A group of Filipino-Americans has called on Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg to take down troll sites that attack presidential aspirant and Vice President Leni Robredo, saying they “pollute Philippine democracy.”
On Tuesday (May 3), the US Filipinos for Good Governance (USFGG) launched TrollExposer.com identifying hundreds of Facebook accounts, pages and groups which share fake news about the Robredo and call her a communist sympathizer.
According to Inquirer, the group launched the website in response to former Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s challenge to show him “where the trolls are.” Former Senator has been accused of hiring troll farms to attack Robredo and boost his election prospectus, which he denied.
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The group tracked down 136 unique pieces of content (such as posts, pictures, videos) shared a cumulative 1,976 times across a network of 737 accounts and 77 pages using publicly available data and artificial intelligence.
Much of the content came from the government’s own anti-insurgency task force and its spokesperson Lorraine Badoy who alleged that Robredo plans to form a coalition government with communist rebels.
TrollExposer.com ranked top five accounts (profiles and pages) that pick up red-tagging content targeting the vice president as well as the number of times it was shared:
- Domingo Castillo – 202 times
- Fernando Tolentino – 130 times
- Federal Party, E Philippines – 53 times
- Tfn Calce — 52 times
- Francisco Esguerra — 40 times
These accounts also often shared false content from a large number of Facebook pages for overseas Filipino workers and many non-political sites.
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Eric Lachica, USFGG Washington DC Coordinator said the Philippines has become “extremely polarized” through vigorous troll activity.
“Trolls have found fertile ground in weakly regulated social media to saturate the public with disinformation. These lies have been allowed to spread through Facebook for years.”
Having the presidency decided based on lies that rewrite history and hide the fact that much of this troll activity is state-sponsored would be a tragedy,” he added.
