

I spent the rest of that Sunday and early last week going through Twitter accounts and mining it for information. Facebook was pretty wiped clean, and there wasn’t much to see there. But Twitter, with its 140-character, shoot-from-the-hip demand — so much of what transpired remained there even as many deleted posts. The sadness grew as this process revealed what it must have been like for one person to see this unfold, and not just on Twitter and Facebook, but also, now we know, in his phone’s inbox. 

As someone who has experienced online mobs and kuyog, one thing is important to remember here: we can all handle trolling from strangers — the state of the nation (of the world) has made us all cognizant of how this can be a well-orchestrated strategy, where people are paid to go low, hit below the belt, and take the personal and magnify it to absurd ends, just to ruin one person’s credibility. That kind of mob, we can ignore.

But a mob, organically created, filled with people you know? THAT is a mob that is heartbreaking. This is what Nacho Domingo faced: a social media mob filled with schoolmates and org-mates, friends and allies, raising their fists against him. That cannot have been easy. The first online kuyog I experienced was in 2012. I was 35 years old, and it broke my heart seeing people I knew and respected, talking about me as if I wasn’t a person they knew.

I can only imagine what it was like for someone like Nacho, 22 years old, just about ready to face the world outside of the University. But here he was, facing a lynch mob.

And what a mob it was. They were technically looking at a set of decontextualized, unverified, possibly spliced, screencaps of a conversation among members of a fraternity. It first appeared via the account @sigmarhorambles on Sept 25 at around 11:00AM. That account would soon be removed by Twitter, but not before enough people had seen it and had made screencaps. By the morning of Sept 26, another anonymous account surfaced with the same screencaps, all 111 of them, this time posted two at a time, instead of all in one go. It would continue posting until Sept 28, as if giving it slowly to its already angry audience.

Not that the slowness mattered. Between the 25th and 27th, the mob already had a personality: the anger was directed primarily at Nacho, not just because he was part of the screencaps, but also because he is the College of Mass Communications Vice Chairperson, a student-leader, and an activist. He was a multi-layered persona on campus, and so the attacks on him were more vicious. But also, there was the timing: the screencaps were released while we were all talking about the death of a PMA plebe to hazing, and the accusation of sexual harassment versus a high profile activist. It was also a year or so since the Lonsi Leaks.

Nacho was being painted as devil-incarnate, a representation of the macho-fascist culture we live in, an example of the evil that is in our midst. The statements of student organizations were not only worded painfully and thoughtlessly, these were also being released one after the other, as if there were a race.

The mob, of course, is real. And the calls for protest actions, as with the release of statements, were also swift. By the afternoon of the 25th, calls for quick response rallies were released. By the 26th, Nacho would’ve seen students — some of them his own friends and allies — at protest actions against him. 

On the 27th, at around 4:34PM, the University of the Philippines itself, via the Office of the Chancellor would release a statement, saying that they would do an investigation on the screencaps, but also that “the suspects” were being placed under “preventive suspension.” This, even as it also says that they “will file formal charges where there is evidence to support such a move.”

That same evening the CMC Student Council held its general assembly at around 8:00PM, where they decide to accept Nacho’s resignation as Vice Chairperson. After the assembly, they released the resignation email from Nacho. A one-sentence, obviously hastily written, letter. It brought on the mob, more vicious now — some laughing at how he had written the letter, but many others angry that he had resigned, because where is the accountability?

Nacho must have seen, he must have known, that at that point, he was damned if he did, damned if he didn’t. There was no action he could’ve taken, there was no response he could’ve given, that would’ve sufficed. This is the thing with angry mob, fueled by their notion of what is right, of black and white, their fists and vitriol and hate directed at someone as if he is Duterte himself: no one talks about what next. No one asks: how do we want him to take accountability? No one wonders: what is due process in this case? No one stops to think, or listen.

No one asks what next.

But Nacho asked.

And he must have seen, not so much that there wasn’t much that he could do, but that every option he had — his Plan A, Plan B, Plan C — all meant facing a dead-end at every turn. Because what it looks like, given the social media mob, given the movements on the ground, from the student organizations to the UP administration itself, what it looks like is that he was not being given the chance to redeem himself.

And he would’ve been correct to read it that way. Here’s the thing with social media mobs, petition letters, statements: no one talks about redemption. And when we refuse to do so, what do we become? When mobs ensure no due process and no redemption, where do the objects of our hate and vitriol and anger go?

I had sought to gather screencaps of Twitter posts and statements, towards putting together a timeline of what happened to Nacho. But I realize now it’s really a timeline of what has happened to us. How a public can turn mob, how institutions can be pressured to release thoughtless statements. It’s material we should be able to learn from — students, schools, teachers, universities, social media users, all — not just for what it shows, but because of the gaps that it reveals. Those are gaps we can address, just so we never ever make someone like Nacho feel like there is no redemption, no forgiveness.

The only other person I’ve given access to this information is Nacho’s mom, Giselle, because she asked. But any institution at all that seeks to address these gaps, that wants to do things better, that hopes to make changes to its policies on social media use, is welcome to it. Comment here or send an email to katrina@kssantiago.com. At the very least, let us have this conversation. Because it’s not just necessary, it is urgent. ***