I was interested to hear that the Philippines was described as ground zero for online disinformation. After all, the political situation in the Philippines is usually pretty dire, so it came as no surprise that political interference in the news was occurring. The Duturte government was tough on crime, or so they claimed, the Duterte government was involved in numerous extra judicial deaths and a lack of process that led to the deaths of numerous innocent people.

The Duterte government was pretty forward in meeting with social media companies to develop an election winning social media strategy. This was a highly effective strategy targeting the under-educated masses and bombarding them with disinformation programs that were shared between the highly connected population. Facebook was a leading distributor of misinformation, even assisting the Duturte government to set up programs to distribute government propaganda.

So now we have had a change of government after Duterte’s six year term is up, it was returned to the Marcos family ruling the Philippines. My attitude is you get what you vote for, the downfall of the previous Marcos regime saw Ferdinand and Imelda along with their children flee the country for exile in Hawaii taking their ill gotten fortune with them. This was really the development funds for the people of the Philippines, the country still lags the development of other Southeast Asian nations and it is my guess they will continue to under-perform whilst these regimes maintain power.