We have a problem with social media and politics in the Philippines.

Much has already been said about the pro-Duterte trolls and pages. We all know the deal: fake news, malicious editorializing, harassment, and all the nice stuff. Condemnation has been loud and pervasive among our circles.
The truth, however, is that they are not the only problem nowadays. For the past few months, a war has raged between this unholy alliance and another group of social media warriors, who claim the mantle of fighting for our liberal ideologies and ideas. At face value, it sounds great—after all, we have long needed a resistance that could fight back and contest the discursive space on social media.

Here’s the problem: as of late, many of these warriors have increasingly turned to the same tactics that made the pro-Duterte alliance infamous in the first place. Examples are rife: the meme that assaulted Sass Sasot’s transgender identity, the misleading portrayals of exchange rate fluctuations as signs of Duterte’s economic incompetence (the irony), and the conspiratorial accusations of infiltration in social media moderating teams. Instead of reclaiming these spaces for reasonable and evidence-based discourse, these accounts have simply embraced the zero-sum popularity race, and we, to various degrees, play along and share these around.

There is unquestionably still a difference of extents. It would be wrong to draw complete moral equivalences between the content and actions of the two warring factions. Nonetheless, it is an alarming trend that not only has mostly escaped self-criticism from self-identified liberals but is increasingly approved by us.

The sad truth is that this war does nothing to strengthen our opposition to the excesses and injustices being committed by the Duterte administration. We need a strong civil opposition to mobilize against policies and keep the government accountable. We need a strong opposition to properly contest the elections. Despite the proclamations of these accounts, they contribute little towards the important task of building a real, solid, principled opposition. Instead, the content some of these pages push out only dilute values and weaken institutions even more by promoting the warped, simplistic views of government and governance that brought those populists into power in the first place. In a time when pettiness in politics needs to be combated, our interactions with this Team Pagbabago only make it worse.

The longer this war lasts, the more our credibility and potency as an opposition suffers. The greatest casualty of this war, however, is the ability to converse properly. Without the ability to discourse and dialogue, a democracy dies a painful death. We cannot claim to be democrats when we only hasten the erosion of the foundations of a functional democratic society. Attacks by the likes of Mocha Uson demand just responses, not reflexive flame throwing. We cannot stand by and be silent. We cannot have double standards when we rightfully call out Sass Sasot’s rumor-mongering while spreading unsubstantiated assertions ourselves.

We can have a good laugh at the admittedly hilarious stuff that comes out of all of this, but we cannot forget the building and defending our republic is a sober task in the end.

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