Daily TribuneBut along with the growing concern over fake accounts, coordinated social media operations are now using artificial intelligence to spread politically-charged lies and disinformation against which, Matibag admitted, the NBI is basically toothless.
Simpletons coughing up toxic arguments, parading their arrogance and rock-hard certainties in social media feeds is our common predicament. It’s a miracle that after swimming in that garbage-strewn pond we haven’t developed post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms.
Some credit that to our native resilience. But more likely it’s because fending off simpletons is personally fun.
Fun, since we’re confident that when these simpletons are so certain that they’re right, that they don’t need to pay attention to the evidence, that they don’t think they need to learn anything more, they’re ignoring reality.
It’s not that they’re congenitally unable to discern the truth. It isn’t really their fault. It’s just that, as a favorite commentator said, they’ve “disappeared through the wormhole into the mephitic swamp where intelligent life goes to die, where the clinically deranged and terminally deluded are to be found.”
Yet, even if we happen to personally enjoy all this, it also happens to be one big socio-political mess.
A tragic mess that National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) Director Melvin Matibag indirectly addressed last week when he talked about outlawing social media troll farms.
Blaming troll farms for being primarily responsible for coordinated lies, Matibag said the problem worsens when these lies are picked up by legitimate and innocent social media account holders who then spread the lies.
Matibag said the NBI is finally addressing this menace. But the agency has to be armed with a specific law from Congress to criminalize troll farms.
It’s not that the NBI has been powerless against criminal social media accounts. The chief said the agency is effective against accounts linked to criminal offenses covered by the Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012, like financial and love scams. Matibag said the NBI has taken down more than 2,000 social media accounts of that nature.
But along with the growing concern over fake accounts, coordinated social media operations are now using artificial intelligence (AI) to spread politically-charged lies and disinformation against which, Matibag admitted, the NBI is basically toothless.
At any rate, the NBI’s plea for legal weapons against mercenary troll farms and their shadowy operations comes at a politically explosive time.
At a time obviously screaming that all isn’t sweetness and light in “Duterteland,” the clear center not only of the country’s favorite political spectator sport but also of troll farm operations.
Speaking on recent political events involving “Duterteland,” the attention-getting sociopathy of its leading figures and the amplification of the same slop by its employed troll farms and their ill effects on uncritical supporters still seems to hold sway.
But there’s now a strong pushback, of storming the ramparts of the once invincible “Duterteland.”
Payback time that, for instance, took its toll on deluded Senate President Alan Peter Cayetano who, in desperately trying to console himself that the public still loves him, suddenly realizes no one actually gives a hoot what he has to say anymore, except to dispute or ridicule him.
Cayetano’s Senate cohorts suffer from the same issues, too. The initial verdict on recent events they were a party to is that their protection of Senator Bato dela Rosa “has clearly been the destabilizing factor in the Senate.”
The senators behave with arrogance and without a modicum of respect for the rule of law.
“History will not be kind to them,” declared political scientist Jean S. Encinas-Franco.
