We beg to differ.
The year 2017 is drawing to a close and, despite the emotional screeching of Philippine Opposition elements, the country does not seem any more “authoritarian” (or not authoritarian) than it was back at the dawn of 2016. Just the same, the objective fact that the Philippines remains as “democratic” as it’s ever supposedly been does…
Maria Ressa, CEO of “social news site” Rappler has gone too far. Rather than own up to her failure to build a credible news media organisation that could compete in the free market of ideas, she, instead, takes it upon herself to appoint Facebook as “the new gatekeeper to information” and then proceed to accuse…
Read More “A desperate Maria Ressa blames Facebook for Rappler’s inevitable demise” »
For one thing, it is a bit presumptuous to think spying on the minutiae of day-to-day lives of ordinary Filipinos is an important enough main objective for a multi-million dollar investment in network infrastructure and telco service delivery capability. There really isn’t much to learn from data collected from Filipino Internet users beyond what Facebook…
Read More “Will a China-owned telco operating in the Philippines spy on Filipinos?” »
Back in the heyday decades of Yellowtardism in the 1980s and 1990s, mass communication was pretty much a one-way street. The ability to efficiently reach a mass audience was a capitalist monopoly — held by those who possessed the means to organise enterprises that could build and operate what today are regarded as conventional broadcast…
Read More “Filipinos were taught FAKE Philippine history for 30 years!” »
OVERVIEW The embattled website Rappler.com have been through many issues and controversies since the dawn of the Duterte administration in the Philippines, alleged of misquoting the President, using fake photos, publishing fake news and propaganda, using questionable graphs and data, and putting various bloggers and netizens under bad light. In return, the President himself occasionally…
The Duterte administration, one year into its term, remains terribly awful and inept at controlling the narrative. It still lacks its own public communications apparatus that it could use to bypass the other media stations. There’s PTV4, and the Presidential Communications Operations Office (PCOO), and yet so far both have proven ineffective. Even if one…
Read More “The competitive advantage of Yellowtards over the pro-Duterte in media” »
Across the political spectrum, Filipinos still completely miss the point of social media and the so-called “free market of ideas” it represents. The latest project of Malacanang allowing “bloggers with a following of more than 5,000 to cover presidential events” is attracting a lot of questions. Unfortunately, true to form, all the questions being asked…
Because of the hardship of life in Filipino society – the degree of self-imposition of such hardship is another matter – a few behaviors seem deeply ingrained in the average Filipinos’ psyche: they will take any shortcut possible (even if illegal), they will resort to penny-pinching, and they will easily buy into things whose integrity…
Read More “Here is why the ‘fake news’ scare doesn’t resonate with Filipinos…” »