IT would be a mistake to think that the social media posts of a handful of prominent vloggers were disparate thoughts of individuals with too much time on their hands.
With a million sundry issues, interests, and musings fleeting by one’s consciousness per hour, it would take an extra dose of gullibility to believe that on a given day, the merry band just happened to set their venomous eyes on a luckless individual, group or institution.
Unlikelier still is the chance that they would all happen to be supporters of the man whose regime was made remarkable only by the savagery of his uttered words and their terrible consequences on the nation he used to lead.
No, what was posted was not the byproduct of one person’s ponderings.
They were consciously crafted pieces backed by a deliberate intent to inflict injury, to wreak damage, to destroy. Taken separately, each post was nasty and hurtful. Combined, they represented a wrecking ball.
‘Duterte’s gang of influencers operated as a seasoned demolition crew. They worked as a pack and ravaged their targets with the malevolence of one that does not hold themselves answerable to any authority.’
It was unfortunate that lawmakers at the congressional inquiry saw fit to quiz each contributor about personal motivation. By doing so, they missed the forest for the trees.
The unmistakable signs of unity of purpose were there. Various social media platforms bore indelible evidence of the wide swath of destruction they left in their wake. The posts were echoed, repackaged, and reposted to create an illusion of truth.
Duterte’s gang of influencers operated as a seasoned demolition crew. They worked as a pack and ravaged their targets with the malevolence of one that does not hold themselves answerable to any authority.
They had years of unbridled run and it showed with the swiftness and efficiency with which they rallied the screaming horde against military and police generals, Cabinet secretaries, government agencies, a judge of an international tribunal, and even the President and his spouse.
Silver-haired sobriety cautions against imposing restrictions on the much-abused freedom of speech and expression lest the cure cause more harm than the disease. They counseled that leaving it to the government to write the dividing lines between what constitutes the truth, the half-truth, and the outright falsehood is not worth the risk of allowing the transgressions of Duterte’s attack dogs to go unpunished.
We hazard to put forward a contrary view – that the pro-Duterte vloggers be held accountable and allow Congress to do its job of attempting to define the metes and bounds of what is and what is not acceptable in the field of civilized discourse.
When a group of misguided individuals has already proven that social media can be weaponized by threatening retaliatory action unless its demands are met, how far can they be from seeking to influence the outcome of local elections or forcing concessions from local government executives or regulatory agencies?
Let us take that one step further.
When an unfriendly state openly courts such a group’s favors that some of its members start spouting propaganda lines abhorrent to this country’s interests, does that not approximate a hazard to public safety and security?
