Social Media and Philippines Political Landscape

This topic was pretty relevant in my country as the campaign period for political candidates in the Philippines is currently undergoing with the National Election to be held on May 12, 2025, only about 20 days left as of the writing of this post. So right now, all the candidates are out of their way, doing whatever means necessary to spread their name to as many people as they can such as conducting political rallies, TV advertisement or to distribute poster banners everywhere. But with the advancement of technology, politicians have found a more efficient way to spread their name by utilizing social media platforms which has greatly change the political landscape of the Philippines for better or for worst.

First things first. With many of the politicians moving their campaign in social media platforms, there are now less posters plastered in places. Looking back from 10 years ago, there used to be around five times as many if not more and when election ends many of the candidates, even the elected ones, would bother to remove the posters and be left off to the residents to clean. So I guess, that's one positive thing as with politicians moved to social media, they produces less trash.

With the use of social media, the amount of TV adds and political rallies were also much less than it used to be. Before, politicians would buy as much TV run time as they can to show their campaign adds. Right now, the only thing that politicians needs to do is to create a social media account, perhaps even a social media page where they will post all their campaign adds and whatever campaign policies that they say they will implement once they get elected though whether they will be true to their words or not is something that we will only know once they are in the position. After that, politicians needs to gather followers and when they have enough followers that would engage with their post, social media algorithm will automatically push their post to as many people as possible, saving lots of money for these politicians.

That said, politicians moving to social media also creates a lot of problems with misinformation and disinformation. The first one was false or inaccurate information that spreads in social media whether or not it was intended to mislead people while the other one was manipulated or misleading information that is deliberately used to deceive. Even outside of politics, social media platforms has become a cesspool of fake news but with politics included, the aim of this fake news was to destroy the reputation of their opponent using dummy accounts to make it hard to find the original source of the fake news. We can even say that it was the politicians that are self- sabotaging themselves by spreading fake news about themselves because when they clear those fake news, the voters would think that it was the opponent that spread the fake news like some sort of reverse psychology. It is also very easy to spread fake news in social media platforms using bot accounts specially with the help of AI to make artificial engagement and make the fake news looks credible. Political adversaries can also resort in making deepfakes like the fake video of BBM allegedly doing drugs.

With social media around, vote buying also becomes much easier, perhaps even safer to conduct because politicians can just create dummy account where they will do the discussion with the voters in private and conduct the payment through online wallets.

There are laws that are in place to punish the politicians caught in spreading election fake news on social media but with dummy accounts, bots and AI technology, finding the violators are becoming more and more difficult. And its not as if social media platforms are very cooperative to the authorities, claiming that it will infringe the privacy of their users although they continuously sold our user information to data brokers.

All in all, things like fake news and vote buying have been around long time ago but with social media, they became easier to conduct. I also think that it will get worst in the future unless the laws caught up with these technologies. The only thing I could advice to my fellow Filipino that will happen to see this post was to do their own research about the candidates that they will vote and not just believe in whatever they see in social media and choose the candidates that they think to be the lesser evil.

Thank you for reading my post and see you on the next one!