EVERY HOUR, I always end up checking Facebook.

As a social media manager, I must ensure that there is an engaging flow of content on my assigned page. Despite my best efforts, my Facebook page gets overshadowed by political propaganda.

A post glorifying the state can get more engagements than a well-researched article about their shortcomings. Moreover, users would comment the same hate or conspiracy messages towards those with dissenting opinions.

While these activities seem normal, they are according to politicians’ plans.

Dictator’s son Bongbong Marcos, for instance, requested Cambridge Analytica to rebrand his family image. President Rodrigo Duterte’s 2016 campaign utilized 500 trolls to deflect criticism. To them, Facebook users are their commodities in fulfilling their insatiable need for advancement in the political hierarchy.

Despite this, the platform has been passive in combating such issues. Whistleblower Frances Haugen claimed that Facebook has closed some of its security measures against political misinformation before the US Capitol attack. As a result, groups still have countless strategies to falsely promote the political elite.

With the oncoming Philippine elections, there needs to be more attention on this issue. If Facebook fails to act against its systems that fuel the country’s evolving propaganda market, then it will become a manipulative platform that prevents competent, virtuous leaders from governance.

An example is its collection of data on your accessed content. Former Operations Manager Sandy Parakilas mentions that the site’s algorithms process this information to determine its users’ preferences. From here, Facebook utilizes their predictions to provide personalized content, inciting users to visit the platform more.

Notably, this content includes politicians. People who support a politician through their pages, groups, or posts receive homogeneous content about them in return. While this benefits Facebook due to engagements, it makes users more biased on who they support.

The algorithm then forms an echo chamber which politicians utilize for disseminating misleading content to their supporters. With this, users are more likely to share it given that it is aligned with their biases and that others are also spreading it. Thus, misinformation improves the public’s perception of a politician who may be corrupt or immoral. Preventing this means changing the algorithm.

Another system that Facebook must act upon is its human and AI content moderation. The platform contracts 15,000 moderators to inspect reports on accounts that violate its community standards. Due to the large number of reports it encounters daily, it has also added AI moderators as well.

These systems aren’t as effective as they seem. A Wall Street Journal report stated that many human moderators lack multilingual skills in evaluating content, while the AI is only dependent on the popularity of the post. Some violative posts are left uninspected as a result.

With this, politicians have begun treating Facebook as a site for unethical promotion. Given the platform’s flaws in moderation, they have become encouraged to monetize businesses like Twinmark Media to create fake accounts for trolling, aiding their political agenda.

Should Facebook not concretize its content moderation systems, more politicians would become encouraged to commoditize false political information.

Realistically speaking, it may take a while for Facebook to implement the necessary changes on its content algorithm and moderation systems. With the ongoing investigation on the platform, many politicians during the elections will have much time to mislead their potential voters.

However, what is necessary is for Filipinos to include the unethical online conduct of politicians in the ongoing discourse of national leadership. 

With Facebook being the popular online platform for news, we must open empathetic conversations with its users about their participation in fake news or trolling. By discussing the negative implications behind their activities, we may start small, mitigating measures against the nationwide industry of online propaganda.