‘Troll-in-Chief'? Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte Admits Hiring Online Defenders During 2016 Election

A University of Oxford study has caused uproar in the
Philippines for examining the administration of Rodrigo
Duterte's efforts to manipulate social media through
trolling and fake accounts. The findings confirmed
what government critics have long suspected while
stirring harsh denials by the president's supporters.
Duterte himself, however, later said in a press
conference that he had in fact hired online
commenters during the election.
Entitled “Troops, Trolls and Troublemakers: A Global
Inventory of Organized Social Media Manipulation” , the
July 2017 study by Samantha Bradshaw and Philip N.
Howard focused on the use of cyber troops or troll
armies by governments, the military, and political
parties in 28 countries.
The researchers made an inventory of the kinds of
messaging, tools and communications strategies used
across countries as well as the different organizational
forms that were deployed by those in power to
manipulate public opinion through social media.
They found that in the Philippines, pro-Duterte trolls
were engaged in flooding social media with pro-
government comments while harassing and trolling
social media users with contrary opinions by using of
fake accounts and automated bots.
Evaluating the capacities of specific organizations
created for gathering cyber troops, the Oxford study
outlined that Duterte’s machinery for the 2016
elections not only relied on civil society volunteers and
paid citizens, but also hired a private contractor: Nic
Gabunada, former advertising executive and former
senior vice-president of TV giant ABS-CBN.
Also assessing the organizational capacity of the
Duterte cyber army in terms of staffing and budget,
the researchers discovered that it is characterized by
ad hoc membership with coordination across teams.
As much as 200,000 US dollars or roughly 10 million
Philippine pesos has been spent to fund the Duterte
troll army, which has a regular staff capacity of
400-500 individuals, according to the study.
And as if to confirm the findings of the study, social
media trolls and pro-Duterte bloggers quickly took to
social media to condemn the Oxford study and Oxford
University, flooding the institution’s Facebook page
with acerbic posts.
Screenshot of University of Oxford's Facebook page
being flooded with pro-Duterte comments.
In a press conference, Duterte admitted that he did
hire online defenders but only for the 2016 election
campaign:
I spent P10 million? Me? Maybe during the
elections, in the elections ma'am, I spent
more than that…They were all during the
campaign.
Dismissing the idea that government is bankrolling an
online army to dominate social media, Duterte swore
that he had no more need for defenders online:
Pero ngayon, hindi ko na kailangan [But
now, I do not need it]. I do not need to
defend myself against attacks. I stated my
piece during my inauguration and my
campaign.
To cap his spiel, Duterte, tagged by critics as the
country's “troll-in-chief” and biggest bully, also
attacked Oxford University, one of the world’s leading
higher education institutions:
Oxford University? That's a school for the
stupid people.
But an official of the president's political party denied
that the campaign team hired online trolls during the
2016 election:
For the record, and I am speaking for the
party @PDPLABAN , we NEVER hired nor
used online trolls.
— Ronwald Munsayac (@RonMunsayac)
July 23, 2017
In the end, it would be best to take Duterte’s outbursts
with a grain of salt. With his government regularly
being hit for spreading falsehoods and the military
establishment itself being criticized for propagating
fake news in its counterinsurgency wars, what we now
know may just be the tip of the iceberg.

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