The trolls are not free speech
The people we go after are often among the wealthiest in the country, and they don’t only hire lawyers; they hire networks.
Every day, millions of Filipinos open their phones and walk into a room where many of the loudest voices aren’t real. Accounts with no faces, no history and no families post the same talking points within minutes of each other. Comment sections fill with identical insults. Thousands of reactions pile onto posts no real person would bother to read. None of this is accidental. It is bought.
The platforms know this. They have the data, the engineers and the tools to spot coordinated fake activity as it happens. What they lack is the will. Fake engagement still counts as engagement, and engagement is what they sell.
So the trolls stay, the bots multiply and the country pays for it. Our public square is now so toxic that ordinary citizens hesitate to speak up, and real debate is drowned under outrage that someone paid for.
For those of us who fight corruption, this is not an abstract problem. It is where the fight happens. The people we go after are often among the wealthiest in the country, and they don’t only hire lawyers; they hire networks.
Before a case reaches a courtroom, they have already tried it online. Investigators are painted as political hitmen. Witnesses are mocked and threatened. Evidence is called fabricated before anyone has seen it. The aim is simple: if the public can be made to doubt the people prosecuting a case, it will stop caring whether the accused is guilty.
This is distortion on an industrial scale. It works because it is cheap for the corrupt and costly for everyone else.
Platforms answer criticism by pointing to legal frameworks and free speech. But a troll farm is not a citizen with an opinion. A paid comment is not expression. It is advertising dressed up as conviction. A thousand fake accounts repeating a lie are not a thousand voices. They are one wallet. Protecting that does not defend freedom. It defends fraud.
It is time for a law. The House has already passed a bill against troll farms, bot networks and fake accounts, and it should not be allowed to die. Any law worth passing must do three things. It must require platforms to take down coordinated fake accounts within a fixed period after a verified complaint. It must punish the people who fund and run troll networks. And it must force platforms to disclose who is paying for political and influence content.
Free speech belongs to people. It was never meant to shield machines and mercenaries. Platforms that profit from this country’s attention owe it at least this much: to care what their business is doing to us.