Part 3 of 3

When I wrote about how free Facebook changed the campaign, I said the questions of social media ethics it raised were lengthy enough to deserve their own post. This is that post.

I’ve put it off, if I’m honest, because it’s the hardest one to write. It’s easy to tell the story of a clever, cash-strapped campaign that found a new way to be heard. It’s harder to sit with what that new way also made possible — and to admit I was in the middle of it, not watching from the outside. I’m not writing this to absolve myself. I’m writing it because the same tools that let us compete did things I’m still weighing, years later. We are forced to think about social media ethics when we reflect on these moments.

Faster Than the Truth

The first problem was speed. On social media, a claim could travel across the country before anyone thought to ask whether it was true.

Free Facebook made this worse in a way few people noticed at the time. In its “free mode” — the version millions of Filipinos were actually using — photos didn’t load, and links to outside websites were blocked unless you paid for data. People were often reacting to a headline alone: no article, no source, no context. The platform that put the whole country within reach of a message also stripped away the very things that would have let people check it. Correcting something false was slow and expensive; spreading it was instant and free. This is just one example of how challenging social media ethics can be in the digital age.

Real Support, Manufactured Noise

The harder question is about the noise itself.

There was real enthusiasm for Duterte. I felt it in the reactions from CDO to Ilocos, and it was genuine. But social media has a way of blurring the line between authentic support and something more orchestrated. And from the inside, that line was not always easy to see. What I can say is that the machinery we built to amplify a message didn’t come with a switch that sorted the genuine from the manufactured. It amplified whatever we fed it.

Here’s the honest version. We’d seed a piece of content — a graphic, a clip, a line of argument — to the pages and groups we ran, and then watch it move. Sometimes it caught fire on its own, reshared by people who believed in it and owed us nothing. Other times it moved because we made sure it would: the same message — or a rephrasing of it — going up across several pages, groups, and personal accounts, sometimes within hours, sometimes over days or even weeks, so that what was really one voice arrived looking like a chorus. And the uncomfortable truth is that, once it was out there, even I couldn’t always tell the two apart. A post that began as ours would come back to me days later from a stranger who thought they’d found it themselves — and I honestly couldn’t say whether that was genuine conviction or the echo of our own machinery. That blur wasn’t a malfunction. If I’m being honest, it was part of how the whole thing worked. Furthermore, social media ethics must be applied to judge the impact of these orchestrated efforts.

When It Turns

In Part 2, I wrote that the moment something leaves your hands, it stops being yours. That cuts both ways.

The same reach that carried our message could just as easily be turned on a person. Amplification has no conscience — a crowd that can lift a candidate can also bury a critic, and it moves just as fast in either direction.

The other camp had a way of looking down on Duterte’s supporters — calling them ignorant, low, gullible. Nothing drew a more furious response than that kind of contempt. Posts we saw as unfair did the same: claims we believed weren’t factual, or were meant to belittle the candidate’s competence. When one of those went up, the negative reactions arrived in such numbers that the person who posted it would sometimes just pull it down. And it ran the other way just as hard — known Duterte supporters were swarmed on the opposing camp’s pages and accounts with the same speed and venom. What unsettled me wasn’t who was right in any single exchange. It was recognizing the shape of it — the pile-on, the way a lone voice gets buried under a crowd — as the very machinery we used to lift our own message, only pointed at a person. I hadn’t aimed it at anyone. But I’d helped build the thing that could.

It was around then that I started to understand something simple and uncomfortable: a loudspeaker doesn’t care what you shout into it.

What I’d Do Differently

So where does that leave me?

I don’t think the answer is that social media was a mistake. It gave a voice to a region and a candidate the old gatekeepers of tri-media might never have let through, and I still believe that mattered. But I’ve come to believe that reach without responsibility is its own kind of danger — and that those of us building and running these networks, myself included, carried more of that responsibility than we admitted at the time. In the future, I will place social media ethics higher among my priorities as a communicator.

If I were doing it today, I’d spend less energy asking what the platform could do, and more asking what it should. That’s a question I didn’t ask often enough in 2016.

Still Feeling the Pulse

Ten years on, the pulse has only quickened. The speed problem I described hasn’t gone away. It’s been handed new tools: AI-generated content, deepfakes, feeds tuned to keep us angry because anger travels fastest of all. The specifics have changed; the underlying current has not.

That’s why I keep coming back to this, dear reader. Not to relitigate one campaign, but because the questions it raised are the ones we’re all living inside now. I was there near the beginning of it, and I’m still feeling the pulse — trying, like everyone else, to tell the genuine from the manufactured, and to work out what we owe one another on these platforms we can no longer live without. In conclusion, reflecting on social media ethics is essential for anyone who engages in shaping online discourse.

The journey continues.

 

Email: nicgabjr@gmail.com                      X: @nicgabunada