Social Media in the Philippines is

Widespread, but what is its Impact?

The Philippines long had a terrible reputation for telecommunications, with Singapore’s
Lee Kuan Yew famously saying that in 1992, “98 percent of the population are waiting
for a telephone, and the other 2 percent for a dial tone.”

Above, a rice farmer in the Philippines uses his mobile phone to send a text message. Photo: IRRI Images.

However, beginning with the administration of Fidel Ramos (1992-1998) and followed
by President Estrada (1998-2001), the telecoms industry was liberalized, and phone
ownership skyrocketed. While there were more landlines available, much of the growth
was in mobile phones. Soon the Philippines was the texting (SMS) capital of the world –
to the point where the practice played a part of the ouster of President Estrada early in
2001. When the Senate impeachment trial was suddenly adjourned without verdict, the
text message went around “meet at EDSA.” Crowds gathered in the middle of the night
and refused to leave the main Manila thoroughfare until he left the presidential palace.
Fast forward to the present, and we have Facebook being used by more than 25
percent of the population – ranking 8th in the world, while other social media networks
(such as Twitter) are rapidly growing in popularity. In September 2011, the Philippine
Trust Index, commissioned by EON The Stakeholder Firm, was released. The study
revealed that 68 percent of the respondents view online news sites as the most trusted
sources of news and information while 49 percent trust social networking sites.
These impressive metrics are telling about usage, but more needs to be done to
understand the impact that social media has. A good example was the exciting initiative
by ABS-CBN, “Boto Mo Ipatrol Mo” (patrol your vote) that was part of the
general introduction of new technology in election coverage. The network aggressively
reached out through advertisements and roadshows to get people to sign up for the
system, and to post their observations and comments. The effort received per day 500
reports by email, 103 calls, and 3,058 texts during the electoral campaign. BMPM
peaked with 87,419 “Boto Patrollers” in its database, 125,487 fans on Facebook, 23,111
supporters on Twitter, 6,960 members on its microsite, and 3,701 members on Multiply.
The May 2010 automated election was indeed much improved, with lower levels of
violence and being generally accepted as producing honest results. But any impact of
BMPM needs to be assessed in context – for instance, the fact that there were 76,000
different voting places across the country means that many observers are needed. The
long-established Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting, along with its Muslim
partner organizations in Mindanao, mobilized well over 400,000 volunteer observers
who not only sent in reports but forwarded copies of election returns so that results
could be cross-checked.

The Asia Foundation has long partnered with organizations who try to move forward
through technology, helping to sponsor in May 2005 the first Philippine Blogging
Summit. Five years later, in the rapidly transforming social media landscape, we
supported civil society organizations to leverage this technology to reach out to the
general public – in this case as part of human rights advocacy work in the Philippines.
Learning to exploit the popularity of online social networking sites to advance their
social and political campaigns and to drum-up public support, human rights-based
organizations underwent a training on “Digital Activism.” This focused on the use of
social networking sites (Facebook), blogging (WordPress), microblogging (Twitter), web
tools and applications (Google documents), live streaming, and mobile activism.

With the support of USAID, we conducted the first series of trainings in June 2010. Out
of 37 human rights-based organizations, including representatives from the Commission
on Human Rights, that participated, 30 created their official Twitter account while 16
have official Facebook accounts. Monthly monitoring of these social media accounts
reveal that they continue to be active with an average of one post per week that is
human-rights related.
Representatives from human-rights organizations participate in a Digital Activism training conducted by The Asia
Foundation in Zamboanga City.

Building on the gains of the June 2010 training, the Strengthening Human Rights in the
Philippines (SHRP) program conducted an Expanded Digital Activism Training in
partnership with DAKILA – Philippine Collective for Modern Heroism. The second series
of trainings saw over 100 NGOs and key government agencies trained throughout the
country. An online communication plan was introduced as one of the new modules for
this second series. Social networking sites are incorporated in official communication
plans of the organizations, thus optimizing digital media as one of its components.

A total of 74 new blogs, 11 new Facebook pages, as well as 188 posts in 89 blogs were
created during and after the training. Many participants initially shied away from creating
Twitter accounts due to the perceived hassle of maintaining the account, yet 36 new
Twitter accounts were created. Each organization represented in the Expanded Digital
Activism Training has established at least one form of web presence for their
organization.

The participants have since started using either organizational or personal online
accounts in promoting their causes and have adopted a strategic approach to conduct
human rights advocacy work in digital media. Some examples of these are:
 Ardan Sali of the Bangsamoro Center for Just Peace in the Philippines used the blog
he created to design a prototype website of Tiyakap Kawagib. He demonstrated his
understanding of website architecture in organizing the pages of the site in a clean
and user-friendly interface.
 On the International Day of the Disappeared, Aug. 30, 2011, participant Ed Atadero
posted about removing profile photos in remembrance of the disappeared. This
became part of a large Facebook meme, which was covered by GMANews.TV.
 Right a 1qfter the Davao City training, Liezl Bugtay, one of the participants, used
the online application Storify to document Davaoeños’ Twitter reactions to a news
item on Mayor Sarah Duterte in her blog.
 During the actual trainings, participants used the twitter hashtag #Digibak (short for
Digital Tibak. Tibak is the local term for activists) for information they learned during
the training. The same hashtag was used to identify all attendees of the training
nationwide.
 The collective Philippine human rights blog HROnlinePH organized a fellowship and
participants to contribute to the blogsite.
 During the 2011 State of the Nation Address, some attendees initiated the use of the
hashtag #WeWantPnoyTo, a call to make President NoyNoy Aquino aware of the
different concerns of advocates. This spread among Expanded Digital Activism
participants, as well as among members of their organizations. It became one of the
10 most trending hashtags in the Philippines during that week.
 Emil Tapnio, co-author of this article, gained prominent Twitter followers from
opinion-makers and international and local media whose interest was captured by
his recounting of the training.

Clearly, development workers saw this avenue as an inexpensive yet effective way to
instill advocacy into the stream of public consciousness. The civil society organizations
we trained knew that social media is most effective when it supplements the traditional
mode of campaigning to encourage collective action against human rights abuses. As
mobile phones reach even the most remote citizens, and internet penetration – and
along with it social media usage – widens its reach in the Philippines, these tools will
become potentially more valuable to civil society, citizens, and officials in their advocacy
efforts. As skills in these tools are acquired, careful attention needs to be paid to how
much impact is generated on the daunting development challenges facing the country.
Editor’s note: this version has been edited slightly from the original.

Steven Rood is The Asia Foundation’s country representative for the Philippines and
Pacific Island Nations, and Emil Tapnio is an assistant program officer in the
Philippines. They can be reached at [email protected] and [email protected],
respectively.