‘Shitposting’

‘Shitposting’ | Daily Tribune

Wondering why senior administration officials pounced on the obvious social media “shitpostings” of Representatives Paolo “Polong” Duterte and Kiko Barzaga?

Before anything else, “shitposting” isn’t offensive profanity. It’s a legitimate verb in our digital era. Merriam Webster defines it as “to post something online (such as a comment, video, or meme) that is deliberately absurd, provocative, or offensive.”

Generally considered low-effort social media content, “shitposts” are designed to amuse political fanatics and annoy critics or government.

“Shitposting’” deliberate offensiveness, however, makes good-faith engagement nigh impossible.

“Responding means either sinking to the level of the shitpost or looking ridiculous by responding earnestly to a low-effort provocation, which only proves the shitpost had its intended effect,” says digital media and rhetoric scholar Robert Topinka.

With the clarifications, Barzaga’s recent post calling for the abolition of the Philippine Coast Guard on grounds the PCG is a “waste of our government funds” obviously counts as “shitposting.”

Similarly, Polong Duterte’s castigating Armed Forces chief of staff Gen. Romeo Brawner by asking, “Who are you really serving? The Philippines or the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency)?” was another provocative “shitpost.”

(Duterte premised his offensive post on Brawner’s earlier matter-of-fact statement that the US’ Typhon missiles can reach China.)

But while we can readily dismiss such posts as bizarre and even mad, senior administration officials weren’t amused by Barzaga’s and Duterte’s outlier tirades. Which begs the question: why?

Senior administration officials didn’t categorically say if they considered the postings national security issues except to air their likely suspicion the posts reeked of being pro-China.

Yet, it was obvious senior administration officials quickly caught on to the tactical weaponizing of “shitposting” to service the larger issue of suspicious foreign interference operations.

In this light, Duterte’s “shitpost” is now seen as a devious attempt at “framing the AFP’s modernization and building of a credible deterrence as pro-US moves, when all our military is doing is what any self-respecting armed forces is expected to do in these fraught geopolitical times: preparing itself for any external threat,” said a Filipino political observer.

Barzaga lambasting the PCG, meanwhile, showed an effort to undermine the Coast Guard’s recent solidifying credibility. A recent survey said many Filipinos considered the PCG the most trustworthy government agency for updates and incident reports on developments in the West Philippine Sea (WPS).

While both instances of “shitposting” readily showed that both the AFP and the PCG are notable prime targets for shadowy interference operations, they also targeted the pronounced anti-China opinions of many Filipinos.

Interference operations are defined as any effort that “pierces, penetrates, or perforates the political and information environments in the targeted countries.”

Interference operations involve many methods. But in relation to the “shitposting” interference operations, these are part of the larger “narrative warfare” strategy.

“Narrative warfare,” say security experts, refers to the construction and propagation of strategic stories that are designed not only to inform but to persuade, condition, divide, or destabilize.

These narratives are often rooted in fragments of truth but are reassembled, reframed, and repeated until they embed themselves in the public imagination.

“Narrative warfare” isn’t new. But what makes it dangerous nowadays is its fast amplification by today’s digital infrastructure.

Unlike traditional propaganda, “narrative warfare” in general, or for that matter “shitposting” in particular, is subtle, layered, and contextually adaptive. It seeks simply not to implant new beliefs but to corrode the legitimacy of existing government policies and personalities.