They may have or have not known it, but the self-righteous vloggers who trooped to Congress last week ended up self-describing as fake news purveyors.

That brutal fact was amply demonstrated by their copious tears and profuse apologies after lawmakers strongly belied their fakeries on such issues as the past regime’s brutal drug war, the present destabilization efforts, and the events at the West Philippine Sea (WPS).

Nonetheless, the fate of these colorful vloggers hardly concerns us. They are but minor microbes to the more devastating malignant cancers of the dark side of social media that remain uncured.

In fact, whatever shortcomings these overtly partisan vloggers are accused of is only indicative of social media’s unchecked power to turn human libidinous or darker impulses into marketable products.

Marketable, because, as a recent report found, anyone who uploads on YouTube and gains a sizable audience can earn up to P20,000 daily, even if what was uploaded was later flagged as a false claim or an outright lie.

At any rate, railing against the unbridled power of social media platforms as well as internet capitalism and its deleterious effects on people, communities and countries has been going on for some time now.

And the verdict so far on the impact of our screen fixation, says one critic, “is damning — the internet does not build horizontal communities, it engenders addiction and distraction, destroys sociability, encourages narcissism and diminishes our capacity for rational thought.”

Examples of its impact hereabouts are aplenty, including numerous examples of how we have lost our capacity for rational thought about our rambunctious politics.

From last week’s congressional hearing on fake news, for instance, when lawmakers confronted a vlogger for writing the way she did about political destabilization, she gingerly remarked, “I write what I feel.”

Yet, strictly speaking, “feelings” play a minor role in politics. But shouldn’t thoughtful principles and facts-based arguments count for more?

At the hearing, another vlogger couldn’t defend her strange claim that the violence attendant to the brutal drug war was a “hoax.”

Alarmingly, the subtext of her claim was that local media, specifically traditional media, was a party to the “hoax.”

Yet, traditional media didn’t fail in reporting and verifying vital facts about the impunities and brutalities of the drug war.

Unfortunately, mainstream media was sidelined and overwhelmed by the online deceptions of the amoral tricksters allying themselves with a rabble-rousing autocratic regime.

Besides, there was a hidden insidious campaign to vilify traditional media and its institutionalized system of professionally reporting and interpreting political events and personalities, in favor of bullying fake news instigators pounding hard on the table.

The media is but one of the institutions done in by fake news, another is our fragile justice system.

Disturbing is the fact that “fake news,” as well as online harassment and hate, made many lose sight of due process being denied to thousands.

Ironically, those who were mum then are crying now for due process in the aftermath of the arrest and detention of Duterte, thereby tacitly proclaiming their admission that Filipino justice is a privilege of powerful political dynasties but not the powerless.

Anyway, all of these instances only go to show that combating fake news and its purveyors will be a long hard climb out of the mucky, dark sinkhole we inadvertently fell into.