Graphic for the final installment of the Edwin Espejo series on Philippine politics and the Duterte social media narrative.

Beyond the ‘Troll’ Label: A Reality Check for the Opposition

March 25, 2024

Part seven of seven. Edwin Espejo published this series on Facebook in June and July 2021. It is republished here in full and lightly copyedited; the introduction below is mine, not his. I am a subject of the series as well as its publisher. It concerns the 2016 campaign and not subsequent events, including the proceedings now before the International Criminal Court. Full editorial note and series index → Introduction by Nic Gabunada This is the last installment, and it is the one that has aged most interestingly. Edwin wrote it in July 2021, a year out from the end of the term. His argument was that the opposition kept losing because it kept explaining its defeats with a villain instead of an assessment —

Graphic from Edwin Espejo’s six-part series on the 2016 Philippine presidential election, highlighting the retrospective on the Duterte campaign movement.

The Ad Men Can Only Be as Good as the Product

March 24, 2024

Part six of seven. Edwin Espejo published this series on Facebook in June and July 2021. It is republished here in full and lightly copyedited; the introduction below is mine, not his. I am a subject of the series as well as its publisher. It concerns the 2016 campaign and not subsequent events, including the proceedings now before the International Criminal Court. Full editorial note and series index → Introduction by Nic Gabunada They like to call us trolls. It is a convenient word. If the movement was fake, nobody has to sit with the uncomfortable part — that millions of Filipinos were simply fed up. Every time someone reduces 2016 to digital manipulation, they are insulting the people who actually built that result. It was

The Story That Comes Back Every Election Season

March 23, 2024

Part five of seven. Edwin Espejo published this series on Facebook in June and July 2021. It is republished here in full and lightly copyedited; the introduction below is mine, not his. I am a subject of the series as well as its publisher. It concerns the 2016 campaign and not subsequent events, including the proceedings now before the International Criminal Court. Full editorial note and series index → Introduction by Nic Gabunada The script is as predictable as it is tired. Every time the political season heats up, the story about decapitating the trolls comes back around, usually with the same innuendos attached to the same name. I have watched it arrive often enough to know its timing better than its authors do. What strikes

A Target Board Over My Back

March 22, 2024

Part four of seven. Edwin Espejo published this series on Facebook in June and July 2021. It is republished here in full and lightly copyedited; the introduction below is mine, not his. I am a subject of the series as well as its publisher. It concerns the 2016 campaign and not subsequent events, including the proceedings now before the International Criminal Court. Full editorial note and series index → Introduction by Nic Gabunada After 2016, most of the people I worked with went into government. I did not. I went back to building a business — advertising and reputation management — on the strength of the goodwill the campaign had generated. What I underestimated was how those networks would keep growing without anyone directing them,

The Unseen Momentum: Rewriting the Rules of Engagement

March 21, 2024

Part three of seven. Edwin Espejo published this series on Facebook in June and July 2021. It is republished here in full and lightly copyedited; the introduction below is mine, not his. I am a subject of the series as well as its publisher. It concerns the 2016 campaign and not subsequent events, including the proceedings now before the International Criminal Court. Full editorial note and series index → Introduction by Nic Gabunada They called us many things back then — trolls, hacks, noise. Those labels were a convenient way to avoid seeing a groundswell the established media had already decided was not there. What I remember from 2016 is not the technology or the platforms. It was the raw passion of people who had

Aerial view of the massive Miting de Avance crowd for the 2016 Duterte-Cayetano campaign at Luneta Park in May 2016, demonstrating the scale of the organic support.

The Anatomy of a Disconnect: Why the ‘Troll’ Narrative Failed to Explain

March 20, 2024

Part two of seven. Edwin Espejo published this series on Facebook in June and July 2021. It is republished here in full and lightly copyedited; the introduction below is mine, not his. I am a subject of the series as well as its publisher. It concerns the 2016 campaign and not subsequent events, including the proceedings now before the International Criminal Court. Full editorial note and series index → Introduction by Nic Gabunada In this second installment, Edwin moves from the myths to the mechanics. Most of the public argument about 2016 has been an argument about a troll army. It skips the part that actually decided the election. We could open doors to the networks and the newsrooms, and we did. We could move

Decapitating the ‘trolls’ of Duterte: A 7-Part Retrospective

March 19, 2024

Part one of seven. In June and July 2021, veteran Mindanao journalist Edwin Espejo published a seven-part series on Facebook examining how the political opposition attempted to reduce the 2016 Duterte campaign — and the people behind it — to a story about “trolls.” The series is republished here in full, with Espejo’s text unchanged apart from minor copyediting. The introductory notes preceding each installment are mine and should not be read as part of Espejo’s original work. Readers should know that I am a subject of the series as well as its publisher. Espejo wrote it independently and without my involvement; I have republished it without altering his argument, including where he is generous about my role. A note on scope. Espejo wrote this

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