Tgk1946's Blog

From This Is Not Propaganda (Peter Pomerantsev, 2019) pp23-30

On 9 June 2008, when she was running the news side of the Philippines’ largest television network, Maria [Ressa] was woken early in the morning by her star reporter, Ces Drilon: ‘Maria, this is all my fault . . . We’ve been kidnapped. And they want money.’ Despite Maria’s orders to the contrary, Drilon had chased an interview with Islamist insurgents and had been kidnapped, along with two cameramen, by Al-Qaeda affiliate Abu Sayyaf.

Over the next ten days Maria worked day and night to help coordinate the rescue effort, which ended after Drilon’s family managed to get enough money to satisfy the kidnappers’ demands.

After the hostages had been handed over, Maria began to research the identities of the kidnappers. She found that they were related to bin Laden through three degrees of association. This fitted in with a pattern she had observed since she began covering the growth of Al-Qaeda from Afghanistan into South East Asia. Ideologies spread through networks, and your fealty to them depended on where you stood inside the web. Instead of just studying ideas and socio-economic factors, one had to understand the interconnections between people to see why . and how Al-Qaeda’s ideology was spreading. The same jumble of personal and social issues could have quite a different expression if they came into contact with a different network. And Maria realised that these physical networks were quickly being replaced with social media.

In 2012 Maria created Rappler, the Philippines’ first purely Internet-based news site. She wanted to put her insights into networks to good use. Rappler would not merely report on current affairs, but engage a greater online community that would organise crowdfunding for important causes. It would gather vital information to help Victims caught in floods and storms find shelter and assistance. Rather than old-school hacks, Maria hired twenty-year-olds who knew more about social media. When you walk into Rappler’s orange and glass open-plan office you notice how young and largely female the staff are, with a small band of older journalists overseeing them with a hint of matronly severity. In Manila they’re known as ‘the Rapplers’.

When Duterte began his social media-inspired presidential campaign, he and Rappler seemed perfect for each other. The TV networks didn’t take him seriously. When Rappler held the Philippines’ first Facebook presidential debate, he was the only candidate who bothered to turn up. It was a runaway success. A poll of Rappler’s online community showed Duterte was ahead. His message -to vanquish drug crime was catching on. Rappler reporters found themselves repeating his sound bites about the ‘war on drugs’. Later, when Duterte went on his killing spree, they would regret using the term ‘war’. It helped to normalise his actions: if this was a ‘war’, then casualties became more acceptable.

The trouble started with a wolf-whistle. At a press conference Duterte whistled at a female reporter from a TV network. The Rappler reporter in the room asked him to apologise. Rappler’s online community filled up with comments saying she should be more respectful of the president. ‘Your mother’s a whore,’ they wrote. The Rapplers were taken aback. This language didn’t sound like their community. They put it down to the vestiges of sexism: any time a woman held a man to account, she would be attacked.

Meanwhile, Duterte’s language didn’t let up in its coarseness.6 He called the Pope and US presidents sons of whores; enquired whether a journalist he didn’t like was asking tough questions because his wife’s vagina was so smelly; bragged about having two mistresses; joked about how a good-looking hostage should have been raped by him when he was mayor, instead of by her kidnappers. On TV Duterte said he wanted to eat the livers of terrorists and season them with salt; that if his troops raped three women each, he would take the rape sentences for them.

I learnt a little about the linguistic context behind such statements when I visited the comedy clubs in Quezon City, the section of Manila where teenage prostitutes and ladyboys congregate by night next to the TV towers of national broadcasters. The comedians pick out victims in the audience and roast them, taunting them about the size of their penises or their weight and this right in front of entire families, who all laugh along at their relatives’ humiliation.

This is the language Duterte partially taps into with his incessant stream of dirty jokes. It’s a use of humour he shares with a troupe of male leaders across the world. Russian president Vladimir Putin made his rhetorical mark by promising to whack terrorists ‘while they are on the shitter’; US pres, ident Donald Trump boasted of grabbing women ‘by the pussy’; Czech president Miloé Zeman called for ‘pissing on the charred remains of Roma’; Brazilian president lair Bolsonaro told a female politician she was ‘too ugly’ to be raped and that black activists should go ‘back to the 200’;7 while in Britain the anti-immigration politician Nigel Farage, his outsized mouth gaping in a braying laugh, poured down pints and belched out rude jokes about ‘Chinkies’.

This toilet humour is used to show how ‘anti-Establishment’ they are, their supposedly ‘anti-elitist’ politics expressed via the rejection of established moral and linguistic norms.

When dirty jokes are used by the the weak to poke fun at the powerful, they can bring authority figures back down to earth, give the sense that their rules can be suspended.8 That’s why dirty jokes have often been suppressed. In 1938, for example, my paternal great-grandfather went down to the cafeteria of the Kharkiv mega-factory where he worked as an accountant, had a drink, told a wisecrack about the balls of the Head of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, and was speedily reported on and arrested, perishing in a labour camp on the Volga river.

But when such language is used consistently by men of real power to degrade those who are weaker, this humour grows into something menacing: it lays the linguistic path to humiliating victims in other ways as well, to a space where all norms disappear.

As Rappler began to report on Duterte’s extrajudicial killings, the online threats became incessant. At one point there were ninety messages an hour: claims that Rappler was making up the deaths, that it was in the pay of Duterte’s enemies, that it was all fake news. The messages were like an infestation of insects, swarming into the email in-boxes and descending like a scourge onto the site’s community pages, which Rappler had curated with such care to enable what it hoped would be the Internet’s ‘wisdom of crowds’. Sometimes Rappler staff would check to see who was behind a rape threat: maybe it was an automated account? To their disappointment it would turn out to be a real person. People were enjoying this. Rappler journalists were shouted at in the malls: ‘Hey, you you’re fake news! Shame on you!’ Relatives would admonish them too.

Maria bore the brunt of the attacks. Some were so stupid they just bounced off her, like the memes of her dressed in a Nazi uniform, or comments such as ‘Maria, you’re a waste of sperm. Your mother should have aborted you!’ Others got under her skin literally. Her eczema had always been her weak spot. When the attackers started to taunt her about her skin condition, it would flare up without her having time to erect her psychological defences.

Her first instinct was to blame herself. Had she done something wrong? Misreported something? She checked all of Rappler’s output over and over but could find nothing. The hashtag #ArrestMariaRessa began to trend, as did #UnfollowRappler. The government launched a case against her. One of Rappler’s investors had been an American foundation, so the government charged the network with following foreign editorial instructions. Several of Rappler’s board members resigned; advertising plummeted. Maria started to walk around town with bail money on her. The first trial against Rappler ended up in the appeals court, where it was settled. And then, when the worst was thought to be over for Rappler, Maria got wind that another case was being prepared against her.

During all the attacks on Rappler, Maria’s managing editor, Glenda Gloria, seemed to me to be the most serene person in the newsroom. Perhaps it’s because she has seen it all before. Glenda remembers the Marcos years. In the 19805 she’d been a student journalist covering the regime’s torture of opposition figures. Her boyfriend had been arrested for running a small independent printing press and had had electrodes connected to his balls. Torture sessions combined the psychological and the physical; the ultimate aim was not merely to brutalise but to break. Professor Alfred McCoy of the University of Wisconsin Madison, who has studied the psychological torture techniques of the CIA and US client states during the Cold War, relates the story of Father Kangleon, a priest falsely accused of subversion and cooperating with Communists who was denied sleep and daylight for over two months. At the denouement of his interrogation he was blindfolded, led into a new cell and sat down on a stool. He could hear a series of people coming in. Then different voices taunted him in a pre-planned piece of theatre which, when I read it in 2018, almost anticipates the taunts of anonymous trolls on social media:

‘Father, what’s the name of the sister you met with at Sacred Heart College? . . . You are fucking her? How does it feel?’ ‘For me he is not a priest. Yes, your kind is not worthy of respect of a priest.’ ‘OK, take off his shirt. Oh, look at that body. You look sexy. Even the women here think you are macho. You are a homosexual?”

After this, the interrogation became more physical:

‘Let’s see if you are that macho after one of my punches.’ (A short jab was delivered below the ribs.) ‘Hey, don’t lean on the table. Place your arms beside you. That’s it.’ (Another jab.) ‘Take the stool away.’ (He stood up and was hit behind the head, he started to cower, then more blows . . .)
After he agreed to cooperate, Kangleon was taken to a TV station and forced to say on air that he had helped Communist insurgents, naming other clergy supposedly involved in the insurrection.

Under Marcos, remembers Glenda, the government had agents in every university, every farm, church, office. They would go around and tell your colleagues, your neighbours, your friends that you were a Communist even if you were not destroying your reputation with a whispering campaign before they came to arrest you. Marcos grouped the media into ‘proper’ journalists and ‘Communists’, so every critic was dismissed as a ‘Commie’.

‘The psychological warfare that Marcos mastered is very similar to what is happening now,’ Glenda tells me. ‘The difference is, Duterte doesn’t have to use the military to attack the media. How is it made possible? With technology?

After Marcos was overthrown, the new Filipino democracy was far from perfect: human rights abuses continued; journalists’ lives, especially in the provinces, were cheap.11 But unlike most of his predecessors, who tried to obfuscate the abuses under their rule, who at least pretended to abide by some rules, Duterte exults in his extrajudicial killings, celebrates , his attacks on journalists. He is also rehabilitating Marcos. Duterte had his body exhumed and gave him a military burial with full honours. He formed a political alliance with his son, Ferdinand ‘Bongbong’ Marcos, who still controlled his father’s old stronghold in the country’s north. A drip of Videos appeared online, absolving Marcos of his crimes in the 19705, claiming it was just rogue elements in his army who had killed and tortured . . .

But even as an imprint of Marcos’s media methods emerged, Glenda thought there was an important difference in its digital-era manifestation. Back then, you could see the enemy. There was a sort of predictability: they could kill you, or you could skip town, contact a lawyer, write to a human rights group, take up arms. You knew who the agents were, who was coming for you and why. There was something of a routine to it all.

But now? You couldn’t see the enemy. You couldn’t tell who you were really up against. They were anonymous, everywhere and nowhere. How could you fight an online mob? You couldn’t even tell how many of them were real.

After several months of this onslaught, Maria and the Rapplers dedicated themselves to making sense of the attacks. They could now see a pattern to the chaos. First, their credibility had been attacked, then they had been intimidated. With their reputations undermined, the virtual attacks were turning into real arrest warrants. They wondered whether there was a design lurking behind it all.

First to catch their eye were the Korean pop stars.

They kept appearing in their online community, commenting on how great Bongbong Marcos and Duterte were. How likely was it that Korean pop stars would be interested in Filipino politics? When they checked out the comments the pop stars were making, they matched one another word for word: obviously fake accounts, most likely controlled from the same source.