The anger economy and the 2.3 million reasons we should pay attention to

By Francis Allan L. Angelo

An Ilongga vlogger based in Dubai, operating under the name Iloy Bugris, has been referred by the Presidential Communications Office to the Department of Justice for allegedly spreading fabricated claims about the health of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.

Her Facebook page, Iloy Bugris: The Queen of Revelations, has 2.3 million followers and remains active. She held livestreams claiming the president is critically ill, displayed what the PCO says was a fabricated medical document, and solicited financial contributions from viewers while doing it.

In a radio interview, she doubled down saying the real Ferdinand Marcos Jr. was dead and the current president was a product of some weird if not ethereal technology.

That last detail on the alleged solicitation is the one that should stop you.

Not because soliciting money online is unusual. It is not. It is one of the oldest moves in the vlogger playbook. But because it reveals something about the machinery underneath this whole episode that the legal complaints alone do not capture. What we are looking at is not simply a case of someone saying something false about a president. It is a case study in how attention, anger, and money move through the Philippine internet — and how little separates political commentary from commercial performance in the influencer economy.

The Philippines had roughly 107.6 million Facebook users as of December 2025, according to NapoleonCat data  — about 89 percent of the entire population. The Digital 2026 report from Meltwater and We Are Social found that 94.9 percent of Filipino internet users accessed Facebook at least once in the past month. Filipinos spend an average of nearly 34 hours a week on social media if you include video content. That is not a casual user base. That is an entire public square, and it runs on engagement.

In that kind of environment, a page with 2.3 million followers is not a hobby but a potent broadcast operation. And when that operation involves livestreams about a sitting president’s health, fabricated documents, and open requests for donations, it stops being opinion and starts being something closer to a monetized spectacle.

I want to be careful here, because the legal question and the cultural question are not the same thing.

On the legal side, the case is relatively straightforward. Article 154 of the Revised Penal Code penalizes the unlawful use of means of publication and unlawful utterances, with penalties of arresto mayor – one month and one day to six months of imprisonment – plus fines ranging from PHP 40,000 to PHP 200,000. When committed through digital platforms, Republic Act No. 10175, the Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012, escalates the penalty to prision correccional, which means six months and one day to six years. DOJ spokesperson Polo Martinez has said the matter is being treated as malicious and will be referred to the NBI for evaluation and case buildup.

Fine. The law will run its course. But that is the easy part.

The harder question is what to do about the system that makes this kind of content profitable in the first place.

Because here is the thing most commentary about disinformation misses: the people producing it are not always ideologues. Some are. But many are entrepreneurs – attention entrepreneurs – operating inside a platform economy that rewards provocation, emotional intensity, and speed. A claim that a president is dead or dying generates more clicks than a policy briefing. A fabricated medical document displayed during a livestream is more engaging than a fact-check published the next day. The outrage, the denial, the pile-on, the counter-reaction  — all of it generates movement. And movement is what the algorithm reads.

I have watched enough of these cycles to notice a pattern. One person goes viral for a hot take. Another reacts. A third makes a breakdown video. A fourth posts screenshots and adds moral outrage. By then, it is no longer about the original claim. It is about traction. Everybody in the chain is getting something out of it.

That is the real economy. Not an economy of ideas but an economy of attention, and anger happens to be one of its most profitable fuels.

Anger is fast. Easy to package. It asks very little of the audience except an instant reaction. You do not need to think long about a post that makes you furious. You respond, repost, react. The platforms love that. The algorithm does not ask whether the exchange is thoughtful, fair, or true. It only reads movement.

What makes the Iloy Bugris case particularly instructive is how it straddles both sides of the Philippine disinformation paradox. On one hand, you have a government that rose to power partly through sophisticated social media campaigns now using legal mechanisms to pursue online content creators. On the other, you have content creators who frame their activities as democratic transparency while openly soliciting cash donations during livestreams built on unverified claims.

Neither side is fully clean. And the platform sitting underneath both of them — Facebook, where this all played out — has no headquarters in the Philippines, faces no specific Philippine regulation governing its duties toward content creators and advertisers, and operates on a business model that profits regardless of whether the content circulating on it is true.

The House Tri-Committee hearings on disinformation, which began in February 2025, exposed some of this. Legislators issued subpoenas to several social media influencers. They discussed revisiting tax laws to better monitor payments from online users monetizing their content. The proposed Anti-Troll Farm and Election Disinformation Act, House Bill 11178, floated penalties of six to 12 years’ imprisonment and fines of PHP 500,000 to PHP 10 million. And yet Meta could not even be formally invited to testify because it has no Philippine-based entity.

That regulatory gap is the real story, and it is not getting enough attention.

Meanwhile, Internews’ Initiative for Media Freedom documented that domestic influence operations in the Philippines typically follow a cascading pattern: hyper-partisan vloggers post content on YouTube, which gets embedded on dubious websites and amplified by Facebook accounts. The financial incentives are layered. Some actors mirror content across platforms like Bilibili and ViralPitch specifically to maximize monetization. The line between political conviction and commercial calculation is, in many cases, invisible.

Iloy Bugris herself has said she is prepared to seek asylum if deportation proceedings are initiated. She claims to hold UAE residency under a visa tied to her Canadian spouse. In a radio interview, she said her lawyers told her she is outside Philippine jurisdiction. She has compared her situation to that of former Presidential Spokesperson Harry Roque.

Forget for a moment whether that legal theory holds up. What is more revealing is the posture. It is the posture of someone who understands that being targeted by the government is itself content. Being investigated is a narrative. Being threatened with charges is branding. Even her initial public response to the PCO’s press release was performative: she posted a photo of it and wrote, in effect, that she had “made it.”

This is how the attention economy digests its own controversies. A scandal becomes content. A criticism becomes content. A falling-out becomes content. Even being attacked becomes content — especially being attacked — because victimhood, rage, righteousness, and mockery all travel well online.

I am not saying this means nothing should be done. It should. But the responses need to be smarter than just filing cases.

First, the regulatory framework has to catch up. The Philippines needs legislation that specifically addresses the monetization of disinformation — not just the speech itself but the financial pipeline that sustains it. If someone is collecting GCash and BPI donations while displaying fabricated medical documents on a livestream, the financial dimension of that act should be actionable independently of the speech dimension. Platform accountability laws that require social media companies operating in the Philippine market to maintain local compliance offices would also help.

Second, the government’s own credibility matters. The PCO’s Anti-Fake News Desk and the new Memorandum of Agreement among the DOJ, PCO, and the Department of Information and Communications Technology may formalize interagency coordination, but they also concentrate enforcement power in institutions that have their own complicated relationships with online propaganda. If the government is serious about disinformation, it has to be consistent — not selective about which fabrications it pursues based on who the target is.

Third, media literacy and fact-checking infrastructure need investment that matches the scale of the problem. In a country where nearly 95 percent of internet users are on Facebook and where 64 percent of the population gets news from social media, the fact-checking ecosystem is still pitifully underfunded relative to the disinformation economy it is trying to counter. Influencer marketing spend in the Philippines alone is projected to reach USD 141.67 million by end of 2026. Compare that to the budget of any Philippine fact-checking operation and the asymmetry is obscene.

The Iloy Bugris case will probably follow the usual trajectory. Legal threats, NBI referral, maybe charges, maybe not. If she is abroad and claims asylum, enforcement becomes murky. Her page will likely keep posting. Her audience will likely grow. The controversy itself will feed the machine.

And that is the part I find most tiring about all of this. The economy rewards people not for clarifying but for intensifying. Not for calming things down but for keeping them alive. Not for ending a conflict but for extending it just enough to squeeze another day, another post, another livestream out of it.

The people inside this system learn — consciously or not — to treat every controversy as recyclable material. Nothing is wasted. And because attention is limited, nobody in that world can really afford to ignore everybody else. So they watch one another, provoke one another, react to one another, and when needed, destroy one another a little.

Then they all check the numbers. The question is whether we keep letting the numbers be the only thing that counts.