Truth is under siege

FACEBOOK’S Community Standards are clear-cut: “To help balance the needs, safety, and interests of a diverse community … we may remove certain kinds of sensitive content or limit the audience that sees it.” Among the objectionable content it lists and discusses at length are nudity, hate speech (“which includes content that directly attacks people based on their race, ethnicity, national origin, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, sex, gender, or gender identity, or serious disabilities or diseases”), and violence and graphic content.

But policing content in a platform that is now said to have 1.65 billion monthly active users is a gargantuan task, and for this Facebook relies partly on its users, by asking them specifically to report instances of abuse of the guidelines. “Not all disagreeable or disturbing content violates our Community Standards,” it says. But it can take action any time its attention is called to a violation, and the consequences may include—“depending on the severity of the violation and the person’s history on Facebook”—a warning, a temporary blocking of that person’s ability to post on the site, or a permanent ban.

It’s instructive to revisit the guidelines that govern the use of Facebook, and other popular social media sites such as Twitter and Instagram, in light of a worrisome development: legitimate, responsible posts by some people disappearing from their timelines, in what amounts to an attempt at censoring ideas and discussions by anonymous objectors who apparently report such posts to Facebook as “abuse.”

The most recent case involves journalist Ed Lingao, who recently posted a thoughtful examination of the grave implications presented by President-elect Rodrigo Duterte’s plan to bury the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos at the
Libingan ng mga Bayani. In his post, Lingao argued that the enormousness of Marcos’ crimes—some 10,000 dead, 30,000 abused, $10 billion stolen—outweighed any consideration of his fitness to be buried in heroes’ ground simply because he was a former soldier and president.

“So really, who should move on and allow healing?” Lingao wrote. “The thousands who were victimized? The prosecutors still looking for another five billion dollars in hidden wealth? Or a family that chooses to ignore all this by funding a macabre quarter-century spectacle at the family mausoleum in Ilocos because it simply insists that the patriarch be buried a hero? Who is really holding the nation hostage here? And so, really, who should move on?”

The post was widely shared and quoted—and then it disappeared, vanishing from all the timelines that had shared and reposted it. Some readers had apparently taken the trouble to report it to Facebook as a piece of abuse; Lingao was informed that his post had been taken down because it “violated Facebook community standards” and that his account was being suspended. The anonymous complainants didn’t stop with Lingao: A number of other Facebook pages that had reposted his opinion piece also saw the post scrubbed from their timelines and their owners-administrators temporarily banned from using Facebook.

After Lingao made noise online and got help from others who were roused into calling Facebook’s attention for the malicious, misguided use of its guidelines to suppress speech, the post was restored and Lingao received a message of apology from Facebook saying that his post was “accidentally removed” and that it “was a mistake.”

Was it really an accident? The only plausible explanation is that Marcos sympathizers angered at Lingao’s well-reasoned manifesto mischaracterized the post to Facebook, and had it taken down in a chilling throwback to the media censorship that was one of the hallmarks of the Marcos dictatorship. Clearly, in the minds of shadowy operators manipulating social media for their ends, the systematic virulence unleashed online by well-trained trolls during the election campaign no longer suffices to drive and frame the narrative they want the public to read and hear. Outright censorship is now back in the cards, and unless the people stay alert, Lingao’s case will not be the last attempt to suppress thought and take down discourse when it inconveniences certain powerful parties.

“How shall freedom be defended? By arms when it is attacked by arms, by truth when it is attacked by lies,” wrote Pulitzer Prize winner Archibald MacLeish. On social media these days, truth is under siege, not only by lies but more so by underhanded means. Vigilance is paramount.