The Sunday Show: A Conversation with Jonathan Corpus Ong

Subscribe to the Tech Policy Press podcast with your favorite service.

This week the Philippine Congress declared Ferdinand Marcos Jr. the winner of the recent election, confirming that he will become the country's next president. Marcos, know by his nickname “Bongbong,” is the son of the late dictator and kleptocrat with the same name, who was president from 1965-1986. Marcos Sr. declared martial law in 1972, a year before his second term was to come to an end, ushering in years of brutality, oppression and poverty in the Philippines.

To learn more about the role of social media in the rehabilitation of the Marcos brand and to dig a little deeper into the conditions that drive disinformation, I spoke to Dr. Jonathan Corpus Ong, an associate professor of global digital media at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, a fellow at Harvard University's Shorenstein Center, and the author of a recent piece in Time magazine, The World Should Be Worried About a Dictator’s Son's Apparent Win in the Philippines.

Jonathan is also the cohost, with Kat Ventura, of a podcast on the world of troll farms and propaganda in the Philippines called Catch Me If You Can. Check it out.

What follows is a lightly edited transcript.

Justin Hendrix:

So Jonathan, can you tell me a little bit about your research area and your research interests?

Jonathan Corpus Ong:

Sure, so I am a communication professor and most of my work deals with media ethics and digital politics with an interest in the Global South. Coming from the Philippines, most of my work is focused on the Philippines and broader Southeast Asia. My research interests are on digital labor and workers, so the conditions of workers nowadays, themes of precarity and also aspiration. My work is also very insistently ethnographic in approach, trying to capture experiences of ordinary people and workers, how they deal with social media. So, I'm very much interested also in digital politics, in the wake of... Since 2016, most of my work has pivoted the words more explicitly political communication in digital politics, even though it's very much grounded in that ethnographic tradition and also centering the workers within this whole ecosystem, and that's where my work on paid trolls and where they come from would come in.

Justin Hendrix:

So, we're going to get into the Philippines in particular and what's happening in the Philippines at the moment, but I had the pleasure of attending a workshop that you hosted recently that was under the banner of what you call the true costs of misinformation. Now, you were one of the chief curators of that event, as I understand it, and drew together really just an incredible group of researchers and thinkers. Can you explain your worldview on these issues of misinformation at the moment, how you're thinking about it and what was the sort of, I don't know, thesis behind that event?

Jonathan Corpus Ong:

Sure, I was super happy to host over 150 participants on Zoom for a two day event called True Costs of Misinformation at Harvard Kennedy School. So this is an event also co-organized with professor Joan Donovan and Gabrielle Lim at the Shorenstein Center, and we really wanted to open a conversation as to how we could have a more critical discussion in terms of methodologies of how exactly we can document harms in digital harms and assign specific figures, perhaps a financial cost to specific events of misinformation, how it might impact hospitals, how it might impact schools, local government, and what they need, how they can also build up their capacity in-house to respond to misinformation events. So, how can we put a price tag to misinformation and who should be paying for it?

So, that's one of the themes, but definitely also the underlying theme there is, which costs count more and whose harms count more? Just being very much attuned to inequalities in terms of how global community and global attention would focus our attention oftentimes on Euro-American electoral events rather than events that happen in the Global South. And so, how to properly advocate for workers, for journalists, civil society, organizers who are much more underrepresented and less heard in this particular space. So, we definitely wanted that event to be advancing a conversation that will help people advocate for themselves and advocate for the social media worker within their organization, how to provide them with better resources.

And what did you think, Justin? What did you take out from that event?

Justin Hendrix:

Oh, there were so many different, great presentations that I recall. I think one of the ones that stands out to me, I remember Sarah Wiley from the Tow Center who gave a great presentation on the extent to which the major tech platforms dominate the fact checking ecosystem.

Jonathan Corpus Ong:

For sure.

Justin Hendrix:

In the news media, not just in the US or in Europe, but around the world, how important their funding is and the extent to which that puts them in a position of great leverage over how fact checking works, so many different, good conversations about that intersection, and it sparked a lot of ideas for me.

But I want to come to one particular domain where we have seen perhaps the true costs of misinformation, which is the Philippines, and in the last week, of course, we've seen an incredibly important election, which had an outcome that I think you might characterize as existential for the Philippines. For my listeners’ sake, if they're not paying close attention, can you tell folks what happened?

Jonathan Corpus Ong:

Absolutely, so the Philippines is one of Asia's oldest and largest democracies, obviously there's also a social media story that is very important to the Philippines as well. We are the most intense users of social media in global surveys. The average Filipino spends upwards of four and a half hours on social media each day, in the tops on global surveys. There's a lot of digital work that is outsourced as well to the Philippines, just think about how content moderators are... That is an industry in which the Philippines is known for. We are the digital janitors of the world, like scrubbing filth and gore and toxic content on social media, but very proximal to these digital janitors are the online troll armies that are responsible for toxic content, for vitriolic content, and this has been documented for many years, including my own work, the work of many journalists.

Thinking about Maria Ressa's advocacy… so obviously Rodrigo Duterte was elected in 2016. We know Rodrigo Duterte as this foul mouthed populist leader who has cursed Obama to the pope and very much driving down that... Villainizing liberal elites and journalists in the country, and now for 2022, many of us were hoping that, could we swing it back the other way? There was even a thought about maybe someone a little more centrist. The Philippines has a personality-driven political system, and so there's more than just two parties. There's some were kind of like in the middle and no, people were just so split up and they ended up electing the son of a former dictator where 30 years ago, this family, the Marcos family had been exiled to Hawaii in the aftermath of a long period of dictatorship. We call it the martial law period, so many atrocities, human rights abuses and extrajudicial killings.

And, now 30 years after this family is welcomed back to the Malacañan Palace in the seat of power with a resounding mandate, with an over majority vote and it is very concerning and we need to discuss it as something that could also have a global impact, and authoritarians around the world are taking notes from his campaign, what they did.

Justin Hendrix:

So, I don't want in this conversation to overly put the emphasis on social media or the internet. Clearly there's something much more significant or much, I suppose, dramatic going on in this particular case than simply the internet, and yet you do talk in your piece in Time, which I would recommend everyone go and look at, it's called The World Should be Worried About a Dictator's Son's Apparent Win in the Philippines. You do talk about the role of social media in helping the Marcos' essentially rebrand themselves, bury the worst of their backstory and put a fresh coat of paint on their political brand. How do you think about just knowing the lens with which you look at these things? How do you think about the role of the internet?

Jonathan Corpus Ong:

That's such a thoughtful question, Justin, because it is important to think of the unique role of social media in this election or any election, but also not to overstate and over-hype... Sometimes when you over-hype social media as well, you're guilty of the same brainwashing and hype that they would want you to believe. And so, it's important to acknowledge and be critical about that relationship, and to me, the story of the Philippines is also the story of huge class inequalities, and I think in my work I always try to bring that out, and there's many attempts of retelling social media in the Philippines, and I've called that several journalists, including journalists colleagues who I've collaborated on some of their news reports.

So, sometimes the Philippines is introduced by the foreign press as... ‘In the Philippines where over half of the population access Facebook through Free Basics, the masses access Facebook through Free Basics,’ etc. To me, you're supposed to like follow that up with a critique of Facebook and its data extraction logics, and how they're able to sell our data and profit from our data, but no, it's often used by many journalists to dunk on the masses, the masses who don't know any better when they see something on social media and I think that is really, really dangerous. It plays to those class divides. So, thanks for asking, Justin Hendrix. So for me about the Marcoses, it's important to recognize that I don't think their rehabilitation program, their brand rehab could have happened without social media, without YouTube enabling them, creating an archive for them to upload all of these videos that rebrand the martial law era as a golden age, rather than as a period of repression and atrocity.

So without those videos on YouTube, people won't have access to visuals and images, images that are easily de-contextualized and re-contextualized for their agenda. So, I think it's important and to think of it that way, but the Time piece that you mentioned, Justin, talks about also the many failures of academics, journalists, educators in the progressive movement in the Philippines too. So, social media did play a role here, but not in any kind of way of leading the masses into voting Marcos or duping them, but it's more subtle and sophisticated.

Justin Hendrix:

You also talk about the role of the media in particular. How's the sort of Filipino media play into this? And, you mentioned Maria Ressa, who has just won the Nobel Prize and who is kind of a constant voice for media freedoms, and yet you point to this stratified media ecosystem and the role that it played here. How would you characterize that?

Jonathan Corpus Ong:

That's so interesting. So, Philippines' media follows many developing countries and their own media ecosystems in terms of there is... For many developing countries, national media have this kind of educator kind of role toward their viewers, toward their listeners, and many in the national centers have a very kind of liberal orientation. So, they try to position themselves as kind of neutral, the kind of objective journalism genre of reporting kind of normalized by many American media companies.

So, that is very much present in our national media ecosystem, but there's a disconnect between there in the local media where the local media are much more partisan and they are explicitly aligned with mayor so-and-so, and antagonistic to the other one. Now for me in 2022 and under Duterte, the impact of his regime, of six years under a very aggressive and hostile president who has normalized attacks against liberal media, what we are seeing is the regional media, which is much more partisan, it's becoming more and more mainstream. So, we didn't used to have this and I was happy that we didn't have it for the longest time, but we will eventually have a kind of like Fox News at a national level, and that is really worrying, so a propaganda arm of the next president and there's a channel and I just won't name it because they had filed libel cases to my colleagues. So, it's really, really scary times right now.

Justin Hendrix:

You do talk a little bit about the kind of high wire act now that tech platforms, especially Western tech platforms, will have to play in the Philippines. I guess there's kind of two things I'm wondering, and maybe the flip side of the coin. One is if someone like Susan Wojcicki, the CEO of YouTube were on this podcast, what would be the advice that you might give her about how to manage in the Philippines in this circumstance that we now find ourselves in, and what would you tell her about how to perhaps help avoid this type of situation happening elsewhere?

Jonathan Corpus Ong:

And, I'd love to pick your brain in this, Justin, as someone I respect also as a leading voice in terms of platform accountability discussions. Well, first to Susan, I would say that actually YouTube is kind of slower compared to the meta platforms in terms of flagging partisan content. So, the key "innovation" in the disinformation landscape in 2022 is the rise of all these live streamers, all these reactor influencers, these news channel commentators on YouTube, and they're just there, so obviously like we've said, it's easier to flag misinformation, which is text rather than long form and visual. And so, those hour long, two hour long live streams of these news commentators, they were clear players in terms of playing into the partisan lines, and many of them are pro Marcos, that's one.

Another example here, and this is really tricky, Justin. So, Marcos' sister, Imee Marcos, is a senator and she has her own official YouTube page, and it is interesting to think about how Marcos Jr. himself, the president elect, has been super neutral in his official appearances, but the attacks to his opponents are carried out by his own family and his supporters, including Senator Imee Marcos' YouTube channel, where she plays parodies attacking the rival vice president Leni Robredo, the rival of Marcos Jr. to the presidency, so that's on her official page.

So to me, it circumvents official Philippines regulations, so that this allows negative advertising, but it's not quite advertising because it's her YouTube page and she's also an elected official. So to me, are you supposed to allow that? It also drops in conspiracies about her, about how she's a puppet of different players, of even the US government, so it's a really tricky, gray area. I would love for Susan to comment on that, for one, and the number two, about platforms. I would be curious what they should be doing under the Marcos administration because obviously many academics and I'm part of them that yes, we need to be doing more in terms of de-platforming and content moderation, but under the next administration, I worry that if they get too aggressive and identify specifically government accounts, they might become villainized as Twitter has become villainized in Nigeria, in India, and that might... Would we want to risk a social media platform to be blocked in the Philippines? Any thoughts, Justin Hendrix?

Justin Hendrix:

I think that's a hard question. I'm reminded of what's also happening in Brazil right now with Bolsonaro and the role that YouTube is playing there, the kind of influencer ecosystem that you're referencing in the Philippines seems also to be very active, of course, in Brazil. There seems to be almost a similar dynamic in some ways, and the same dynamic where already the social platforms, including YouTube, have walked right up to the line in terms of taking action against COVID disinformation in this particular instance in Brazil and may draw the ire of the president, especially as the election gets nearer. So, it seems like some similar dynamics across the world.

Jonathan Corpus Ong:

Absolutely, and medical misinfo as something that Brazil leaders have themselves perpetuated, but YouTube seems to be a bit more clearer, would you say, in terms of health messaging and health messages, but political messages are much more in the gray area. So, I do find it complicated. I am advocating for strategic policy initiatives between academics, journalists, advocates like Maria Ressa and platforms themselves in terms of navigating authority and regulatory environment under Marcos. Again, remember, his father, under martial law had blocked the press and had only allowed for propaganda channels, so no free press under him.

I don't predict that's what he's going to do, Marcos Jr., that that's what he's going to do. What I predict that he will do though, is he will be pressuring platforms and their financial support for their fact checkers for the third party fact checkers and the local media that they seem to be supporting because Marcos has himself declared in various interviews that he is a victim of local journalists and local fact checkers.

And, to the extent that he sees journalists and fact checkers are getting financial support from platforms, he would end up targeting platforms in that kind of discussion, and that will be a pain point for both local media and platforms themselves. So, there needs to be more strategic cooperation here rather than just clear lines of right and wrong content, but there needs to be a strategy when they publish an exposé of inauthentic, coordinated behavior. How might that be better communicated under the next administration? I think these are very challenging questions that I know many of our colleagues in India, Brazil, Nigeria, Kenya are also facing.

Justin Hendrix:

So, when you step back from the situation in the Philippines, as you do in this Time piece, and you look at the rise of authoritarianism, even to some extent the rise of illiberal democracies that you reference, I don't know, it's just a total global shift. This is now a decade long trend, if not longer. We know which way it's headed. Do the social platforms, to your mind, have some larger responsibility in a time of democratic backsliding? Is there something more dramatic they should be doing in this world we're in at the moment?

Jonathan Corpus Ong:

That's a good question, in terms of what platforms should be doing more of, and a lot of the efforts in the Philippines, I do credit some social media platforms who have opened up back channel support for journalists and local fact checkers, even activists and academics who have been targets of harassment and red tagging, insinuating that they are communist sympathizers, something that was definitely a strategy of Duterte government to villainize their critics with that label. So, there are those kinds of back channel mechanisms. I can also sense though, when I interact with local public policy officers of these platforms in the Philippines and I've interacted with some other public policy officers in Global South countries, they would themselves... Well, it would be revealed in during our interaction, how truly disempowered they are in the hierarchy.

You could tell when they invite us to meet their other teammates, it's like, oh, they actually need our research for them to lobby for resources within their own company. It's like, "How challenging could that be?" So to me, it's also interesting to think of it in that way, that within the company the national level policy officers, and some of them are well-meaning, some are pretty lazy, let's be honest, but many of them are disempowered within the hierarchy. So, to what extent we can influence them and support them is a good question, but yes, certainly discussions of transparency mechanisms would be good. I think folks at companies like RESET who advance platform accountability measures are very strong and empowered. I know of one initiative around supply chain transparency of platforms, when platforms partner with local companies for content moderation work or whatever kind of other third party service, that there needs to be transparency mechanisms around that. I am mostly for on the side of transparency, accountability having had direct experience with regimes of censorship. So, that's why I'm worried under Marcos for the Philippines.

Justin Hendrix:

I want to spend just a couple of minutes on your worker-centered research as well. You mentioned, of course, that the Philippines is a kind of destination for outsourced activity, and I think a lot of folks don't realize the extent to which there is so much internet entrepreneurship in the Philippines. I don't know how that ecosystem may change in this context or if it will or not, but I don't know, how do you think about that world that you study and its relationship to these issues?

Jonathan Corpus Ong:

Yeah, absolutely. So, I think, Justin Hendrix... And, I think this is an opportunity for me to talk about my own distinct approach to disinformation studies, which is the worker-centered approach. So, some folks obviously specialize in the computational analysis. I'm not a big data expert at all, so I do ethnography. After the 2016 election of Duterte, I wanted to interview all the political campaigners who participated in national, but also local races, and I wanted to make my way down their hierarchy. So, who's your digital strategist? And, then who's the influencer team? And, then who's the copy paster, the one who boosts these messages within community groups? So, the study that I authored with my colleague, Jason Cabañes in the Philippines is called Architects of Network Disinformation: Behind the Scenes of Troll Accounts and Fake News Production in the Philippines.

So, we wanted to interview who exactly are the paid trolls. How much are they getting paid? Do they have even contracts and official receipts when they do troll work for politicians? And, also the question of ethics and morality. How do these folks sleep at night? So to me, did anyone really aspire to become a paid troll? And so, that to me is the story of the study, and we retell different portraits of these workers from the very high powered, very arrogant PR firm strategists, who one of them told us in an interview, she was just bored doing marketing for shampoos. She's like, "I'm so bored doing that. I've trended so many times on Twitter. I want to consult for a politician with a very tarnished reputation and get people to like them again," because it's just a personal challenge for her.

And so, it's funny to think of it that way and very abhorrent to hear her speak of it, of political games in a kind of Game of Thrones kind of fashion, and she sees herself as a strategist, and then you have at the opposite extreme a fresh out of college young person who actually was deceived into doing political operations. They signed up to be a PR associate in a PR firm, and it was only on day one that they find out, "Oh, the actual work is actually to do attack memes against the rival of the city mayor." So to me, it's important to narrate those stories beyond heroes versus villains binaries, but to talk about easy complicities within these kinds of outsourced work arrangements in a broader context of economic precarity in the Philippines, and I applied that ethos in many of my other work.

Justin Hendrix:

I don't even know where to go after that. I feel like... I don't know, one of the things I'm thinking about is, did you see that... I may cut this out, I'll probably cut this part out, but just as a point of conversation and we'll finish up here in a second, did you see the QAnon on documentary on HBO?

Jonathan Corpus Ong:

I did. I think I finished it, yeah.

Justin Hendrix:

So, much of it took place in the Philippines, which was sort of surprising on some level, and the Watkins' seem to be kind of stewing in that world of being able to take advantage of low cost internet labor in the Philippines and to do the things that they were up to and with maybe some kind of political ideology or interest, but also a lot of just entrepreneurial interest and desire to make money, and it just seemed to me that kind of... I don't know, the economic and the political- they blend, they blur, and they become impossible to distinguish in a way.

Jonathan Corpus Ong:

Absolutely, Justin. So, the Philippines is not yet... So, we are a personality oriented political system. That's how political scientists describe our political system in that the different politicians and their parties don't have clear ideological differences as you would have between the Democrat party and the Republican party in the US. When you drill it down to policies, they would actually agree on many of the policies, but how they perceive their relationship with the masses, how they emphasize whether it's about democratic institutions, or more kind of doll out kind of approaches to the masses, so that's where they might kind of differ, but going back to your story of, are people in it just for the job and just for the paycheck or whether they really believe in the positions of their clients, I think that's such a good question.

So for many of my respondents, that would depend on where they are in the hierarchy. So, if you are one of those top level PR strategist, there tends to be more of a political alignment that I do support my client, however, as I have said as well, there's those who would say, "I'm just in it for the adventure, my point in my career where I take big risks because I've proven myself in the corporate world and I want to take political clients," but for those at the bottom, they tend to be just doing it for the money. So, it's mostly a story of economic precarity, and that's why some of the approaches of "unmasking the trolls" that journalists tend to do in the Philippines and even activists, I'm a little uncomfortable, to be honest, that ‘let's unmask this low level account operator,’ or’ let's unmask this meme page operator in the Philippines’ because we forget who the top troll is and who their boss actually is.

And we, again, dunk on the masses and we assume whom we assume to be uneducated and come from less respectable backgrounds, and that's why we can name and shame them, but it's also, funnily enough in our study, we say the big elite strategists, it's almost like an open secret who they are. So, we've had Senate investigation after Senate investigation, and we're still always about the influencers. We're still always about the sexy blogger who has a million followers. She's the fake news queen. We're still shaming her, slut shaming her as well on social media, but her boss is never called into the hearing, even though sometimes their names are dropped there, and this is also a challenge. The politicians have a debt of gratitude to their strategists. These people helped elect them in power, so I do get it that we're just going to scapegoat it to the influencers, but the top level strategists, it's harder to hold them accountable and this is where the whole idea of a "whole of society approach" is necessary.

Justin Hendrix:

We talked quite a lot about the idea of disinformation, the problems of the platforms being economic problems, or being driven by the economics of the tech platforms. I appreciate very much you kind of also situating it in a larger economic context of inequality and the appetite of some of these people to get involved, whether you're a Macedonian teenager or maybe a Filipino contract meme maker.

Jonathan Corpus Ong:

Absolutely.

Justin Hendrix:

You're trying to pay the bills.

Jonathan Corpus Ong:

I love the work of colleagues, Jane Lytvynenko, Craig Silverman, William Kwan, formerly of Buzzfeed, they’re in other places now, on disinformation for hire. And this to me is a specific story that is super relevant. Well, sorry, not specific story, it's super relevant to the Global South in particular where stories of economic precarity play into disinformation in the thriving local industries of disinformation, where you have the troll farms, you have the PR firms, you have the digital boutique agencies, you have influencer agencies all part of the gray area of political campaigns. They do black operations, influence operations, attack messaging for political clients, and the ideological differences as you say, they're kind of really blurry. They're not super distinct. Sometimes we even have examples of the PR firm switching midstream during an election cycle that their client is about to lose.

So, they switch to the winning client, just to make sure that in the next administration they're going to get some corporate accounts and some business accounts from them. So, it's totally weird that these people work unregulated for political consultancies and they expect the same lax regulation of corporate marketing to be applied to political marketing when it should be more regulated, more transparent, and they should be held accountable for the toxic content of specific campaigns. So, to what extent we can have more legal innovations around campaign, political advertising, political marketing, and transparency initiatives around that, we would love to hear from other colleagues, including those from the Global North to work with us researchers in the Global South to think of new regulations around these. For many of us in the Global South, the governments and our politicians are really the worst culprits of disinformation, and they need to be held accountable just as we need to hold accountable platforms.

Justin Hendrix:

I have talked to Maria Ressa in the past, and had her on this podcast, and one thing that she's sort of impressed upon me is the extent to which folks in the West, particularly in the United States, need to do more to get these platforms under control in order to help address the systemic issues that are so pronounced in places like the Philippines. Do you agree with that kind of perspective? Do you feel like there's more that needs to be done in the US in order to kind of address these problems, and that might ultimately have a knock on effect elsewhere in the world?

Jonathan Corpus Ong:

I do see myself as in a complementary and supplementary mode to discussions of platform accountability. So my work, which is mostly about the workers in the disinformation for hire industries would obviously gear my policy recommendations more in terms of, how do we regulate these complicit industries, just as other people will hold the platforms accountable?

So, I see my work as very complementary there, and I do see there's a lot of momentum around platform accountability measures. For many of us in the Global South, sometimes we see it sometimes as, oh, some of these discussions also overlook the political elites who are truly responsible for toxic political content and hostile environments within countries, and therefore maybe what we need to be doing here is more strategic engagements with the platform representatives within countries, again, thinking of like India examples where Twitter's local workers and local officers were villainized by the Modi government. So, where should academics and journalists and activists stand within that fight? They're caught in the crosshairs between government and platforms. So to me, I see my work as complimentary there.

Justin Hendrix:

Well, Jonathan, I appreciate your work very much, and I hope you'll come back and tell us about it as it continues on.

Jonathan Corpus Ong:

Yeah, and I would love to also invite your listeners to my podcast, which is the media outreach translation of my ethnographic work. The podcast is entitled Catch Me If You Can, and available on Apple and Spotify and you get to actually hear from trolls, PR strategists, and influencers, and hear from their own voice how they got into the kind of work that they did, and it's co-hosted by a journalist, Kat Ventura, and we editorialize and comment on their expressions as well. So, it's not just a complete retelling of the perpetrator's perspective, but it's also a critique of the perpetrator, but it's an interesting show, and it recently made it to the top 10 of the Philippines' charts. It's mostly English, but we switched to Tagalog in certain phrases.

Justin Hendrix:

That's awesome, I'll make sure to include a link in the show notes for this particular episode and hope folks will check it out.

Jonathan Corpus Ong:

Thank you, Justin. Thanks for having me.