The Philippines finally has its very own thought police. If you are not familiar with what a thought police is, read up on your George Orwell 1984. With the help of Facebook who knows us better than ourselves, thanks to the amount of data we give them, Rappler and Vera files have been promoted from propagandists to our country’s very own thought police.
In a recent announcement, Facebook has partnered with Rappler and Vera files in it’s supposed effort to combat “fake new” in Facebook. Rappler and Vera files have been accredited to take on the responsibility of evaluating what is fake news and Facebook does the rest – it blocks the Facebook page and prevents links from being shared. This partnership is very intriguing for a lot of reasons. Rappler went after Facebook hard in the last few months accusing them of hatching a deal with the Duterte administration to allow online trolls to propagate in Facebook. Rappler also openly attacked Facebook for not taking enough steps to control the content on its platform.
Facebook for a long time always defended itself by saying it is not in the business of editorializing content on its platform. Facebook has long claimed that it is not a publisher but a platform for publishers and it editorial responsibility rests elsewhere. What changed recently is that Facebook has seen a huge amount of pressure from governments around the world. Most of this pressure is coming from governments previously run by liberals who lost big time in their most recent elections to conservatives. These sore loser liberals are blaming Facebook for their fall from power. These liberals refuse to see the truth that their ideology has been found lacking, and their leadership destructive. These liberals refuse to accept that they have failed society for too long and now they want a new direction. Due to their arrogant blindness to their inherent flaws, they blame someone else and that is Facebook – in particular Facebook for allowing “fake news” to propagate.
Facebook’s decision to cave in to the pressure will damage its reputation permanently, but their biggest mistake here is the fact that they partnered with Rappler and Vera files. These two institutions are not fit to be fact-checkers because they are obviously partisan. Rappler in particular has a long history of slanted anti-Duterte reporting and they are obviously a platform for the Liberal party. Their thought pieces are written mostly by people who are openly against anything and everything this administration does. Vera files used to be a trusted institution who spoke truth to power, but recently they have been nothing but another anti-Duterte propaganda machine. Their most recent “investigative” piece was about the Duterte hidden wealth. When you read their take on the Duterte hidden wealth, it was nothing but a rehash of the Trillanes accusation using the same documents Trillanes has shown (an excel spreadsheet). What made it worse is the fact that the Anti Money Laundering council already discredited the Trillanes documents yet Vera files went ahead with the same crap and gave it a stamp of “legitimacy” by being reported by Vera files.
What Facebook did in partnering with Rappler and Vera file is that they weaponized these two Liberal party propaganda machines. Now they have the power to control what we see in our Facebook news feed. Now they have the power to tell us what is real and what is fake. Now they have the power to filter our view of the world based on their subjective definition of what is spam vs valid content. Now they have the power over what we can talk about on Facebook. With that power, they have essentially taken control of our thoughts. Rappler and Vera files are our real world thought police.
A few days after this partnership was announced a dozen pro-Duterte websites have been blocked on Facebook for allegedly being a source of Fake news while anti-Duterte fake news sites that are coordinated by the Liberal party have remained open and accessible. This is the start of a hidden dictatorship orchestrated by the Liberal Party and implemented by Rappler and Vera files. We have to stand up against this thought policing.
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