FACEBOOK WAR!

“Over at the administration-friendly network that was airing the YouTube interview (and which was supposedly taking questions from online citizens), the people in charge tried a different tack when confronted by the same comment storm. They began posting even the most nonsensical “news” in a bid to keep the critics – and push their uncomfortable snipings – at bay.”

Taken from: Jojo Robles

The top Internet propaganda strategist of Malacañang was in a foul-mouthed, hair-pulling rage. For an entire day last week, he and his army of paid Facebook page “administrators” and commenters were working as hard as they could, deleting critical posts and attempting to bury them under an avalanche of pro-government declarations and small talk.

And yet, for all their efforts, the critical questions and the occasional heckling would not be stopped. How was this possible, especially on this day, when the President was supposed to be answering sanitized questions softly thrown by a Google executive who had no idea at all of what was going on in the Philippines?

Over at the administration-friendly network that was airing the YouTube interview (and which was supposedly taking questions from online citizens), the people in charge tried a different tack when confronted by the same comment storm. They began posting even the most nonsensical “news” in a bid to keep the critics – and push their uncomfortable snipings – at bay.

President Noynoy Aquino just kept on fielding the softballs hurled his way. In cyberspace, the war raged on.

Apart from the reference to Santa Claus, there was surprisingly little that was noteworthy in the interview of Aquino aired over the video-sharing site YouTube last Friday. The real interesting stuff that day took place elsewhere in cyberspace, when self-styled Internet warriors got busy flooding Aquino’s official Facebook page and another that was being used by a cable news channel that was airing the YouTube interview.

We’ve been told that the Palace propaganda mavens were surprised by the cyber attack, which consisted of posting critical questions and unflattering remarks on both pages simultaneous with the interview. The sudden surge of Facebook activity forced the “admins” of both pages to take counter-measures like deleting posts as soon as they were posted (in the case of the Aquino page) or attempting to snow critical posts under with trivial “news” (which was what the people running the ANC News page did).

In both instances, the admins failed to stop the comment storm. In the Palace, an informant said the official in charge of trumpeting the YouTube interview started cursing; he repeatedly asked aloud if the people armed with government-issue laptop computers (which are the standard gear in creating the impression of many individual “posters” who favor Aquino) were doing their job.
When the virtual smoke of cyber war cleared, the loose group of people who decided to stage the sneak attacks felt tired but exhilarated. They had proven, if only to themselves, that it’s possible that Malacañang – despite its resources and its army of paid computer users – could be unable to stop a determined counter-propaganda drive online.

In the palace, government propagandists who once thought the Internet was their exclusive playground and their one-way press release platform, were understandably shell-shocked. They had a carefully planned, easy interview on the global stage of YouTube, where the “softball” questions had been picked days in advance and the audience just waiting to hear what they thought were profound and witty responses from Aquino.

And a motley crew of mostly anti-Aquino Internet users was able, on its own dime, to post uncomfortable questions about the massacre of 19 soldiers by the Moro Islamic Liberation Front in Basilan and a video about the supposed questionable deals involving the Aquino-Cojuangco family through the years. It was, especially for the palace propagandists, embarrassing.
The cyber-rallyists weren’t able to shut down the interview itself, of course. That would have been hacking, an illegal activity.

Instead, what they did was to reclaim the Internet and social media from Malacañang and its PR flacks. And for the fleeting moments before the heavy-handed page administrators censored their uncomfortable questions and critical comments, they were able to prove that not only are there hard issues that Aquino will not confront – but also that there are people willing to ask them outside the mostly Palace-influenced “traditional” media of broadcast and print.
This is truly a new battlefield. And a unique, spontaneous exercise of participatory democracy through social networks long promised by the people who dreamed up Facebook and the Internet.

The people in charge of the Palace presence on the Internet, particularly through the dominant social network of Facebook, like to claim that they have 2.2 million people who “like” the official page. Presumably, this is the army of online supporters that Malacañang has as a sounding board for and as a passive recipient of its propaganda.

But people who understand the metrics of social networks point out that only a little more than 6,000 FB users “are talking about” Aquino’s page.

For the amorphous group of Internet warriors who staged the attack, there can no longer be any turning back. Now that they’ve tasted victory, they can surely be counted on to mount similar cyber-skirmishes in the future.

“That means only .309 percent of the claimed fans are actually engaged,” said one analyst. “That’s a very poor social media metric.”

The Palace’s Facebook presence, said this analyst, “is really a propaganda page. They were not able to harness the pool of people ‘talking about this’ to respond to the deluge they got [during last Friday’s cyber-attack].”

As a result, “they were really surprised and didn’t know what to do.” “I mean, if you create a propaganda page, you should have been able to respond,” the analyst said. “There was no protocol followed to respond to a cyber rally.”

In the world of Facebook, the Aquino page is also controversial because it was basically created by government takeover of what was once a fan-originated and -driven page.

The two million fans, who joined the page in droves before the May 2010 elections, tracking the popularity of Aquino outside of the Internet, were simply “migrated” by Facebook to the official page of the President, with the cooperation of the owners of the social network in the US. The lack of activity in the FB page since the election reflects the disillusionment of many of the people who joined the first page unbidden, before it became an official propaganda vehicle.