Two undisguised attacks against Filipino reporters and media last week actually revealed the fact that deploying modernized online censorship remains difficult in this country.
In the first attack, detained Rodrigo Duterte’s lead defense counsel, Nicholas Kaufman, again proved his ill feelings towards Filipino media.
Responding to a reporter’s question, “Why do you always criticize the media in your presentations?” Kaufman sharply shot back with, “Why does the media always criticize my client? Full stop, end of story.”
Kaufmann’s dismissive reply wasn’t new to reporters as he had actively campaigned against Filipino journalists.
On one occasion he dismissed the work of photojournalists that graphically documented the killings during the former strongman’s war on drugs. In another, Kaufman implied that Filipino media overall was often in cahoots with civil society groups in painting the elder Duterte as an ogre.
Similarly, in the other direct attack on media, the independent Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism (PCIJ) had to unprecedentedly push back against the unbacked accusation of Manila’s Chinese Embassy that they received funds from the United States.
Saying that the PCIJ was involved in advancing a “political agenda” when it released an informational video and an article on how Filipinos can spot pro-China propaganda, the Chinese Embassy accused the group of receiving funds from the US government-backed NGO National Endowment for Democracy (NED) for their efforts.
The Chinese Embassy said the NED “interfered in other countries’ internal affairs, stoking division and confrontation and influencing public opinion under the banner of promoting democracy.”
Responding to the accusation, the PCIJ flatly maintained the independence of its reporting, saying it received funding from multiple sources, including United Nations organizations.
“We have zealously guarded our independence since our founding in 1989. We are nobody’s tool,” the PCIJ pointedly retorted to the Chinese Embassy.
While media practitioners were generally horrified by Kaufman’s and the Chinese Embassy’s tirades, attacking reporters and media is nothing new. Recent history is littered with attacks by personalities and regimes determined to bend the press to their will.
Instead, what is revelatory about the recent attacks is that these manifestly highlight the need for us to double down on modernized censorship’s relentless use of subtle digital techniques to shape opinion and narratives.
In fact, unlike traditional forms of censorship — where information dictators terrorize people by wholesale repression and coercion — modern online censorship’s similarly perverse objectives even threaten to grow beyond the usual heavy-handed propaganda and disinformation/misinformation techniques as we now know it.
So much so that information autocrats adapting even more sophisticated digital techniques to “artificially amplify support for political personalities or hegemonic regimes, strategic agenda setting, algorithmic filtering and the monopolization of digital infrastructures” demand that we respond even more aggressively.
Despite the grim threats, however, online censorship’s naked attempts to duct tape our mouths ironically gives us hope.
In fact, as demonstrated by last week’s attacks on media, we quickly saw that modern online censorship’s newer monstrous forms are still in development and can be resisted.
If that wasn’t the case, both Kaufman and the Chinese Embassy wouldn’t have taken extraordinary pains to prevent truth-tellers from reaching the public and deny the public access to relevant news and insights.
In short, both Kaufman and the Chinese Embassy themselves exposed their own weaknesses in that, while they had on hand paid trolls and disinformation ecosystems, they still couldn’t dispense with blunt force attacks.