By Francis Allan L. Angelo

When The Camera Becomes A Weapon

There is a peculiar irony at the heart of the social media age. The same technology that democratized speech — that gave ordinary citizens a platform to speak truth to power — has also become the most sophisticated machinery for manufacturing that power’s lies. In the Philippines, this irony has never been more visible, nor more consequential.

On the night of May 6, 2025, the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) arrested Franco Mabanta, founder of the Peanut Gallery Media Network (PGMN), along with four others in connection with an alleged extortion scheme targeting former House Speaker Martin Romualdez. The sum allegedly demanded: P300 million. The evidence allegedly in hand: suitcases of cash. The backdrop: a man who had built an entire brand around “independent journalism,” “fearless” political commentary, and a crusade against the very corruption he now stood accused of perpetuating.

The Mabanta affair did not emerge from a vacuum. It is the logical, if extreme, endpoint of a decade-long transformation in Philippine media — one in which the line between journalism and influence operation, between civic advocacy and political gamesmanship, between truth-telling and extortion, has been deliberately, systematically, and profitably blurred.

This article examines how social media influencers and vloggers have come to occupy the space once held by credentialed journalists; why that occupation poses a grave and underappreciated threat to democratic discourse and media freedom; and what the 2025 Philippine midterm elections reveal about the mechanics, the incentives, and the dangers of this new political-media industrial complex.

The Rise of the Vlogger-Politician-Journalist Hybrid

The collapse of the old information order

To understand what social media influencers have become in Philippine politics, one must first understand what they replaced. The shutdown of ABS-CBN in 2020 — the country’s largest and most storied broadcast network, silenced by a Congress dominated by allies of then-President Rodrigo Duterte — created a seismic rupture in the Philippine information ecosystem. CNN Philippines followed, closing in 2023. What remained was a fractured media landscape: legacy outlets diminished in reach and resources, and an enormous, hungry audience with no institutional broadcaster to serve it.

Into this vacuum rushed the vloggers, the commentators, the “citizen journalists,” and the political partisans — many of them indistinguishable from one another. According to the Sigla Research Center’s 2025 report Imperfect Allies: Influence Operations in the 2025 Philippine Midterm Elections, new transmedia information channels mushroomed precisely to “fill information and news voids left by legacy media channels like ABS-CBN and CNN, capitalizing on audience distrust in established legacy news outlets.” These outlets, however, “did not necessarily fill information gaps left by the closure of major news organizations” so much as “provide alternative sources of partisan content that traditional media avoided in the interest of fairness and objectivity.”

The difference is critical, and it is one that millions of Filipino consumers of online content are ill-equipped to make: the difference between information and partisan messaging dressed in the costume of information.

The architecture of the new media class

The Sigla report identifies with clinical precision the distinct typologies of this new media class, each performing a different function in the ecosystem of influence.

There is the hyperpartisan vlogger — loud, prolific, algorithmically rewarded for outrage, and typically organized into networks that coordinate messaging, distribute content, and share political clients. These are not solitary voices in the wilderness. They are, as the report documents, professionalizing into what amounts to a shadow public relations industry: “Local influencer organizations filled the role of chief architects and their firms, with chief influencers brokering politician–influencer relations between national/local candidates and local influencers.”

There is the knowledge influencer — figures like Sass Rogando Sasot, a China-based commentator who styles herself as an international relations expert, amplifying Duterte-aligned narratives from beyond the reach of Philippine jurisdiction. These personalities lend an air of intellectual credibility to what is, in substance, partisan propaganda, their academic-sounding vocabulary serving as camouflage for political weapons.

There is the newsfluencer — a hybrid creature documented in the report as characteristic of channels like the Conservative Anti-Woke Infotainment platform. These outlets blend “political commentary with modern professional media aesthetics,” presenting themselves as neutral analysts while systematically privileging one ideological camp. The Sigla report describes their method with precision:

“This infotainment approach disarms viewers by offering a mix of humor, polemic, and sleek production, making conservative talking points feel like neutral, critical, and unbiased analysis.”

And there is the influencer-turned-state-actor — perhaps the most unsettling category. Atty. Claire Castro, dubbed the “Clapback Queen” in the Sigla report, is a former YouTube macro influencer with over 400,000 subscribers who became the Marcos administration’s press officer. Her digital celebrity did not stop at the Malacañang gate; she continues to upload partisan commentary on her personal YouTube channel even while serving in an official government capacity, weaponizing her influencer credibility as an extension of state power.

Each of these figures operates at the intersection of media and politics, and each claims, to varying degrees, the mantle of journalism — of “telling truth,” of “independent coverage,” of “giving people information the mainstream media won’t.” It is precisely this claim that must be interrogated.

The Mabanta Case — Symbolism and Substance

A brand built on moral superiority

Franco Mabanta and the Peanut Gallery Media Network represent, in concentrated form, the promise and the peril of the influencer-as-journalist model.

PGMN positioned itself not merely as a “media outlet” but as a moral alternative: young, digitally native, unbeholden to corporate interests, unafraid to go after powerful figures the mainstream press allegedly coddled. Its messaging was calibrated to resonate with an audience exhausted by traditional transactional media — the very audience that had watched ABS-CBN shut down and felt, correctly, that something important had been taken from them. PGMN offered itself as the replacement: cleaner, smarter, more authentic.

The NBI arrest shattered that mythology.

According to the NBI’s account, the alleged scheme was breathtaking in both its ambition and its crudity: threats to release damaging videos unless P300 million in hush money was delivered. The imagery attached to the arrest — suitcases of cash, a secret location in Pasig City, a network of alleged conspirators — was the visual inverse of everything PGMN claimed to stand for.

Mabanta himself denied everything. In a statement released after his arrest, he framed the affair as political retaliation:

“Over the last five months, PGMN completed immense, comprehensive, painful research on the breathtaking national corruption of Martin Romualdez while he was Speaker of the House… That is why this is happening.”

He spoke of a 90-minute exposé “packed with hard evidence,” of death threats from powerful friends, of sacrificing himself for his sons’ future ability to say their father “was the kind of man” they could be proud of.

This is, notably, also the language of journalism. The language of the fearless reporter who has gone too far and paid the price. And courts, not newspapers and certainly not this article, will determine whether it is true.

But the commentary that appeared in the Mabanta files is damning precisely because it does not require a guilty verdict to make its point: “Whether the allegations prosper in court or not, the symbolism alone is catastrophic. Because in politics and media, symbolism matters.” It continues: “When your brand is built almost entirely on moral superiority, even one scandal can destroy the entire mythology overnight. Especially when the scandal looks exactly like the corruption you once mocked.”

The structural problem the case illuminates

The Mabanta case is not primarily about one man’s guilt or innocence. It is about what happens when influence — political influence, audience influence, the power to shape narratives — is accumulated rapidly, without institutional accountability, without editorial oversight, without the professional and ethical structures that, however imperfectly, constrain traditional journalism.

The Sigla report identifies this structural vulnerability with precision:

“The digital age has created a dangerous illusion — that virality is wisdom, followers are credibility, and proximity to power is proof of brilliance.”

Young influencers suddenly find themselves in rooms with billionaires, politicians, and kingmakers. The rise is intoxicating. “The problem with rapid ascension is that character often develops slower than influence. And when character cannot keep pace with influence, collapse usually follows.”

Traditional journalism, for all its failings, is embedded in institutional structures designed to slow this kind of collapse: editorial boards, legal review of stories, ethical codes, professional organizations with the ability to sanction members, libel law, and the accumulated institutional culture of what is and is not permissible. These structures are not infallible — they have failed catastrophically, repeatedly, in the Philippines and elsewhere. But they exist. For the new class of digital influencers, they largely do not.

The Unreliability of the Influencer as Journalist

Partisanship without disclosure

At the core of the influencer-as-journalist problem is undisclosed partisanship. The Sigla report documents comprehensively what its fieldwork found: that a significant proportion of online political content in the 2025 elections was produced by individuals who were simultaneously being compensated by the candidates and campaigns they were covering — or ostensibly covering.

“Opacity in campaign financing emboldened endorsements and collaborations with vloggers and content creators for races in both the Upper House and Lower House of Congress,” the report notes. A key example: Camille Villar, who led advertising spending among 2025 senatorial candidates, appeared on Viy Cortez’s vlog. The Solid North Partylist deployed high-profile influencers including Boss Toyo (7.6 million Facebook followers), Cong TV (7.2 million), and Maja Salvador (4 million) to promote its activities — without, in many cases, the kind of disclosure that journalistic ethics would demand.

This is not endorsement, as the term is commonly understood — a celebrity publicly backing a product or candidate with consumers generally aware that money has changed hands. This is something more insidious: the blending of campaign advertising into organic-seeming content, presented to audiences who reasonably believe they are receiving independent commentary. The audience cannot evaluate information they do not know they are receiving. And when audiences cannot evaluate information, they cannot make informed choices — which is the foundational purpose of a free press in a democracy.

The Local Public Information Office (PIO) Facebook pages documented in the Sigla report take this dynamic even further. Originally intended for public service announcements, these government-owned pages evolved into “extensions of incumbent officials’ campaigns,” producing content that “imitated legacy media journalism, complete with headlines, video reports, and even a production studio for broadcasters while embedding clear partisan undertones.” They carry official government seals. They are perceived by residents as the most credible source of local information. And they are vehicles for incumbent political campaigns, funded by public money.

This is state-sponsored disinformation wearing the costume of public service journalism. It is, arguably, a more systematic and dangerous form of media manipulation than anything an individual influencer could accomplish.

The Deepfake Dimension: when ‘content’ becomes fabrication

The 2025 elections also witnessed the weaponization of Generative AI in ways that pose existential questions for the very concept of journalistic evidence. The report documents two nationally viral deepfakes: one depicting President Marcos apparently snorting cocaine (the “polvoron video”), and one depicting Marcos ordering a military offensive against China. Both were fabricated. Both went viral.

The polvoron video was initially difficult for fact-checking organizations to authenticate precisely because it was low-quality — the kind of degraded footage one might expect from a grainy recording of a real event. The deepfake exploited the epistemological conventions of authentic visual evidence. As the report notes, “deepfakes can mimic real speech and imagery with high fidelity, rendering more deceitful content that is difficult to detect.”

When a prominent pro-Duterte senator shared and praised a deepfake video of a student arguing against VP Sara Duterte’s impeachment — apparently genuinely failing to recognize it as AI-generated — it revealed something important: even people in positions of significant political power cannot reliably distinguish fabricated audiovisual content from authentic footage. If they cannot, what hope is there for the ordinary citizen navigating a feed saturated with such content?

The influencer ecosystem supercharges this problem. A traditional news organization, however partisan, maintains some institutional incentive to avoid publishing demonstrably fabricated content: legal liability, reputational damage, regulatory scrutiny. A distributed network of anonymous partisan Facebook pages and overseas-based vloggers operating outside Philippine jurisdiction faces none of these constraints. They can produce and amplify deepfakes freely, and their audiences — already primed to distrust “mainstream media” — are poorly equipped to push back.

The transnational accountability gap

The Sigla report’s documentation of what it calls “Influencers Beyond Borders” — overseas-based hyperpartisan vloggers who operate beyond Philippine legal reach — illuminates a structural problem that no domestic regulatory framework can fully address.

Vlogger Claire “Maharlika” Contreras, based in the United States, with nearly 480,000 YouTube subscribers and 271,000 TikTok followers, was “among the first to share the viral polvoron video.” She mobilized audiences to condemn what she framed as the Marcos administration’s betrayal of national sovereignty. She dismissed congressional subpoenas. She continues to produce and distribute content that, by the standards of Philippine law, might constitute cyberlibel or election offense — but from a jurisdiction that cannot be compelled to surrender her.

Sass Rogando Sasot, based in China, openly mocked her jurisdictional immunity: “I will wait where I live, which is outside the Philippines, to receive it legally and thereby answer it legally.” The House of Representatives cited her in contempt. The contempt citation accomplished nothing.

This is not merely a Philippine problem. It is the defining accountability gap of the digital information age: the ease with which influence can be projected across borders, combined with the near-impossibility of holding cross-border influence operators legally accountable, has created a class of politically powerful actors who operate outside any meaningful accountability structure. They are not journalists — they have no professional obligations, no editorial oversight, no ethical codes. But they shape elections, inflame passions, and manufacture consent at a scale that professional journalism in the Philippines can no longer match.

Influence Operations and the Degradation of the Public Sphere

Narratives as weapons

The Sigla report’s documentation of the 2025 election’s dominant influence operation narratives — false victimhood, imported justice, drug use accusations, and puppet government — reveals something important about the epistemic function of the influencer ecosystem: it is not designed to inform. It is designed to frame.

Each narrative is built around emotional manipulation rather than evidentiary argument. False victimhood appeals to filial piety and sympathy for the elderly. Imported justice hijacks patriotic sentiment. Drug use accusations revive Duterte-era securitization frameworks, positioning Marcos as morally equivalent to the drug users his predecessor sought to kill. The puppet government narrative undermines institutional trust and democratic legitimacy.

None of these narratives require evidence. They require only repetition, emotional resonance, and a sufficiently large distribution network. The influencer ecosystem provides all three. “Influence operations narratives in the 2025 elections gained significant traction primarily due to their wide distribution rather than their content,” the Sigla report notes flatly.

This is the antithesis of journalism. Journalism, in its ideal form, grounds public discourse in verified facts. Influence operations ground public discourse in strategic emotion. When influence operations — distributed through networks of influencers and vloggers who position themselves as journalists — come to dominate the information environment, the result is not simply “bad journalism.” It is the systematic replacement of the epistemic conditions necessary for democratic self-governance with conditions optimized for manipulation.

Calibrated ambivalence and the limits of the influencer model

The 2025 elections also offered a partial counterargument to despair: the success of what the Sigla report calls “calibrated ambivalence.” Liberal-progressive candidates Bam Aquino and Kiko Pangilinan, consistently underperforming in pre-election surveys, ended up placing second and fifth in the final results, respectively. Their strategy: policy-centric campaigns, deliberate disengagement from partisan narrative wars, and careful engagement across ideological lines — including appearances on the platforms of partisan influencers aligned with opposing camps.

The lesson here is not that the influencer ecosystem is irrelevant. Rather, it is that the ecosystem can be navigated intelligently, that the algorithmic attention economy that rewards outrage and tribalism is not entirely immune to a different kind of appeal — one rooted in welfare concerns, concrete policy proposals, and the deliberate refusal to participate in the daily emotional warfare of influencer politics.

But this lesson, too, has limits. Aquino and Pangilinan succeeded in part because of conditions specific to 2025: the Marcos-Duterte split created space for a third option. The structural dominance of hyperpartisan influence operations in the Philippine information ecosystem remains. The accountability gap for disinformation-for-hire remains. The deepfake production capacity of influence operators continues to grow. These are not problems that any single election result can solve.

Press Freedom in the Age of the Weaponized Vlogger

Who gets to claim press freedom?

The NBI’s response to criticism of the Mabanta arrest was careful, calibrated, and revealing: “Press freedom is fine. We protect it. But criminal activities we will go after.” The NBI director further observed: “We don’t want social media to be weaponized” — and floated the possibility of future legislation regulating certain social media practices.

This is where the terrain becomes genuinely treacherous. Press freedom is not a privilege granted by the state to those who use it responsibly. It is a foundational right — one that protects journalism precisely because states cannot be trusted to define “responsible” journalism in ways that don’t serve their own interests. The history of Philippine press freedom is, in large part, a history of governments claiming to be suppressing not journalism but crime: Marcos declared martial law in 1972 and shuttered the free press in the name of order; Duterte shut down ABS-CBN using regulatory mechanisms in the name of compliance; red-tagging has been deployed against progressive candidates and journalists alike, rendering them vulnerable to extrajudicial violence, in the name of national security.

Any framework designed to regulate “social media weaponization” will be used — inevitably, given Philippine political history — to silence legitimate dissent alongside genuine extortion. The NBI chief’s suggestion of future legislation governing social media practices should be read in this context: with profound caution.

Yet the alternative — a completely unregulated landscape in which any person with a ring light and a YouTube account can claim the legal protections of journalism while operating as a partisan operative or, allegedly, an extortionist — is also untenable. Press freedom exists to protect the public’s right to truthful information. When the entities claiming press freedom are themselves the primary vectors of disinformation, the claim becomes paradoxical.

The real threat to press freedom

It is worth being precise about where the genuine threat to Philippine press freedom lies.

The threat is not primarily Franco Mabanta, if the allegations against him are true. The threat is the systematic use of influence operations — by the state, by political dynasties, and by their networks of paid vloggers and hyperpartisan media channels — to crowd out independent journalism. It is the weaponization of legal mechanisms, including red-tagging and cyberlibel, against journalists who report inconvenient facts. It is the use of government-owned PIO pages to produce partisan content with public funds, displacing genuine public information. It is the deployment of deepfakes and AI-generated content to poison the information environment with fabrications that real journalism cannot keep pace with debunking.

The Sigla report is explicit: “Politicians have exploited such regulations to censor critics and evade accountability.” The closure of ABS-CBN was not press freedom; it was the suppression of press freedom. The congressional subpoenas against DDS influencers — whatever one thinks of their content — set a precedent for congressional intimidation of media figures that could easily be turned against genuinely independent journalists. The use of the NBI against Mabanta may be legally justified; it may also be, as Mabanta himself claims, a politically motivated operation designed to silence an exposé.

Both can be true simultaneously. The allegations against Mabanta can be legitimate, and the timing of the arrest can be politically convenient for those it protects. Courts will adjudicate the former; the latter is the province of journalism — real journalism, done by credentialed professionals with institutional backing, editorial oversight, and the legal resources to defend their reporting.

That journalism is precisely what the influencer ecosystem has been displacing.

Reclaiming the epistemic commons

The crisis at the intersection of social media, political influence, and journalism in the Philippines is not a problem of technology. It is a problem of accountability, incentive, and institutional design.

The influencer ecosystem operates without the accountability structures that make journalism trustworthy. It operates with incentive structures — algorithmic, financial, political — that systematically reward emotional manipulation over evidentiary accuracy. And it operates in an institutional void created by the deliberate destruction of legacy media and the chronic underfunding of independent journalism.

The Sigla Research Center’s recommendations point toward partial solutions: multi-stakeholder self-regulatory models, transparency requirements for influencer-politician financial relationships, community-driven depolarization programs, and regulatory frameworks for AI use in political campaigns. These are necessary but not sufficient. Transparency requirements mean nothing if the entities required to disclose are operating from overseas. Self-regulatory models mean nothing if the platforms themselves — Facebook above all, the dominant information environment for most Filipinos — have abandoned active engagement against disinformation.

What is most urgently needed is something simpler and harder to legislate: an informed citizenry capable of distinguishing between journalism and influence operation. Between a reporter who verifies before publishing and a vlogger who publishes because the content is politically useful. Between an editorial correction that follows the publication of wrong information and a deepfake video designed to poison a conversation that factual reporting might otherwise clarify.

The Franco Mabanta affair crystallized something important precisely because of its imagery: a man arrested beside suitcases of cash, who had built a brand on rejecting suitcases of cash. Whether the imagery reflects the truth of what occurred, courts will determine. But the imagery itself carries a lesson that transcends the individual case.

Power, in the digital age, no longer requires institutions. It requires followers. And followers, in the attention economy, are accumulated not through the slow, painstaking work of factual reporting and verified accountability journalism, but through the faster, more algorithmically rewarding work of outrage, narrative, and tribal emotional appeal.

This is the fundamental unreliability of the social media influencer as journalist: not primarily that individual influencers are dishonest (though some may be), but that the structural conditions of their existence — the platforms, the algorithms, the financial relationships, the absence of institutional accountability — make systematic honesty economically irrational. The system is not designed to produce truth. It is designed to produce engagement.

And in that gap between truth and engagement, in the space between verified reporting and viral narrative, democratic discourse goes to die.

The Philippines in 2025 offers a vivid, granular, and cautionary portrait of what that dying looks like. The question — for regulators, civil society, platform companies, and the citizens who consume this content — is whether it is also, finally, a portrait of what recovery might require.

Sources

NBI press briefing transcript and PGMN statement, May 6, 2025);

Lanuza, J.M.H., Sanchez II, F.L., Berizo, R.M., Agapia, C., Fallorina, R., & Ong, J.C. (2025). “Imperfect Allies: Influence Operations in the 2025 Philippine Midterm Elections.” Sigla Research Center. siglaresearch.org/our-research/.

Additional commentary drawn from editorial analysis included in source materials.

Alex P. Vidal

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