As I’m watching the huge thanksgiving rally for Team Leni-Kiko going on in Ateneo, being streamed live on Facebook, my laptop was at the same time going crazy ringing the bell on one “notification” after another from FB pages, blogs and YouTube channels that I’m tracking.
The trolls are back.
And in huge torrents. Scanning the screen for their account names, I noticed these were the familiar fake social media accounts I’ve been seeing all through 2018 up to 2022—although I’m sure they must have been around much longer. It’s just that I only became really active on Facebook during the insanely-boring ECQ lockdowns of 2020 and 2021. I’ve had my blogs (“baguiorewind.blogspot.com” and “theunheardside.blogspot.com”) a bit longer, since 2016.
There’s something different about these accounts today, however. They seem re-energized and have even seen some striking improvements on the technical side—you know, better layouts, cooler graphics, sharper soundtracks and spiffier editing. In short, if you didn’t know better, some of them actually look LESS fake.
Their content is the same—a lot of POV (“point of view”) videos of very recent campaign sorties, some I’m seeing for the first time though. All of them extol the “man of the masses” qualities of the presumptive president, and even of his vice-president—but why release these now? The campaign is over, they have won.
Wrong. The campaign has JUST STARTED—for 2028!
Early in the onset of the 2022 campaign season, Facebook announced that it was deactivating some 300 troll accounts because of various violations of FB Community Guidelines. But the announcement was not accompanied by a list of these accounts. So it became a guessing game of which trolls got struck down. If you didn’t see them again, I guess they were among the unlucky ones.
But some of these material I’m seeing right now seem to have “disappeared” from about that time—only to reappear today. Did FB reactivate these accounts?
There’s a lot of “Golden Age” YouTube videos again, still trafficking in that familiar “Dekada 70’s” nostalgia. Some really overstretch the timeline, masquerading as historic archives, showing heartwarming sepia-toned footages of Manila scenes in the 60’s and even as far back as the Elvis Presley 50’s.
They say life is like a grammar lesson—where you find the PAST PERFECT and the PRESENT TENSE. I think mainly this is the rationale of all this past-looking rhapsodizing—to mentally condition people to accept the premise that nobody has anything to offer today that’s better than how things used to be.
Fifty years from any event or issue, nobody is going to be able to say unchallenged what REALLY happened. There are a few people who know just because they were there when it happened. But what they now will be based of their perception fifty years ago, too.
That’s the tragic part, because someone who misunderstood what was going on fifty years ago is now suddenly an AUTHORITY about his own misunderstanding back then.
The young ones cannot challenge him—at least, not the young ones too lazy to do diligent research.
This is where the silver lining of the cloud runs. I have faith in the “awoke” youth of today—and I saw these whiz kids all through Leni's campaign. They don’t take to spoon-feeding. They nourish their own brains. Once having discovered the truth, they boldly take it up as their burden to communicate what they know. Presumably, this is the role of social media—to be the virtual venue for public education widespreadable at a phenomenally fast rate.
I think the next six years will be very telling, as far as who really knows how to harness the resources of cyberspace. It is anecdotal that the Marcoses commissioned Cambridge Analytica to map out a strategy to mass-indoctrinate Filipinos subliminally into embracing a return to autocracy. Even if it’s true, that is not against the law because the law cannot penetrate the human psyche where this supposed “crime” of subornation occurs.
This is also an important point to ponder: that Filipinos responding to mass stimuli, therefore, cannot know the error of their ways. So the deliverance of a deceived people CANNOT take the same orientation as “awakening” these people, as one would normally suggest.
No, like the tragic example of the Pied Piper of Hamelin—you have to eliminate both the subliminal messaging as well as the harbinger of that message.
Psychology is an ignored science in the Philippines. It will be its undoing to persist in this snubbery.
From where I sit, the Marcoses have AGAIN jumped the gun on everybody for 2028. Their trolling apparatus is at peak operating temperature—they never shut the thing down, really.
But that’s about all the advantage they have this time—a headstart of a few hours, while the pink brigade is out licking its wounds. On the other hand, I saw this pink wave accomplish in six months what the Big Apparatus worked on for six whole years. But if both were on the starting block more or less at the same mark, my money is on the new Filipino youth.*
No comments:
Post a Comment