Early epitaph

Early epitaph | Daily Tribune

Apace is the ongoing takedown of the once predominant Duterte-era mercenary “colonizers” of our easily manipulable social media information ecosystem.

In last week’s notable instances of this development, a visibly pent-up Sen. Risa Hontiveros and Coast Guard spokesman Commodore Jay Tarriela filed separate cyberlibel complaints against these impenitent unscrupulous cabal of “colonizers,” more colloquially known as the Duterte vloggers.

Predictably, the accused collectively cried “free speech” in counteracting the latest legal attempts to curtail them.

But their censorship and free speech claims sounded hollow. Their repetitive “free speech” claims sounded as if they were pariahs and their yelling served only to mask the cabal’s precipitous fall from political stature and influence.

Related perhaps to this embarrassing free fall was last week’s report that European Commission (EU) observers found the Duterte vloggers’ specialty disinformation had a “limited impact” on the midterms.

Amid the bitter Marcos-Duterte feud, the EU observers initially expected disinformation to dominate the campaign trail.

But to the EU observers’ surprise, it seemed that the combined efforts of civil society, third-party fact checkers, and the Commission on Elections either slowed down or stopped altogether the spread of false narratives.

Anyway, if indeed it’s the end of the road for the beleaguered pro-Duterte social media cabal, they warrant some sort of an early honest epitaph depicting their failings, even guilt.

In this case, their guilt lies mostly in their baneful role in the disastrous fracturing of the public discourse and political life that in turn manufactured not only the gratuitous mystification of the previous regime but also the harmful polarized collective psychosis.

Nowadays, that collective psychosis still exhibits abundant signs. The public is still so divided, confused, and stymied about the political information they are getting and their understanding of political facts.

How these flamboyant characters managed all these years to make “fake-things-appear-real” and the “real-things-appear-fake” in our blighted political landscape through their colonizing exploits of Filipino social media would be fascinating for any student of politics.

The cabal’s colonization of social media’s free-flowing, decentralized, and conversational mode of communication has been well-documented and need not be repeated here.

Seriously note, however, that in this digital era people increasingly know what they know because they learned it from the people and the messages circulating on the social media platforms around them.

At any rate, probably the easily identifiable aspect of the cabal’s relatively fruitful early colonizing efforts on social media platforms like Facebook was its initial seductive, emotional hooking, whitewashing of the previous regime.

So much so that many of the regime’s objectionable unjust doings somehow evolved into “authentic” political values.

Reaping success, however, was short-lived, cut short by the genie of violence and coercion.

The ensuing forms of violence and coercion ranged from the “trollish” labeling of dissenters as “addicts” or communists, threats of murder and rape against dissenters, to the closure of independent media outfits and the outright jailing of political opponents.

The violent turn was as if the brain-dead pro-Duterte fanatics were saying, as one political observer put it in another context, “I’ve given you a fair chance by exposing you to the right order, anyone in their right mind would have responded to, and now I can use force to get my way.”

Historically speaking, that was the very same justification of the Spanish conquistadores for imposing their evangelizing on us naïve natives, hence the aptness of using “colonizers” in labeling pro-Duterte vloggers.

Thus, if there is a fitting epitaph for the pro-Duterte vloggers it would perhaps be: “Here lies another defeated and dead colonizer.”