META Platforms, Inc., the company that owns and operates Facebook, is preparing for the 2022 Philippine General Elections by creating new products, services and developing stronger policies within the platform in collaboration with the Commission on Elections (COMELEC), election watchdogs, independent fact-checkers and civil society organizations, with the aim of cleaner elections by means of a safe and unimpeded flow of correct information.
To do this, Meta expands its ability to remove harmful content and networks using both AI and human fact-checkers so that it can connect more people to credible election information, promote digital literacy, civic engagement and provide more transparency into political ads. The company has also activated an Elections Operations Center, to detect and respond quickly to any potential abuse of our services related to the Philippine elections.
Meta already created a dedicated team to man its Elections Operation Center with subject matter experts from across the company to tackle critical issues including misinformation, safety, human rights, cybersecurity, and others to monitor and respond to emerging risks in real time. This team includes local experts who can speak the language and who have a deep understanding of the context on the ground in the Philippines.
Meta is strongly supporting digital literacy and promoting civic engagement
In partnership with COMELEC and the Legal Network on Truthful Elections (LENTE), it launched the civic education campaign ‘Be Wais’ and ‘Teka Moment,’ in November 2021, which reached over 36 million people. The campaign reminded people to pause and think critically before sharing information online. These videos will soon be aired on national TV and broadcast on radio in the Philippines.
It has expanded our flagship digital literacy program, ‘Digital Tayo’ to reach over 6.5 million people in the Philippines. Digital Tayo covers topics such as online safety, privacy, digital citizenship, news and media literacy, and launching civic campaigns. The Youth Leaders Incubator Program in partnership with Out of the Box Media Literacy and Mano Amiga was launched to encourage youth participation through voter engagement advocacy campaigns.
Meta is also supporting the voter education podcast series, ‘Shading Someone on your Ballot’, in partnership with Podcast Network Asia and LENTE. The podcast highlights the importance of voting, facts about the electoral process, and equips listeners with voting information resources.
Meta’s Philippines Elections Hub to provide resources on how candidates can maximize Facebook and Instagram tools for online campaigns, use ads transparency tools, and prepare for political and social issue ads authorizations.
Together with COMELEC conducted capacity building training for political parties and candidates on Meta’s Community Standards, ads transparency, online safety and resilience for female candidates, to better address gender-based harassment.
Political ads on Facebook are now required to complete our ad authorizations process and include “Paid for by” disclaimers on ads about elections, politics, and certain categories of social issues. Last month, the company requiring anyone running ads about certain categories of social issues in the Philippines to get authorized and show the organization or person who is running the ad with disclaimers.
Ads about social issues, elections or politics that run in the Philippines will also appear in the Ads Library so that everyone can see what ads are running, who saw them and how much was spent. This fully searchable archive stores these ads for seven years. The virtual media conference held by Meta had their executives, Aidan Hoy, Strategic Response APAC, Clare Amador, Head of Public Policy, Philippines.
Hate speech and networks that promote violence are also on Meta’s radar
Meta uses artificial intelligence technology that is trained in Filipino to proactively detect and remove hate speech, bullying and harassment, and content that violates Facebook’s violence and incitement policies. The AI identifies the material that is likely to be violating those policies, to prevent it from spreading quickly. Following review, if any content violates policies, it is taken down. Human moderators review content in both Filipino and Cebuano.
For a while Groups and accounts maintained by the New People’s Army (NPA), a banned terrorist organization, have been shut down for violating Meta’s policies prohibiting Groups that have a violent mission or are engaging in violence. The NPA released several protests against this move saying that they simply present an ideological perspective, which according to some netizens, commenting on an FB announcement, is “an obsolete ideology in the midst of globalization.”
FB also removed some 400 accounts, Pages, and Groups in the country that worked together to systematically violate Community Standards and evade enforcement. The people behind this activity claimed to be hacktivists and relied primarily on authentic and duplicate accounts to post and amplify content about Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, account recovery and defacing and compromising of primarily news entities’ websites here.
Meta also notice and logged what it calls “Inauthentic Behavior” operators. These are not only local accounts but also come from various countries and they actively exist on the margins of the upcoming Philippines elections. These behaviors include context switching, deception in posing as authentic communities and inauthentic engagement.
An example of content switching is a page that was previously just non-political dance videos renaming itself to become “Bongbong Marcos news,” while another page that started off as supporting a politician later changed its name to “Your Financial Answer” and began posting loan advice. Deceptive efforts to pose as authentic communities include multiple clusters of activity from Vietnam, Thailand, and the US that posed as members of local communities in the Philippines in an apparent attempt to monetize people’s attention on the election.
In February, Meta identified a cluster of Pages operated by spammers in Vietnam who used VPNs to make it look like they are based in the Philippines. They posed as supporters of political campaigns or local news entities and used names like Philippines Trending News, Duterte Live, Related to Francis Leo Marcos, and Pinas News. They claimed to share live footage while purporting to be local news sources on the ground in an attempt to drive people to their clickbait websites filled with ads.
In the lead-up to the elections, inauthentic engagement has proliferated. Meta has taken down about a dozen clusters of activity focused on fake engagement. In one case, a social media management agency used a network of over 700 accounts to post and share both political and entertainment content. In other cases, we found and removed inauthentic engagement activity run by the same people in support of multiple candidates in the same election at once.
Meta also removes misinformation where it is likely to put people at risk for imminent physical harm and those that are likely to keep normal political processes from functioning correctly such as content intended to suppress voting, as well as certain highly deceptive manipulated media.
For content that does not violate Facebook policies, independent third-party fact-checking partners including AFP, Rappler, and Vera Files–review and rate the accuracy of such content and provide additional context. Meta provided funding support to help them increase their capacity to promote reliable information in the lead up to the elections. All fact-checking partners are certified by the nonpartisan International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) and review content in English and Filipino.
When a fact-checker rates a piece of content as false, distribution is reduced or stopped. Facebook notifies people who share the content – or who have previously shared it – that the information is false or misleading. A warning label that links to the fact-checker’s article disproving the claim. This already happened to Pastor Quiboloy’s SMNI Network FB page, which consistently shares dis- and misinformation.
To help Filipinos easily find credible voter registration information, Meta launched a pop-up notification on its feed last year. It generated over 10 million clicks and led people to more information on how and where to register on COMELEC’s official partners’ websites: Vote Pilipinas and Magparehistro ka!.
According to COMELEC, they received 1.9 million new registrants during the run of the campaign — more than double the daily average of registrations received before the campaign. FB will launch voting day reminders in people’s Facebook feeds in the Philippines.
Together with the International Center for Journalists and the Border Center for Journalists and Bloggers, Meta rolled out a free digital security and safety program to help journalists and human rights defenders protect their digital assets and counter online harassment. Its Journalist Safety Hub centralizes all resources and tools available on Meta’s platforms.
Updates to Meta’s Community Standards, include expanding protections for public figures such as journalists and human rights defenders. More harmful content such as claims about sexual activity, comparisons to animals, and attacks through negative physical descriptions are also removed because policies now also provide stronger protections against gender-based harassment for everyone, including public figures.
Last year new policies against mass harassment and brigading were promulgated, which removed coordinated efforts of mass harassment that target individuals at heightened risk of offline harm. This includes attacks against dissidents – even if the content on its own wouldn’t violate policies. State-linked and adversarial networks of accounts, Pages and Groups that work together to harass or try to silence people. These efforts and updates to policies are informed by the independent Human Rights Impact Assessment Report on the Philippines published in 2021.
