Youth Act Now Against Tyranny Cebu (YANAT), an alliance of youth groups that mobilized to collect data, soon started hearing from individuals all over the Philippines. Within a few hours, they tracked down almost 500 accounts duplicated from 115 individuals.The Department of Justice meanwhile, received close to 200 reports regarding 300 suspicious accounts, according to Undersecretary Markk Perete. The National Privacy Commission confirmed that reports were “mostly coming from academic institutions.”The true extent of the phenomenon remains unknown however, as Facebook has not yet released official figures.While Facebook confirmed a spike in users reporting fake accounts during that period, it maintained there was no “evidence of the reported accounts engaging in coordinated or malicious activity focused on creating fake accounts,” leaving unanswered questions as to why they were created in the first place.“We haven’t seen [anything at] that grand of a scale,” said Mel Joseph Castro, the editor in chief of Tug-ani, the official student publication of University of the Philippines-Cebu, and the first to report on the phenomenon, in an interview with VICE News. “We agreed that before [the perpetrators] had a chance to use these accounts, it’s better to publicize it.”
Victims, meanwhile, fear that outspoken critics of the administration are being targeted. If true, it wouldn’t be the first time Facebook and other social media platforms have been weaponized in the country. Several arrests have been made in the last few months over allegedly libelous Facebook posts.As the main social media platform in the Philippines, Facebook is a particularly significant target for trolls and sock puppets. There were an estimated 42 million Filipino users as of 2018, almost 40 percent of the population, and that number is expected to rise every year.Meanwhile, the country has become notorious for hosting paid troll farms. In 2019, the Washington Post interviewed several individuals who worked for these farms, disclosing campaigns for companies, celebrities, and at least one senator.According to O’Leary, the burden of protecting user privacy falls on social media companies like Facebook for now because governments face the tricky task of legislating “for social media within a thriving democracy, allowing for free speech while at the same time protecting the individual.”“While the scale of cloning would suggest some level of automation, the fact that many of the cloned accounts contain basic errors would indicate that this is a manual ‘troll farm’ effort rather than anything automated,” Kevin O’Leary, the field chief security officer for Asia-Pacific at the cybersecurity company Palo Alto Networks, told VICE News.
Indeed, that wariness and fear appears to have already taken hold. In the days that followed the proliferation of the fake Facebook accounts, users like Sanchez started cleaning house by updating their page’s privacy settings and scrubbing the internet of their presence. Sanchez, for example, took down all her photos, not just to protect her own privacy, but also to protect her friends—especially those vocal about their political opinions on the platform.“I am in a constant state of worry,” Mary Rose Ampoon, a former student activist who also found duplicates of her account, told VICE News. “It makes me want to take a step back, especially from social media.“These are extremely critical times. The pandemic, the progression of events, we exist in an unprecedented slow boil of events that I feel will eventually lead to something drastic.”Despite it all, Castro, the student journalist who broke the story of the fake accounts, is committed to staying the course, and offered encouraging words for his peers.“In a time of this political heat and instability, [I’m] urging everyone to not be intimidated by this phenomenon, but rather just continue doing what you do,” he said. “If you are pushing for change, if you are being critical, do so, because in the end we know we’re doing nothing wrong.”“Alongside [a climate of impunity] is the climate of fear created by the current government's ongoing efforts to silence its critics,” Ming Yu Hah, Amnesty International’s deputy campaigns director for Asia and the Pacific, told VICE News. “The message from the Duterte administration is clear: dissent is not tolerated and will be harshly dealt with through both legal and illegal means.”