Filipino voters head to the polls on Monday after months of being engulfed in a relentless and widening stream of falsehoods spewed out in multiple formats and platforms that is unprecedented in the country’s history.
Tsek.ph’s second and latest analysis has tracked a high volume of multipronged and multiplatform attacks on selected targets using traditional media and communities of sharers on social media to circulate posts and false narratives.
It closely resembles what U.S.-based think tank Rand Corp. calls the “firehose of falsehood” strategy that is marked by “high numbers of channels and messages and a shameless willingness to disseminate partial truths or outright fictions.”
The strategy is also characterized by an outpouring of rapid, repetitive and indiscriminate topics coming from a volume of sources. Tsek.Ph partners noted that they have many times encountered the same false claims that have previously fact-checked, even long before the election season opened.
Tsek.ph is a collaborative fact-checking initiative of 34 partners from academe, media and civil society for the May 9 elections. It is supported by the University of the Philippines, Google News Initiative, Rakuten Viber, Meta, Meedan and the Embassy of Canada.
Tsek.ph’s first analysis released on Feb. 25 covered around 200 fact checks published from November 2021 to early February, shortly before the campaign period kicked off on Feb. 8. The second analysis covers 685 fact checks published until the end...
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