When the force becomes the ‘like farm’

The PNP, in its eternal search for relevance, has discovered engagement metrics.

Word in the ranks is that personnel are now being asked — not formally, of course, never formally — to like, share, and comment on the official PNP posts. Hashtags are involved. #PNP is one of them. There may be others. One imagines the social media officer in some regional PIO running down a checklist at 7 a.m.: did the ground commander like the post yet, did Patrolman Dela Cruz comment “Salamat sa serbisyo,” did anybody share to their personal account with three fire emojis.

It is, as the kids on Facebook would say, pwerte na ya mate.

There is something charming about an institution with arrest powers, firearms, and constitutional authority over your liberty deciding that what it really needs is a stronger algorithmic footprint. As if Meta’s ranking system is the last unbreached perimeter in the war on crime. As if somewhere in Menlo Park, an engineer is going to look at the engagement spike and say, “Sir, the Iloilo command really cares about its content.”

The deeper comedy is that none of this is necessary. The previous PNP chief, Gen. Nicolas Torre III, was viral without a troll army. He arrested Apollo Quiboloy then served the ICC warrant on Rodrigo Duterte. He was on every news cycle, every reel, every meme page, for months. He did not need his own personnel to manufacture engagement because the work was the engagement. Reporters and netizens chased him. NAPOLCOM eventually chased him out, but that is a different column for a different day.

This is the underlying lesson the current PNP communications strategy seems to have missed: virality is a symptom, not a goal. You do not go viral by ordering 230,000 personnel to react with a heart emoji. You go viral by doing things people want to talk about. The first is a HR memo. The second is a profession.

And there is a sadder note underneath the satire, which is worth saying plainly. PNP personnel have rank, duty hours, and chains of command. When a “request” to engage with official posts comes down through that chain, it is not a request. It is a soft order with a paper trail of metrics. Refusing to like the post is a small act of insubordination that nobody will ever get charged for, but everybody knows about. The likes are real in the sense that the fingers tapped them. They are not real in any sense that matters to communications strategy.

Whether any of this is monetized is a separate question, and one I leave to better-resourced reporters. The PNP Facebook page is not, as far as anyone can tell, running pre-roll ads on its press releases. But the social capital — the appearance of a force unified behind its messaging, the appearance of public approval where there is only internal compliance — is its own currency. It buys cover. It buys headlines. It buys the next budget hearing.

The free advice, offered at no charge to whoever is currently running the PNP communications shop: turn off the engagement farm. It is embarrassing. The engagement metrics on a forced like are the same as the engagement metrics on a real one, but only one of them survives a screenshot from a disgruntled corporal posted to a private group chat. And those screenshots always, always leak.

The institution that needs a troll army is the institution that has run out of reasons to be admired. Gen. Torre, for all his faults, never needed one. He was, as our friend on the messenger thread put it, viral na sya ya nga daan.

The current setup is what happens when you confuse the cart with the horse, the metrics with the mission, the hashtag with the headline. Ilam dulang gid, indeed.