Why Sara’s numbers stay high
Many of us are puzzled at how Vice President Sara Duterte continues to dominate surveys on approval ratings of top government officials, even with questions on her suspicious use of hundreds of millions in confidential funds and other offenses raised in her impeachment case. The question I’m addressing here is not whether the allegations against her are true, but why many people remain supportive of her despite them. This, of course, assumes that polls accurately depict people’s actual sentiments, which past experience shows we cannot always take for granted. Polls, including political surveys, have been wrong before.
Analysts have cited several reasons that include strong loyalty of followers to the Duterte “brand;” regional solidarity and anti-Manila or Luzon sentiment in Mindanao and even in the Visayas; continuing support for the drug war from many who consider public order and safety foremost and human rights concerns as secondary; the absence of a perceived, superior alternative especially given a wide sentiment that “all politicians are corrupt anyway,” including President Marcos and his minions; and undue influence of information ecosystems and media fragmentation. The last, I believe, has not received as much focus and attention as it should, even as it can very well be the key to influencing public sentiment on the subject.
I receive a smattering of pro-Duterte social media posts, memes, and videos directly from people who probably think I’d be sympathetic, or at least open to their entrenched view favoring the Dutertes and their allies. I get others from usually discordant voices in some group chats I’m in. These posts do not, and would not, appear on my social media accounts or my various group chat “echo chambers,” because of the way these platforms are inherently programmed to work. Many Filipinos, like people everywhere else, have already shifted to the highly segmented social media platforms as their primary source of news and information. Supporters and critics of certain public figures or political persuasions thus operate in entirely different information environments. The result is that opinions and allegations that critics perceive to be overwhelming (say, on VP Duterte’s corruption, and evidence thereof) would be seen by her supporters as unproven, and even unbelievable. The latter may be constantly exposed to content that highlights her achievements and downplays her scandals, fueling “confirmation bias” that reinforces pre-existing beliefs.
I recently saw in one of my group chats an article by a college student listing 10 reasons why a Sara Duterte presidency would be good for the economy, but whose arguments I found consistently flawed and easily refutable. But it is written well—whether or not assisted by artificial intelligence—and I could imagine how many undiscriminating readers, or those with a preconceived bias for the Dutertes, will most likely take it all in, hook, line, and sinker. These are the kinds of online articles likely being seen daily by diehard Duterte supporters (DDS–which also stood for “Davao Death Squads”) or anyone, DDS or not, who had “liked” similar articles on their social media platforms before. An obvious DDS I met years ago actively posts his pro-Duterte views, and I was entirely put off when he recently tagged Cayetano’s Senate allies as “The Valiant 13.” While he consistently sends me his Facebook posts and similar articles as attachments in direct messages, I hardly open them. But I noticed how, in posts that I bothered to open, nearly all comments are supportive, often in strong language, indicative of the echo chambers in which such posts find exposure.
All this is rooted in how popular social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok operate by algorithms that track your likes, shares, and comments, and are guided in what they feed you not by any aim to balance information, but by what content is likely to keep you engaged (or even addicted). One who frequently engages with pro-Duterte content will thus get fed more of it. And it works the other way around, too. Those in each group are led to believe that they are seeing what everyone thinks, when in reality, they see only a subset of public opinion. And because of those algorithms, each group becomes self-reinforcing, making it nearly impossible to get those in one group to shift to the other. If VP Duterte’s numbers have somewhat declined recently (although she’s still on top), it’s more likely due to people with limited or no access to social media, and whose sentiments are likely driven by mainstream radio or TV, not by TikTok, YouTube, or Facebook.
The challenge leading to 2028 is how to break across those online echo chambers, or at least diminish their influence on how we Filipinos vote for our next top leaders. We need our social media engineers and social psychology experts to figure that one out for us.
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