COMMENTARY: By Caitlin Johnstone

Secretary of War™ Pete Hegseth said during a speech on Friday that the US is at “a 1939 moment” of “mounting urgency” in which “enemies gather, threats grow,” adding, “We are not building for peacetime. We are pivoting the Pentagon and our industrial base to a wartime footing.”

Everything’s getting darker and creepier in the shadow of the empire.

Nate Bear has a report out on his newsletter titled “The AI Drones Used In Gaza Now Surveilling American Cities” about a new company called Skydio which “in the last few years has gone from relative obscurity to quietly become a multi-billion dollar company and the largest drone manufacturer in the US”.

Bear reports that Skydio now has contracts with police departments in almost every large US city to use these Gaza-tested drones for surveillance of American civilians.

Hegseth: “We are not building for peacetime. We are pivoting the Pentagon and our industrial base to a wartime footing. Building for victory should our adversaries FAFO.” pic.twitter.com/eoxhgZh7sZ

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 7, 2025

Haaretz reports that Israel’s efforts to manipulate American minds back into supporting the Zionist entity include pouring millions into influence operations targeting Christian churchgoers and efforts to change responses to Palestine-related queries on popular AI services like ChatGPT.

It’s crazy how you can literally just be minding your own business in your own church on a Sunday morning and then suddenly find yourself getting throat fucked by propaganda paid for by the state of Israel.

The Intercept reports that YouTube, which is owned by Google, quietly deleted more than 700 videos documenting Israel’s atrocities in Gaza in a purge of pro-Palestine human rights groups from the platform.

Mass Silicon Valley deletions like this combined with the sudden influx of fake AI-generated video content polluting the information ecosystem could serve to erase and obfuscate the evidence of the Gaza holocaust for future generations.

The US empire keeps getting creepier      Video: Caitlin Johnstone

A new report from Reuters says that last year the US had intelligence showing Israel’s own lawyers warning that the IDF’s mass atrocities in the Gaza Strip could result in war crimes charges. This is yet more evidence that the Biden administration knew it was backing a genocide the entire time, including during election season when left-leaning Americans were being told they needed to vote for then-Vice President Kamala Harris if they wanted to save Gaza.

In Italy, a journalist was fired from the news agency Nova for asking an EU official if she thought Israel should be responsible for the reconstruction of Gaza in the same way she has said Russia should have to fund the reconstruction of Ukraine.

A Nova spokesperson confirmed to The Intercept that the journalist was indeed fired for asking the inconvenient question on the basis that “Russia had invaded a sovereign country unprovoked, whereas Israel was responding to an attack.”

Reuters reports that the US is preparing to establish a military base in Damascus. For years the empire waged a complex regime change operation in Syria to oust Assad, first by backing proxy forces to destroy the country and then via sanctions and US military occupation to prevent reconstruction.

And it worked. The empire’s dirty war in Syria will be cited by warmongering swamp monsters for years to come as evidence that regime change interventionism can succeed if you just stick at it and do whatever evil things need to be done.

These are just a few of the disturbing stories from the last few days that I hadn’t had a chance to write about yet. This is the kind of world we are being offered by the US empire. There is nothing on the menu for us but more war, more genocide, more surveillance, more censorship, more tyranny, and more abuse.

Things are going to keep getting more and more dystopian for everyone who lives under the thumb of the imperial power structure until enough of us decide that the empire needs to end.

This article was first published on Café Pacific.

Israelis are determined to erase the evidence of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, through the use of paid and instructed propagandists to reshape the historical record.

Zionists have also taken over social media platforms. Those who are critical of Israel are being censored or arrested.

From YouTube to X, Wikipedia, and TikTok, Zionists are capturing all means of communication to erase the evidence of its genocide, reshape the historical record, and censor those critical of it.

Meanwhile, the Israel Lobby exercises its power through intimidation, paying influencers to endorse it, and arresting dissenters whom they frame as terrorists.

Last December, Israel announced it was boosting its Foreign Affairs Ministry “hasbara” (propaganda) budget by an extra US$150 million.

Back in August, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu admitted to reporters that Tel Aviv was losing to “propaganda” war.

“I think that we’ve not been winning [the propaganda war], to put it mildly … There are vast forces arrayed against us,” he stated at the time, blaming the algorithms for this defeat.

Dismantling free speech
Since then, Israel has been working to dismantle free speech and censor everything critical of it, across social media, as part of an all-encompassing crackdown.

This press conference was no accident; instead, it was part of a much larger scheme that began in July with a targeted campaign aimed at brainwashing right-wing conservatives in the West.

The propaganda plan was hatched in three parts: One being Netanyahu going on a number of right-wing podcasts; another being a social media censorship campaign, along with the financing of propaganda trips to Israel for right-wing influencers.

Benjamin Netanyahu’s appearance on the Nelk Boys podcast was his first stop in his attempt to revive right-wing support for him personally, yet it received enormous backlash at the time.

The podcasters were widely condemned for both “normalising” and asking no critical questions of the Prime Minister, who currently has an International Criminal Court (ICC) war crimes warrant out for his arrest.

The Israeli Prime Minister then went on a round of coordinated interviews across the American corporate media, as a range of other right-wing podcasters hosted him. The difference between the corporate media and the podcasters who hosted him was that the podcasters were even less critical and actively worked to bolster his image.

These disingenuous podcast hosts even attempted to frame themselves as defying cancel culture, being edgy and going against the mainstream, despite the fact that they were simply doing a worse job than that of the corporate media, battling nothing more than their own followings.

Erica Mindel – censorship Tsar
Meanwhile, in the background, TikTok hired Erica Mindel, an ex-Israeli soldier and ex-ADL employee who openly bragged of her loyalty to Israel, as its new “Hate Speech” censorship Tsar.

A move that appeared to have gone relatively unnoticed, but began to shape what was deemed acceptable discourse on the platform.

As this was in the works, the Israeli foreign ministry had already funded trips for 16 right-wing influencers to travel to Israel on closely coordinated propaganda trips. Their goal was to bring 550 such influencers on fully financed tours by the end of the year, which later included figures like Tommy Robinson and even former rapper Azealia Banks.

Upon visiting the White House in October, Benjamin Netanyahu attended a meeting with right-wing influencers and openly discussed ideas to capture social media platforms.

At this point, the agenda to kill content critical of Israel was already underway, as the TikTok app that the Israel Lobby sought to ban just a year prior fell into the hands of pro-Israel billionaires.

The world’s second-richest man and top donor to the Israeli military, Larry Ellison, is a key figure in this picture, as his company, Oracle, is poised to take over TikTok. The move was recently praised by The Times of Israel as “raising hopes for tougher anti-Semitism rules”.

Meanwhile, Ellison was busy buying up CBS News and installing the completely inexperienced, vehemently pro-Israel journalist, Bari Weiss, as the channel’s top executive.

Inexperienced for role
Weiss, whose claim to fame was being a temporary opinion piece writer at The New York Times before leaving and attempting to carve out a career as a right-wing commentator and, later, news outlet owner, is clearly inexperienced for taking on her current role.

Ellison just so happens to be a major stakeholder in Elon Musk’s Tesla and X.

In early October, YouTube also decided to quietly delete at least 700 videos from the platform that documented Israeli human rights violations, along with the accounts of three prominent Palestinian human rights groups: Al-Haq, Al-Mezan Center, and the Palestinian Center for Human Rights.

The Intercept published an article explaining the move as a “capitulation” to President Donald Trump’s recent sanctions, enacted to shield Israel from accountability for its copiously documented war crimes.

Then there is Wikipedia co-founder, Jimmy Wales, who came out against the website’s page covering the Gaza Genocide, asserting that it “needs immediate attention”.

“At present, the lead and overall presentation state, in Wikipedia’s voice, that Israel is committing genocide, although that claim is highly contested,” Wales stated, claiming it violates the platform’s “neutral” point of view.

At present, every major human rights organisation, including Israel’s own B’Tselem, all the top legal organisations relevant to the issue, the United Nations, and the most representative body of genocide scholars, all agree that Israel is committing genocide.

ICJ’s “plausible genocide’
In fact, the International Court of Justice (ICJ)’s ruling on the matter considers it a plausible genocide. The only ones disputing this fact are the Israelis themselves, ideologically committed and/or paid Zionist propagandists, in addition to Israeli allies who are also implicated in the crime of all crimes.

Objective truth is, however, not relevant to any of these bad-faith actors. This is because Israel and its powerful lobbying arms are actively pursuing a total crackdown on criticism of Israeli war crimes.

On X (Twitter), a new censorship warning has been placed over all images and videos from Gaza that show Israeli war crimes, also.

What is currently happening is a widespread attempt to wipe content from the internet, erase the truth, ban, deport, and arrest those critical of Israel. All this as the Israel Lobby brings social media and corporate media under its direct control, using the excuse of “anti-Semitism” and “terrorism” to do so.

Israel’s censorship crackdown, which the Trump administration is working alongside to complete, is by far the worst iteration of cancel culture yet.

The ongoing crackdown on academic freedom, for example, in order to silence criticism of Israel, is by far the most severe in US history.

Meanwhile, the ADL has just set up a “Mamdani monitor” to track the democratically elected incoming New York City mayor.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

A defendant in an Indonesian case of alleged defamation, Fatia Maulidiyanti, has hit back at a statement by Coordinating Minister for Maritime and Investment (Menko Marves) Luhut Binsar Pandjaitan who said in his testimony that he wanted to audit all non-government organisations (NGOs) in the country.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

A new study suggests that the news media’s tanking levels of public trust may be made worse merely by association with social media.

The study, released this month by the Reuters Institute at Oxford University, has exposed gaps between trust in news via conventional delivery and the same thing consumed via social media.

It doesn’t matter whether people use social media or not: Levels of trust is lower if they simply associate news with the platforms.

The gap varies between platforms and between countries but the overall finding is that levels of trust in news on social media, search engines, and messaging apps is consistently lower than audience trust in information in the news media more generally.

And our media is becoming more and more associated with social media.

Many of the country’s main news outlets have done deals with Google to appear on its Google News platform. Click on the app and you’ll see stories from Stuff, Newshub, New Zealand Herald and NewstalkZB, Radio New Zealand, Television New Zealand, Newsroom, and the Otago Daily Times.

NZME has brokered a deal with Facebook for the use of content, and other publishers are using the Commerce Commission in the hope of leveling the negotiating playing field.

Split between north and south
The Reuters study (part of the institute’s on-going research into trust in the media) was a split between north and south. The four countries surveyed were the United Kingdom, the United States, India, and Brazil. Two thousand people were surveyed in each country and covered seven platforms: Facebook, Google, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, WhatsApp, and YouTube.

New Zealand use of social media more closely follows that of the United States and the United Kingdom than India and Brazil so the data relating to those two nations are quoted here. The full results can be found here.

Google showed the smallest gap between platform and general trust in news. It was only one percentage point behind in Britain where 53 percent express general trust in news. In the US, where the general trust level sits at 49 percent, Google was actually four percentage points ahead.

The same could not be said for other platforms.

To ease the calculation, we’ll say roughly 50 percent of respondents in both countries express trust in news in general. Contrast that with news on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, which score in the mid to high twenties.

TikTok news is trusted by only 20 percent on those surveyed, the same number as WhatsApp rates in the United States (the UK is higher on 29 percent).

Only YouTube emerged from the twenties, with its news content being rated by 33 percent in Britain and 40 percent in the United States.

Complex reasons
The reasons for these gaps in perception of news on social media are complex. This is due in part to the fact that social media serves many different purposes for many different users.

News is only a small part of the interchange that occurs. The study shows that no more than a third use Google or Facebook for daily access to news, with other platforms below 20 percent, and on TikTok only 11 percent.

Large portions of the public, in fact, do not use social media platforms at all (although this does not stop them having opinions about them in the survey). Usage varies between Britain and America but a quarter to a third never use Facebook, Google or YouTube and half to three quarters do not use the remaining platforms.

Previous Reuters research has shown levels of trust in news are higher in those who access it on a regular basis. Distrust is highest among those who have least contact with news and with social platforms. This is confirmed by the latest survey.

News organisations may take some comfort from the findings that young people are more trusting of news on social platforms than older people. The gap is huge in some cases.

An average 14 percent of Americans and Britons over 55 trust news on Facebook. That rises to 40 percent among those under 35. The gap for Google is similar and even greater on other platforms.

News aside, however, people have generally positive views of platforms. More than two-thirds give Google a tick and almost as many give the thumbs-up to YouTube. Both are seen as the best platforms on which learn new things.

Facebook doesn’t fare so well
Facebook does not fare quite so well but at 40-45 percent positive rating, while fewer than a third feel positively about Twitter and TikTok.

In spite of these warm fuzzies, however, the surveys reveal “big problems”, particularly with Facebook.

Almost two-thirds of respondents blame Facebook for propagating false or misleading information and it is also seen as the worst culprit in on-platform harassment, irresponsible use of personal data, prioritising political views, and censoring content.

Although opinions expressed by non-users has complicated the Reuters study, both users and no-users express similar views when it comes to these problems. For example, the proportion of Facebook users that say false or misleading information is a problem on the platform (63 percent) is virtually the same as those who say it is in the overall sample.

The study, which includes an even wider range of variables than are included here, attempts to correlate platform usage and ideas about journalism. After all, it is on such platforms — and from the mouths of some politicians — that users encounter discussions about journalism and criticism of journalists.

The survey asked specific questions about journalists. Half the respondents thought journalists try to manipulate the public to serve the agendas of powerful politicians and care more about getting attention than reporting the facts.

Forty percent thought journalists were careless in what they reported, and a slightly higher proportion thought they were only in it for the money.

Criticism of journalism
The researchers then attempted to identify where and how criticism of journalism is encountered. Twitter users are most likely to encounter it. In the United States almost half said they often see criticism of media there and the UK is not far behind.

More than 40 percent of Facebook and Google users in America encounter it and a third of British users of those two platforms say they see it there. Other (newer) platforms have even higher incidences.

So that is where the criticism of journalists is propagated, but who is doing the criticising? Almost half those surveyed in the United States pointed the finger at politicians and political parties, although a similar number also say the hear it from “ordinary people”.

The figures are slightly lower in the UK but around a third identify political or government sources.

The survey also asked whether other public figures were responsible for criticism of journalists. Celebrities and activists figure in around a third of responses but so, too, do journalists themselves.

The surveys also give some pointers about the relative importance of “clicks” or how much attention our newsrooms should give to real-time analytics. The answer is  . . . some.

Respondents were asked to pick the factors that were important in deciding whether they could trust information on online platforms. In both countries fewer than 40 percent said the number of likes or shares were important or very important.

Media source familiarity
Around half paid attention to comments on items but far more important was whether they had heard of the media source. Two thirds were influenced by the tone or language used in headlines and almost 60 percent were influenced by accompanying images.

That finding correlates with another in which respondents were asked who should be responsible for helping to differentiate between trustworthy and untrustworthy content on the internet.

More than two-thirds put that responsibility on media organisations, higher than on tech companies, and significantly higher than on government (although Britons were more inclined toward regulation than their American cousins).

However, if the research proved one thing, it was that the media/social media environment is deeply nuanced and manifests the complexities of human behaviour. The conclusions drawn by the researchers say as much. They leave a couple of important take-aways.

“As a trade-off for expanding reach and scale, newsrooms have often ceded considerable control to these outside companies in terms of how their content is distributed and how often and in what form their work appears on these services.

“Such relationships have been further strained as publishers become increasingly dependent on platforms to reach segments of the public least interested in consuming news through legacy modes, even as platforms themselves have pivoted to serving up other kinds of experiences farther removed from news, recognising that many of their most active users have less interest in such content, especially where politically contentious issues are involved.”

They say the gap they have identified is likely a reflection of this mismatch in audience perceptions about what platforms are for, the kinds of information they get when using the services, and how people think more generally about news media.

“It is possible that the main challenge for news organisations when it comes to building and sustaining audience trust is less about the specific problem of how their journalism is perceived when audiences encounter it online, and more about the broader problem of being seen at all.”

My conclusion
Years ago, we heard the term “News You Can Use” as a response to the challenge of declining newspaper circulation. That was a catchy way of saying “We must be relevant”. The Reuters study is further proof that journalism’s real challenge lies in producing content that ordinary people need to live their daily lives. If that means collating and publishing daily lists of what every supermarket chain is charging for milk, bread, cabbages and potatoes then so be it.

Dr Gavin Ellis holds a PhD in political studies. He is a media consultant and researcher. A former editor-in-chief of The New Zealand Herald, he has a background in journalism and communications — covering both editorial and management roles — that spans more than half a century. Dr Ellis publishes a website called Knightly Views where this commentary was first published and it is republished by Asia Pacific Report with permission.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

On social media, Ferdinand Marcos Jr needed to have all pieces in place to stage a Malacañang comeback: he had a network of propagandist assets, popular myths that justified his family’s obscene wealth, and narratives that distorted the horrors of his father’s rule.

He had even asked Cambridge Analytica to rebrand his family’s image.

The living component among these pieces was Rodrigo Duterte — an ally who, when elected president, normalised Marcos’ machinery, painting over a picture of murders and plunder to show glory and heroism instead.

“I think that really, if we are to make a metaphor [to] describe the role of Duterte to Marcos’ win, it’s really Duterte being the sponsor or a ninong to Marcos Jr…. I think Duterte ultimately is the godfather of this all,” said Fatima Gaw, assistant professor at the University of the Philippines (UP) Diliman.

The alliance
Marcos’ disinformation machinery that was years in the making was complemented by his longtime ties to the Duterte family. Before “Uniteam,” there was “AlDub” or Alyansang Duterte-Bongbong.

Marcos courted Rodrigo Duterte in 2015, but Duterte chose Alan Peter Cayetano to be his running mate. Even then, calls for a Duterte-Marcos tandem persisted.

Gaw said Duterte played a part in driving interest for Marcos-related social media content and making it profitable. The first milestone for this interest, according to Gaw, was when Marcos filed his certificate of candidacy for vice-president in 2015.

They saw an influx of search demand for Marcos history on Google.

“There’s interest already back then but it was amplified and magnified by the alliance with Duterte. So every time there’s a pronouncement from Duterte about, for example, the burial of Marcos Sr. in the Libingan ng mga Bayani, that also spiked interest, and that interest is actually cumulative, it’s not like it’s a one-off thing,” Gaw said in a June interview with Rappler.

Using CrowdTangle, Rappler scanned posts in 2016 with the keyword “Marcos,” yielding over 62,000 results from pages with admins based in the Philippines. Spikes can be seen during key events like the EDSA anniversary, the Pilipinas 2016 debate, election day, and instances after Duterte’s moves to bury the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos at the Libingan ng mga Bayani.

On February 19, 2016, Duterte said that if elected president, he would allow the burial of the late dictator at the Libingan ng mga Bayani. On August 7, 2016, Duterte said that Marcos deserved to be buried at the Libingan ng mga Bayani for being a soldier and a former president.

The burial pushed through on November 18, 2016 and became a major event that allowed the massive whitewashing of the Martial Law period.

Made with flourish
Related content would then gain views, prompting platforms to recommend them and make them more visible, Gaw said. In a research she conducted in 2021 with De La Salle University (DLSU) communication professor Cheryll Soriano, they found that when searching “Marcos history” on YouTube, videos made by amateur content creators or people unaffiliated with professional groups were recommended more than news, institutional, and academic sources.

“A big part of Marcos’ success online and spreading his message and propaganda is because he leveraged both his political alliances with [the] Dutertes, as the front-facing tandem and political partnership. And on the backend, whatever ecosystem that the Duterte administration has established, is something that Marcos already can tap,” Gaw said.

In an upcoming study on social media and disinformation narratives authored by Aries Arugay and Justin Baquisal, they identified four thematic disinformation narratives in the last election campaign — authoritarian nostalgia/fantasy, conspiracy theories (Tallano gold, Yamashita treasure), “strongman”, and democratic disillusionment.

Arugay, a political science professor at UP Diliman, said these four narratives were the “raw materials” for further polarisation in the country.

“Para sa mga kabataan, ’yung mga 18-24, fantasy siya. Kasi naririnig natin ‘yun, ah kaya ko binoto si Bongbong Marcos kasi gusto kong maexperience ‘yung Martial Law,” Arugay said in an interview with Rappler in June.

(For the youth, those aged 18-24, it’s a fantasy. We hear that reasoning, that they voted for Bongbong Marcos because they want to experience Martial Law.)

Arugay described this as “unthinkable,” but pervasive false narratives that the Martial Law era was the golden age of Philippine economy, that no Filipino was poor during that time, that the Philippines was the richest country next to Japan, among many other claims, allowed for such a fantasy to thrive.

Institutionalising disinformation
While traditional propaganda required money and machinery, usually from a top-down system, Gaw said Duterte co-opted and hijacked the existing systems to manipulate the news cycle and online discourse to make a name for himself.

“I think what Duterte has done…is to institutionalise disinformation at the state level,” she said.

This meant that the amplification of Duterte’s messaging became incorporated in activities of the government, perpetuated by the Presidential Communications Operations Office, the Philippine National Police, and the government’s anti-communist task force or the NTF-ELCAC, among others.

Early on, Duterte’s administration legitimized partisan vloggers by hiring some of them in government. Other vloggers served as crisis managers for the PCOO, monitoring social media, alerting the agency about sentiments that were critical of the administration, and spreading positive news about the government.

Bloggers were organized by Pebbles Duque, niece of Health Secretary Francisco Duque III, who himself was criticised over the government’s pandemic response.

Mocha Uson, one of the most infamous pro-Duterte disinformation peddlers, was appointed PCOO assistant secretary earlier in his term. (She ended up campaigning for Isko Moreno in the last election.)

Now, we’re seeing a similar turn of events — Marcos appointed pro-Duterte vlogger Trixie Cruz-Angeles as his press secretary. Under Duterte’s administration, Angeles had been a social media strategist of the PCOO.

Following the Duterte administration’s lead, they are again eyeing the accreditation of vloggers to let them cover Malacañang briefings or press conferences.

“So in the Duterte campaign, of course there were donors, supporters paying for the disinformation actors and workers. Now it’s actually us, the Filipino people, funding disinformation, because it’s now part of the state. So I think that’s the legacy of the Duterte administration and what Marcos has done, is actually to just leverage on that,” Gaw said.

Targeting critics
What pieces of disinformation are Filipinos inadvertently funding? Gaw said that police pages are some of the most popular pages to spread disinformation on Facebook, and that they don’t necessarily talk about police work but instead the various agenda of the state, such as demonising communist groups, activist groups, and other progressive movements.

Emboldened by their chief Duterte, who would launch tirades against his critics during his speeches and insult, curse, and red-tag them, police pages and accounts spread false or misleading content that target activists and critics. They do this by posting them directly or by sharing them from dubious, anonymously-managed pages, a Rappler investigation found.

Facebook later took down a Philippine network that was linked to the military or police, for violating policies on coordinated inauthentic behavior.

The platform has also previously suspended Communications Undersecretary and NTF-ELCAC spokesperson Lorraine Badoy who has long been targeting and brazenly red-tagging individuals and organizations that are critical of the government. She faces several complaints before the Office of the Ombudsman accusing her of violating the Anti-Graft and Corrupt Practices Act and the Code of Conduct for public officials.

“PCOO as an office before wasn’t really a big office, they’re not popular, but all of a sudden they become so salient and so visible in media because they’re able to understand that half of the battle of governance is not just doing the operations of it but also the PR side of it,” Gaw said.

Facebook users recirculated a post Badoy made in January 2016, wherein she talked about the murders of Boyet and Primitivo Mijares under Martial Law. In that post, just six years ago, Badoy called Bongbong an “idiot, talentless son of the dead dickhead dictator.”

Badoy has since disowned such views. In a post on May 2022, Badoy said she only “believed all those lies I was taught in UP” and quoted Joseph Meynard Keynes: “When the facts change, I change my mind.”

Angeles also said the same in June 2022 when netizens surfaced her old tweets criticising the Marcos family. She said, “I changed my mind about it, aren’t we entitled to change our minds?”

But the facts haven’t changed. A 2003 Supreme Court decision declared $658 million worth of Marcos Swiss deposits as ill-gotten. Imelda Marcos’ motion for reconsideration was “denied with finality”.

According to Amnesty International, 70,000 were imprisoned, 34,000 were tortured, and 3,240 were killed under Martial Law.

The rise of alternative news sources
Outside government channels, Badoy co-hosts an SMNI programme named “Laban Kasama ng Bayan” with Jeffrey “Ka Eric” Celiz — who is supposedly a former rebel — where they talk about the communist movement. SMNI is the broadcasting arm of embattled preacher Apollo Quiboloy’s Kingdom of Jesus Christ church.

SMNI has been found to be at the core of the network of online assets who red-tag government critics and attack the media. The content that vloggers and influencers produce to defend Duterte’s administration now bleeds into newscasts by organisations with franchises granted by the government.

The first report of the Digital Public Pulse, a project co-led by Gaw, found that on YouTube, leading politician and government channels, including that of Marcos, directly reach their audiences without the mediation of the media.

“This shift to subscribing to influencers and vloggers as sources of news and information, and now subscribing to nontraditional or non-mainstream sources of information that are [still considered institutional] because they have franchises and they have licences to operate, it’s part of the trend of the growing distrust in mainstream media,” Gaw said.

She said that given the patronage relationship that religious organisations have with politicians, alternative news sources like SMNI and NET25 don’t necessarily practice objective, accountable, or responsible journalism because their interest is different from the usual journalistic organisation.

“I think that in general these two are politically tied and economically incentivised to perform the role that the administration and the incoming presidency of Marcos want them to play, and exactly, serving as an alternative source of information,” she said.

A day after he was proclaimed, Marcos held a press conference with only three reporters, who belonged to SMNI, GMA News, and NET25.

Rappler reviewed NET25’s Facebook posts and found that it has a history of attacking the press, Vice-President Leni Robredo, and her supporters. The network had also released inaccurate reports that put Robredo in a bad light.

Gaw said because these alternative news channels owned by religious institutions have a mutually-benefiting relationship with the government, they are given access to government officials and to stories that other journalists might not have access to. There is thus no incentive for them to report critically and perform the role of providing checks and balances.

“They would essentially be an extension of state propaganda,” Gaw said.

For Arugay, the Marcos campaign was able to take advantage of how the state influenced the standards of journalism.

“Part [of their strategy] is least exposure to unfriendlies, particularly media that’s critical. I think at the end they saw the power of critical media. And once they were able to get an opportunity, they wanted to turn things around. And this is where democracy suffers,” Arugay said.

Under Duterte, journalists and news organisations faced a slew of attacks that threatened their livelihood and freedom. Rappler was banned from covering Malacañang, faced trumped-up charges, then witnessed its CEO Maria Ressa being convicted of cyber libel.

Broadcasting giant ABS-CBN was shut down. Journalist Frenchie Mae Cumpio is in her second year in jail.

While the international community lauds the courageous and critical reporting of Philippine journalists, Filipinos are shutting them out.

All bases covered
While Duterte mostly used a Facebook strategy to win the election, Marcos went all out in 2022 — and it paid off.

“[The] strategy of the Marcos Jr. campaign became very complicated [compared with] the Duterte campaign because back then they were really, they just invested on Facebook. [That’s not the case here]…. No social media tech or platform was disregarded,” Arugay said.

At one point in 2021, YouTube became the most popular social media platform in the Philippines, beating Facebook. Whereas Facebook at least has a third-party fact-checking programme, YouTube barely has any strong policies against disinformation.

“I think with the Marcos campaign, they knew Facebook was a battleground, they deployed all their efforts there as well, but they knew they had to win YouTube. Because that’s where we can build more sophisticated lies and convoluted narratives than on Facebook,” Gaw said.

YouTube’s unclear policies allow lies to thrive
A study by FEU technical consultant Justin Muyot found that Marcos had the highest number of estimated “alternative videos” — those produced by content creators — on YouTube. These videos aimed to shame candidates critical of Marcos and his supporters, endear Marcos to the public, and sow discord between the other presidential candidates.

YouTube is also where hyperpartisan channels thrive by posing as news channels. These were found to be in one major community that includes SMNI and the People’s Television Network.

This legitimises them as a “surrogate to journalistic reporting”.

“That’s why you’re able to sell historical disinformation, you’re able to [have] false narratives about the achievements of the Marcoses, or Bongbong Marcos in particular. You’re able to launch counterattacks to criticisms of Marcos in a very coherent and coordinated way because you’re able to have that space, time, and the immersion required to buy into these narratives,” Gaw said.

Apart from YouTube, Gaw said that Marcos had a “more clear understanding of a cross-platform strategy” across social media.

On Twitter, freshly-made accounts were set up to trend pro-Marcos hashtags. The platform later suspended over 300 accounts from the Marcos supporter base for violating its platform manipulation and spam policy.

Ruining Robredo was a ‘coordinated effort’
Duterte and Marcos had a common target over the years: Robredo. She is another female who was constantly undermined by Duterte, along with Leila de Lima, a victim of character assassination who continues to suffer jail time because of it.

“It has been a coordinated effort of Duterte and Marcos to really undermine her, reap or cultivate hatred against her for whatever reason and to actually attach her to people and parties or groups who have political baggage, for example LP (Liberal Party) even if she’s not running for LP,” Gaw said.

The meta-partisan “news” ecosystem on YouTube, studied by researchers of the Philippine Media Monitoring Laboratory, was found to deliver propaganda using audio-visual and textual cues traditionally associated with broadcast news media.

They revealed patterns of “extreme bias and fabricated information,” repeating falsehoods that, among others, enforce negative views on Robredo’s ties with the Liberal Party and those that make her seem stupid.

Rappler found that the top misogynistic attack words used against Robredo on Facebook posts are “bobo,” “tanga,” “boba,” and “madumb,” all labeling her as stupid.

Fact-checking initiative Tsek.PH also found Robredo to be the top victim of disinformation based on their fact checks done in January 2022.

“By building years and years of lies and basically giving her, manufacturing her political baggage along the way, that made her campaign in [2022] very hard to win, very hard to convert new people because there’s already ambivalence against her,” Gaw said.

Arugay and Gaw both said that the media, academe, and civil society failed to act until it was too late. “The election result and [and where the] political landscape is at now is a product of that neglect,” Gaw said.

There is still a lack of a systemic approach on how to engage with disinformation, said Gaw, since much of it is still untraceable and underground. To add, Arugay said tech companies are to blame for their nature of prioritising profit.

“Just like in 2016, the disinformation network and architecture responsible for the 2022 electoral victory of Marcos Jr. will not die down. They will not fade.

“They will not wither away. They will just transition because the point is no longer to get him elected, the point is for him to govern or make sure that he is protected while in power,” Arugay said.

When the new administration comes in, it will be the public’s responsibility to hold elected officials accountable. But if this strategy — instilled by Duterte’s administration and continued by Marcos — continues, crucifying critics on social media and in real life, blaming past administrations and the opposition for the poor state of the country, and concocting narratives to fool Filipinos, what will reality in the Philippines look like down the line?

Loreben Tuquero is a journalist for Rappler. Republished with permission.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Asia Pacific Report newsdesk

The Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA) union is reconsidering its involvement in the Australian Press Council and has appealed to members to give feedback on this issue.

Vice-president media Karen Percy has appealed to delegates on a YouTube video to take part in this consultation.

“Members have raised concerns about the lack of financial transparency at the Press Council and rulings that are increasingly out of step with community expectations,” she said.

If the MEAA leaves, it needs to give four years notice “to end our contributions”, which last year were more than A$100,000.

“That four years gives us time to look at alternative regulatory options, and that’s in line with the MEAA submission to the Senate Inquiry into media diversity which proposes a single entity for self-regulation,” said Percy.

Meanwhile, the MEAA says in a recent statement on its website that Facebook’s recent “ham-fisted handling of its news sharing ban” in Australia – which initially blocked crucial community information and health and government information sites – had revealed the real dangers of an organisation that “abuses its dominant position” and “thumbs its nose at rules and regulations”.

Last month’s decision by Facebook to unilaterally ban news on hundreds of Australian pages was “the arrogant act of a company with too much power that thinks it is beyond the reach of any government”, the statement said.

Facebook was acting in retaliation to the proposed News Media Bargaining Code, which would force it and Google to compensate media outlets for content that until now has been published on their platforms for free.

While Australia’s News Media Bargaining Code was not a silver bullet to fix the problems within the news media, it was an important step to address the “blatant imbalance between the digital giants” and those who produced public interest news content.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

New Zealand children use a lot less Kiwi media than they used to. New research shows its Netflix, YouTube and TikTok engaging their eyeballs big time these days. If our kids screen out our local media, what does the future hold for them?

The news media seized on one startling stat in New Zealand on Air’s latest survey of how children use the media here.

Nearly 90 percent of the 1100 children aged between 10 and 14 surveyed had seen content that had upset them in the past year – such as animal torture and sexual material.

LISTEN: Kiwi kids screening out local TV media – Mediawatch

There is increasing concern they are seeing a lot more potentially upsetting content at an earlier age these days, thanks to the internet. But when it comes to the media kids choose to use, other survey findings were upsetting for homegrown media.

The five most popular networks kids could name were YouTube, Netflix, Disney Plus, Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon – none of them local.

The survey found websites and apps were more popular than television. Children are watching much more video on overseas platforms such as YouTube and Netflix than the kids who were surveyed the same way six years ago.

TikTok did not exist in New Zealand back then – now its the most popular social media platform for kids (Tiktok is a video sharing mobile app created in China eight years ago, only launched outside China in 2017 on major mobile phone platforms and in the US in August 2018).

Real bad news
But the real bad news for New Zealand broadcasters is that it is only one of several global online platforms more popular than old fashioned TV with kids here today.

YouTube (51 percent) and Netflix (47 percent) have the highest daily reach and children spend the longest time watching content there. Of local options, TVNZ 1, with 16 percent daily reach and TVNZ 2 at 15 percent, have the highest reach – but two thirds of the children surveyed couldn’t name a favourite locally-made show.

That is also a dilemma for NZ On Air which spends more than $15 million of public money a year on locally-made programmes and content for New Zealand children.

Back in 2016 it launched a review of its spending when TV1, TV2 and TV3 began backing away from screening children’s shows – even when the taxpayer was picking up the tab for making them.

TV3 – as it was then – shunted its local kids shows onto a slot on its sister channel Four – and they disappeared altogether when MediaWorks canned that channel for the reality TV showcase Bravo.

These days it screens Keeping up with the Kardashians and Dance Mums UK in the after school slots.

The only free-to-air TV channel showing kids shows after school anymore is Māori TV. On Wednesdays for example, it airs youth shows Grid and Swagger, followed by its long running show in te reo: Pūkana.

‘None of us are shocked’
“None of us are shocked by what’s in this research,“ said Nicole Hoey, chief executive of Cinco Cine Film Productions. maker of Pūkana and many other local programmes.

“In terms of the research it’s already old once it’s published in terms of the world we now work and live in. The last time this research was done was six years ago. It’s great research but it’s too far apart,“ she said.

Two years ago, NZ On Air launched an online children’s programme platform  – HeiHei – now hosted by TVNZ on Demand, in the hope it would attract young digital natives to the local programmes alongside the international ones

But only 49 percent of children aged 6-14 are aware of HeiHei and only 17 percent said they had used it.

Janette Howe is chair of the NZ Children’s Screen Trust (Kidsonscreen), which has long advocated for a kid’s TV channel.

“I think it has to be remembered the children’s local content has basically disappeared from free to air platforms in New Zealand, so there’s no alternative basically,” she said.

“Those international platforms and global shows have a lot of money behind them. They are easy to find and you stick with them because there’s a lot of choice once you’re there. I think for HeiHei to thrive it needs more funding and to be more discoverable and there needs to be more choice of content once kids find it,“ she said.

‘Small seed in garden’
“It’s a very small seed in a very populated garden.”

“At Māori TV programmes are still at the forefront for television. HeiHei uptake isn’t too bad but the reality is it’s got to be aggressively marketed in the digital world,“ said Nicole Hoey, who’s also a former board member at NZ On Air.

“What’s important is the parents and kids in the survey are still saying that they value local content and I think that really we have to work out better how we deliver it to them,“ said Janette Howe.

So will today’s tamariki and rangatai have any interest in local media at all?

Howe said that around the world where there are dedicated children’s channels that are established they are holding their own against the rise of streaming services apps and websites.

“If you have kids in your whānau, you know they don’t watch television. Early in the morning you can see kids that have iPhones and from 12 or 14 months and they know how to touch the screen. They don’t even know how to use a remote control for television,” said Nicole Hoey.

“It’s about getting out in front of kids where ever they are,“ she said.

This article is republished by the Pacific Media Centre under a partnership agreement with RNZ.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz