Pushing back

“WITH all three of us working together, truth does not stand a chance!” reads RJ “Thinking Pinoy” Nieto’s social media post, referring to the rest of the triumvirate, Margaux “Mocha” Uson and Sass Rogando “For the motherland” Sassot.

We are fighting back.

Together with other traditional news media organizations, we are going to fight back. We are not taking crap from anybody’s troll, bot, or an actual person but misinformed or just plain stupid and ignorant, anymore. Worse, are their handlers, most of whom used to work with traditional news media organizations.

I have personally witnessed some former colleagues in the industry who went from calling for an end to impunity and extrajudicial killings to shouting “delawan obosen, bias medias, and fake news” at every news article that doesn’t support the narrative they have set for themselves. (Shouting online is manifested in an all-caps post.) They who have allowed themselves to be trapped in a circular argument and embraced false dichotomies.

They bash news media for being biased. (Yes, there’s supposed to be “ed” after the word.) It is as if these people didn’t know the dynamics in a newsroom. I find it ludicrous that a former station manager of a regional newsgroup of a national TV network rant and lose his cool on his Facebook wall over news that his former station aired that debunked a lie his tatay said.

This is almost always the case, by the way. If a certain news item does not conform to the President’s ridiculous claims, then it must be “fake news.” If you argue against this administration, then you must be a dilawan or bayaran.

I confess that I did nothing to stop or at least, call out the rumormongers on social media. I was indifferent about it. I thought all the lies would just die out when confronted with the truth. But that didn’t happen and the people ought to know the real situation of what is happening to the country.

Last week, I heard some pretty compelling figures that convinced me, finally, to fight this lie-laden rhetoric online.

As of April, this year, there are 69 million Filipinos who are active social media users. Hootsuite has ranked the Philippines as the number one social media users who stay online at close to four hours each day. What is alarming is that the purveyors of fake news have a great number of following which, in turn, creates echo chambers. Unwitting users confuse echo chambers as an approbation of the distorted views of reality they post online.

It used to be that trolls, bots, and real accounts post misinformation or outright disinformation online. Now, referring to the quote above, they just declared war against the truth.

I, for one, cannot take it anymore. I didn’t cultivate my journalistic career just to upped by lying SOBs.

This paper has joined other traditional news media organizations in the fight against disinformation. We will debunk every lie posted online especially on social media networks. If my editor-in-chief and I fought the proliferation of disinformation individually, now entire news organizations will collectively fight back.

Enough is enough. We will resist the lies.