Truth against the trolls

I first met the troll machine in 2022. Not the occasional Facebook commenter who wakes up angry and decides everyone else should suffer with him. I mean something that felt different: sudden, patterned, almost mechanical. I was helping administer a private Teachers for Leni and Kiko Facebook group when we posted a familiar photograph related to Martial Law. Almost immediately, membership requests spiked. Strange accounts tried to enter the group. The post drew hostile comments that sounded uncannily alike — same talking points, same aggression, same appetite for disruption. I remember staring at the screen and thinking: Ah, so this is what people mean.

Four years later, I felt a disturbing sense of déjà vu. Our school had posted a recorded message from Senator Risa Hontiveros following her visit to our university. She had spoken about youth empowerment and responsible leadership. The message itself was hardly a declaration of political war. Yet that particular video quickly attracted comments that seemed oddly detached from what she had actually said. Some dragged in the old PhilHealth allegation. Others simply heckled, bullied and attacked, resorting to personal insults, body-shaming, ad hominems, recycled propaganda and outright falsehoods. The experience reminded me of 2022: the conversation in front of you and the conversation being forced into the comments section seemed to be two different things.

I should be careful here. A rude commenter is not automatically a troll. An anonymous account is not necessarily fake. Neither is a person a troll simply because he disagrees with Risa Hontiveros, Leni Robredo, Ferdinand Marcos Jr., Sara Duterte or anyone else. Democracy would be unbearable if disagreement itself became evidence of conspiracy. Nor can I prove that the accounts I encountered were all paid, coordinated or directed by any politician. Suspicion is not evidence, and political loyalties should never lower that standard.

But organized manipulation online is not imaginary. Facebook itself documented the problem. In 2019, it removed 200 Philippine-linked pages, groups and accounts for coordinated inauthentic behavior involving deceptive identities and political content. Facebook traced the network to one organized by Nic Gabunada. Millions of users had followed or joined pages and groups within that network. So when Filipinos talk about organized online manipulation, we are not discussing some creature invented around the sari-sari store after three bottles of beer.

What interests me more, however, is not who pays whom. It is how a falsehood survives after it has already been corrected.

Take the PhilHealth story repeatedly thrown at Hontiveros. VERA Files first debunked claims in 2018 that she had been ordered to return millions — or billions — from unauthorized PhilHealth bonuses. PhilHealth itself told the fact-checking organization that Hontiveros was not among the officials named in the Commission on Audit decisions, while her camp maintained that the disputed bonuses had been approved before her term on the PhilHealth board. Yet the claim refused to die, resurfacing over several years and appearing again in recent attacks against her. That is the trick worth studying. A lie does not always have to win an argument. Sometimes it only has to survive it.

The other attacks are hardly more convincing. Calling Hontiveros a communist a thousand times does not make the label evidence, and fabricated statements portraying her as supportive of the NPA have repeatedly been debunked. Then come comparisons about who is supposedly “more intelligent,” as though political disagreement could be settled by insulting one person and flattering another. That, too, avoids the issue. The larger point is simpler: name-calling is cheap. Evidence is not.

Repeat something often enough and somebody encountering it for the first time may reasonably wonder, Basi tuod man? Maybe there is something to it. A screenshot appears in a Messenger group. A cousin forwards it from abroad. Somebody posts it under a news story. Another person comments, “Research before you speak,” while providing no research whatsoever. Soon the falsehood acquires that peculiar social-media legitimacy: I keep seeing this; therefore, there must be something there.

This is bigger than Hontiveros, and that distinction matters. The target today may be a senator one admires; tomorrow it may be a politician one dislikes, a journalist, a teacher, a scientist, a school or an ordinary person unlucky enough to become viral. The Reuters Institute’s 2025 Philippine report described a surge in disinformation and harmful content amid political conflict, including coordinated attacks on rival political camps, activists and journalists. It also found that social media remained Filipinos’ preferred news source. The combination is combustible: enormous reach, intense partisanship, cheap content production and algorithms built to notice what keeps us looking.

We see the difference in our classrooms. Before, misinformation might be a questionable fact passed around by relatives. Today, it comes professionally packaged, amplified by thousands of reactions and echoed by comments that make a falsehood look popular. The packaging has improved faster than our skepticism.

And now AI complicates the problem further. A believable profile photo can be generated. Hundreds of variations of a message can be produced quickly. Translation can make an operation cross linguistic borders. Automation can magnify activity. None of these tools proves that every suspicious account belongs to a troll farm, but they make an old lesson newly urgent: virality is not verification, and volume is not evidence.

I have also learned not to feed every creature living under the digital bridge. Arguing with an account whose only purpose is provocation can be like debating a videoke machine at 2 a.m. You may be correct, but you are still the one losing sleep. Sometimes the sensible response is to correct the factual claim once, provide the source, report genuinely abusive or deceptive activity and move on. The goal should not be to “troll the trolls.” If truth begins copying the methods of deception, we eventually forget which one we were defending.

This does not mean becoming humorless guardians of Facebook. It means developing a small pause between outrage and reaction. Who posted this? What exactly is being claimed? Where is the original document? Is the account discussing the issue or merely attacking the person? Has a reputable source already checked the allegation? Am I sharing because it is true, or because it feels satisfying against somebody I already dislike? Those few seconds of reflection may now be part of citizenship.

My encounters in 2022 and again this year have convinced me of one thing: trolls are real, but their greater power comes from real people doing their work for free. We become the final link when we forward without checking, rage without reading or mistake repetition for proof. We do not need to defeat every anonymous account on the internet. We only need to become harder to fool.

Because a troll can manufacture a comment. A network can manufacture noise. An algorithm can manufacture attention. But none of them should be allowed to manufacture our judgment.

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Doc H fondly describes himself as a “student of and for life” who, like many others, aspires to a life-giving and why-driven world grounded in social justice and the pursuit of happiness. His views do not necessarily reflect those of the institutions he is employed by or connected with.