Facebook under fire for aiding Duterte’s campaign

Familiar? Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte also streamed his inauguration through Facebook in June 2016.

Bloomberg said: "In the Philippines, it trained the campaign of Rodrigo Duterte, known for encouraging extrajudicial killings, in how to most effectively use the platform."

Training Duterte's team

The US media outfit referred to Duterte as a strongman leader who follows Putin's propaganda strategy, using Facebook for political leverage.

"Facebook is a global company and it was ground zero for this [Russian President Vladimir] Putin and Duterte playbook, long before Zuckerberg was playing naive about fake news," MSNBC said in a December 27 report.

The Philippine leader has repeatedly expressed admiration of his Russian counterpart who is known for broad use of the military force and for silencing dissent.

Human rights organizations, meanwhile, estimated 16,000 deaths under the Duterte administration's bloody campaign against illegal drugs. Duterte has also imprisoned his top critic, Sen. Leila de Lima, with charges of involvement in the drug trade.

In January 2016, Facebook "flew in three employees who spent a week holding training session with candidates that include Duterte," MSNBC reported.

This was roughly two months after Duterte—after repeated denials and pleas to stop coercing him to run—declared that he is indeed gunning for the top position.

"But giving tips to a few campaigns in constitutional democracy can be different in giving tips to this authoritarian Duterte," an MSNBC host said.

"And Facebook learned that quickly. In fact, after his team got that Facebook briefing, his allies went into overdrive: Pushing fake news and fake accounts, along with wide campaigns," the media outfit said.

The allegation of gaming Facebook's algorithms with false information and pretend users hounded the Duterte campaign and eventually, the administration, as the loudest voices on social media were eventually given offered seats in national government.

A leading figure in Duterte's social media campaign was adult performer Mocha Uson, now an assistant secretary for the presidential communications group. Uson constantly defended and promoted Duterte to her millions of followers on Facebook and has positioned herself as an alternative source of information to the news media.

The Senate has held a hearing on fake news October this year. But the one-day probe missed crucial questions and issues, dedicating time instead for senators instead to air their grievance over allegedly being a target of "fake" information and for so-called digital influencers to defend their online activities.

Pope Francis' so-called endorsement

Among the first and the notable fake news propagated during Duterte's campaign was the alleged badge of support given by Pope Francis to the firebrand leader, whose two decades of mayoral stint in Davao was marred by alleged human rights abuses and rampant killings.