Despite the Facebook brouhaha executed by no less than Malacanang’s communication team by entertaining a reported fugitive (a writer from www.barriosiete.com), President Noynoy Aquino will again be interviewed live on YouTube’s World View series…
The Aquino administration, which prides itself on being Internet-savvy, has decided to take the offensive in cyberspace. Only this time, an anti-Aquino counter-offensive is also aborning on the same virtual platform.
Tomorrow, Nov. 4, President Noynoy Aquino will become the 12th head of state to be interviewed live on YouTube’s World View series, a special presentation of the video-sharing site owned by Google. Coinciding with the worldwide interview, a cyber-rally calling for justice for the 19 soldiers killed two weeks ago in Al-Barka, Basilan will be launched on the social networking site Facebook.
Aquino’s drum-beaters say the Philippine president is the first Asian leader to be featured by World View, which was first conducted with US President Barack Obama, last January. British Prime Minister David Cameron and Spanish PM Jose Luis Zapatero are among those who have also been interviewed for the series.
The entire interview will be streamed live over the Internet from Malacañang Palace and will be conducted by Google moderator Ross LaJeunesse. The local partner of YouTube is giant network ABS-CBN, which will stream the interview on its abs-cbnnews.com/askpnoy Web site.
LaJeunesse is director of public policy and government affairs of Google Inc. in Asia-Pacific and former deputy chief of staff to California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. The whole interview will also be shown on ABS-CBN cable news channel ANC.
At the recent launch of YouTube Philippines, Secretary Ricky Carandang said: “Open and transparent governance has always been one of our priorities, and we have been actively exploring the ways through which social media can deepen democracy. Knowing that it can be difficult for the ordinary Filipino to view his government as accessible and transparent, we are taking the first step in coming to you.”
But while the interview itself will be “live,” questions for Aquino have already been pre-screened through the YouTube World View site from Oct. 21 to Oct. 28, and will be submitted to the President in the order in which they were voted upon. This pre-qualification process has critics wondering if Aquino will ever get to answer hard questions or just give his standard replies to softball inquiries that have already been sanitized by his propagandists.
However, ABS-CBN promised to submit questions raised by the public during the interview itself that are sent through SMS. A “chat box” for instantaneous comments from viewers will also be put up, so that viewers can also see the reactions of various viewers.
It remains to be seen, however, if the network will moderate comments before they appear onscreen. Or if any other sort of censorship will be employed during the YouTube interview.
It is also not known if Aquino’s interviewer, LaJeunesse, is aware of the various issues that confront the Philippine President. Google’s top officer in Asia-Pacific also worked on the staff of the late Senator Edward Kennedy before working for the “Governator”; he took up Asian studies at Dartmouth and graduated from Harvard Law School.
On the same day that Aquino will conduct his YouTube interview, a “virtual rally” will be held on Facebook. The rally, believed to be the first of its kind, is being coordinated by an FB group calling itself “Justice for Basilan 19,” in reference to the Army Special Forces soldiers killed two weeks ago by the Moro Islamic Liberation Front in Al-Barka, Basilan.
The rally will take place entirely in cyberspace and is intended to call the President’s attention to the growing unrest that has been unleashed by his administration’s mishandling of the Basilan massacre. The virtual meeting place of the rally is Aquino’s own official Facebook site starting at 10 a.m. on Friday. It will move over to the FB page of the ANC network at 4 p.m., in time for the start of Aquino’s YouTube interview, which that station will carry live from Malacañang.
“Our cause is justice for the 19 fallen heroes of Basilan and allegiance to Philippine sovereignty,” said the invitation delivered (naturally) through Facebook. “Our rally shout: The President should be held accountable for the allocation of financial aid to enemies of the state which in legal terms is treason, an impeachable offense.”
The virtual rally may introduce a new paradigm for anti-government protest actions at a time when Internet penetration in this country just keeps growing. In the same way that Filipinos have long been the world’s leading users of text messaging through cellular telephones, we are already a huge presence on the Internet – especially on Facebook.
An August 2010 comScore study showed that Filipinos already spend more time on social networks than Internet users anywhere else in the world. The Philippines has the eighth-largest Facebook population in the world, with more than 90 percent of Internet users in this country regularly accessing the site.
“Virtual attendance” in a cyber-rally, according to the organizers, requires “no traveling, no threats from rain, dust, heat, police, physical violence, stoning, water-hosing, being chased etc., no need to rush to the rally venue, no traffic to beat to get there.” “The rally does not end when attendees disperse and the protest could go on indefinitely, with a lasting effect as the messages remain,” they added.
The rally is counting on its base of almost 8,000 members who belong to the FB group put up in honor of the slain soldiers to make noise during the day. Of course, no one knows what counter-measures are being prepared by Aquino’s well-funded propagandists to stop them from flooding pro-Aquino pages and news Web sites on the day of the protest.
This should be really interesting.
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