MANILA, Philippines – A new study found that non-political Facebook pages in the Philippines participate in election discourse by sharing content from partisan sources and cascading posts about political candidates.
The study, entitled “Cloaked Politics: The political involvement of non-political Facebook pages in the 2022 Presidential Elections,” was conducted by associate professor Jon Benedik A.
During a #FactsFirstPH briefing on Friday, April 8, co-author Bunquin outlined how 2,162,463 Facebook posts from May 1, 2021 to January 31, 2022 were analyzed for the study, using the social media monitoring tool CrowdTangle.
“Page categories, names, and descriptions of these non-political Facebook pages make it appear that they are primarily disinterested and unrelated to the elections,” the study said.
Coordinated link sharing is defined as the practice of the same links being shared multiple times, by many pages, within the same timestamp.
61 pages were identified engaging in this behavior, sharing 634 unique links, with most of the links being shared from pages not related to presidential candidates.
“Interestingly, while having the most shares, Lacson-related pages shared only seven unique links across 28 unique pages multiple times.
This study is part of #FactsFirstPH’s efforts in studying and tackling disinformation online, to equip voters with verified information ahead of the upcoming national and local 2022 elections.