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What Happens When the Government Uses Facebook as a Weapon?

Etter, Lauren
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-12-07/how-rodrigo-duterte-turned-facebook-into-a-weapon-with-a-little-help-from-facebook

Publisher:  Bloomberg Businessweek
Date Written:  07/12/2017
Year Published:  2017  
Resource Type:  Article

It's social media in the age of "patriotic trolling" in the Philippines, where the government is waging a campaign to destroy a critic -- with a little help from Facebook itself.

Abstract: 
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Excerpt:

The Philippines is prime Facebook country--smartphones outnumber people, and 97 percent of Filipinos who are online have Facebook accounts. Ressa's forum introduced Duterte to Filipino millennials on the platform where they live. Duterte, a quick social media study despite being 71 at the time of the election, took it from there. He hired strategists who helped him transform his modest online presence, creating an army of Facebook personalities and bloggers worldwide. His large base of followers--enthusiastic and often vicious--was sometimes called the Duterte Die-Hard Supporters, or simply DDS. No one missed the reference to another DDS: Duterte’s infamous Davao Death Squad, widely thought to have killed hundreds of people.

"At the beginning I actually loved it because I felt like this was untapped potential," Ressa says. "Duterte's campaign on social media was groundbreaking."

Until it became crushing. Since being elected in May 2016, Duterte has turned Facebook into a weapon. The same Facebook personalities who fought dirty to see Duterte win were brought inside the Malacanang Palace. From there they are methodically taking down opponents, including a prominent senator and human-rights activist who became the target of vicious online attacks and was ultimately jailed on a drug charge.

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