Digital mercenaries

Every election cycle, newsrooms gear up to play whack-a-mole with lies. We screenshot, we fact-check, we publish. And we lose.

Because we are hunting ghosts while the necromancers sit in air-conditioned boardrooms.

Look at the Statements of Contributions and Expenditures (SOCEs) filed with the Commission on Elections. They are a masterclass in creative writing. A campaign will declare PHP 500,000 for “digital consultancy” or “influencer management.” What the Comelec doesn’t audit – what nobody audits – is the actual digital footprint that money buys. Candidates aren’t paying for high-level strategy. They are buying an army.

But let’s stop pretending that army is made of radicalized political true believers. The people doing the actual posting are usually broke, precarious gig workers. A college kid in an internet cafe juggling data annotation and content moderation isn’t a political mastermind. They are just taking whatever gig pays the rent. We vilify the disposable worker while the PR strategist who drafted the campaign gets promoted. The architect retains their industry respectability, insulated by wealth, while the low-level troll gets their account nuked.

The public relations industry knows exactly who these architects are. It is the worst-kept secret in the business. Yet, attempts to draft voluntary codes of ethics against disinformation always quietly fizzle out. Polite suggestions do not work when there is this much money on the table. In 2017, Bell Pottinger was driven into administration after being expelled from a UK PR association for running a racially toxic campaign in South Africa. We need that exact ruthlessness here. If self-regulation fails, we need legal frameworks to penalize the agencies designing these digital burn-it-down operations.

And here is the part my own colleagues hate talking about. We know who the strategists are, too. But exposing them means biting the hand that feeds the newsroom. These same executives control massive corporate advertising budgets. If a paper out of Iloilo or Manila goes after a powerful PR chief, the ad revenue mysteriously dries up. So we write another fact-check. We focus on the what because investigating the who threatens the bottom line. This profound conflict of interest reduces journalism to digital janitorial work.

The only way to break this machinery is to go after the wallet. We need to look at what worked in Brazil during the 2022 elections. The Sleeping Giants campaign relentlessly pressured brands to pull their ads from disinformation sites. And it worked – outside analysis put their success rate over 80%. When the money stops flowing, the machine stalls. Defunding is not, and should not be, censorship. It is a consequence. Civil society and local advertising watchdogs need to build a coalition that makes funding fake news too toxic for any corporate brand to touch.

We have spent a decade asking if a post is true, but it has not saved us. The only question that matters now is who signed the check.