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.
Tiktok, harm, and political content
During the March 21 House of Representatives TriComm inquiry on disinformation, a Tiktok spokesperson said that “harmful” content is not allowed on the platform pertaining, of course, to online hate, cyberbullying, etc. But what of the content that harm democracy and freedom, that create a climate of fear and disinformation? Rewriting history, decontextualizing information, spewing baseless opinion—all those are harmful, too, but none of them would be flagged by Tiktok as “harm.”
The app’s navigation itself, in fact, arguably feeds off misinformation. A Tiktok account’s For You Page (FYP)—the equivalent of Facebook’s news feed—will not show any dates or timestamps at all for the information users see. Instead, all you see on your feed are account names and the number of likes, comments, saves, and shares. This means you can go through an endless scroll of political content and not know when these were generated or posted. It takes two more clicks to see a timestamp: you click on the account that posted content, which then shows you thumbnails and the number of views of each of their posts; and then you click on the post you just saw, which shows you the date or time of posting.
Otherwise, the FYP is a continuous scroll of content with no clear sense of past or present, fact or fiction. Tiktok will say that this is not a newsfeed, because its FYP is about entertainment and user-generated content. But that this FYP can be filled with political content, because this is what you are interested in as a user, is what makes it dangerous. Sure, timestamps are irrelevant for celebrity OOTDs, but if I’m on this app for political news and current events, then its dangers are massive.
Unless of course you’re on the other side of content creation, which means you are using precisely this Tiktok algorithm to change narratives, skew public opinion, and shift stories in your favor.