The ‘Strong Leader’ Online Influence Operations and Filipinos’ Desire for Effective Government

The Philippines will hold its midterm election in May 2025, with the spotlight on nationally elected senators. The polls are shaping up to be a significant political event that is touted as a “proxy war” between the families of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr and Vice President Sara Duterte, the two most influential political clans in the country. Charting the electoral fortunes of the candidates allied with the Marcoses and the Dutertes will be valuable as they prefigure the state of play for what is anticipated to be a direct clash of the two families in the 2028 presidential polls.

At this juncture, it is instructive to examine the state of online political influence operations in the Philippines. These operations systematically fund and orchestrate covert campaigns that weaponise diverse social media platforms by manipulating and propagating political narratives based on people’s shared imaginaries — the collective stories, sentiments, and social practices that animate the electorate. By identifying the predominant influence operations, we can also discern the shared imaginaries most widely utilised by political campaigns.

One of the key influence operations in the country has been the continued exploitation of the Filipino electorate’s collective yearning for a “strong leader”. A previous Fulcrum commentary described these campaigns as seeking to connect with people’s desire for a politician who will take their side and “do whatever it takes to clamp down on rule-breakers, so that hardworking and law-abiding individuals like them can be allowed to pull up their own bootstraps and work on making their lives better”.

Such online influence operations worked exceptionally well in the 2022 national elections, when President Marcos Jr and Vice President Duterte ran under the banner of political unity. The electoral results show their tandem’s appeal across the Philippines’ socio-economic categories and regions. Their popularity was bolstered by digital media campaigns that sold their team-up as addressing the Filipinos’ yearning for a strong leader. They peddled a distorted narrative of nostalgia about the public discipline achieved during the Martial Law regime of ex-President Ferdinand Marcos Sr in the 1970s and 80s and how his son represented a renewal of this spirit. Alongside this, they pushed for a narrative of continuity based on the idea that the then-President Rodrigo Duterte’s “social bandit” style of leadership would carry on under the stewardship of his daughter.

Those engaged in countering online influence operations must understand the implications of the Filipino electorate’s preference for a strong leader.

This collective desire among Filipinos for a strong leader persists, as shown by recent opinion polls on the potential 2025 senatorial candidates. Notably, surveys by Pulse Asia in June 2024 and Octa Research in September 2024 indicate a preference for candidates who seem to embody the people’s desire for a figure who will act swiftly and decisively on issues they care about. Tellingly, these surveys have been topped by Congressman Erwin Tulfo, who will be running with the camp of President Marcos Jr, and his sibling Ben Tulfo, who will be running as an independent. Alongside their other sibling, Senator Raffy Tulfo (who also topped the 2022 senatorial elections), they are dubbed the “T3” or “Tulfo 3”. They are known as media practitioners who take on public complaints, confront suspects — who are most likely errant public officials — and effect “immediate action …within the[ir] programme’s airtime limit”.

Parallel to this, the online influence operations associated with the President and the Vice President have repeatedly locked horns through campaigns that either support or undermine the image of each politician as a strong leader. Now that they are no longer a tandem, the battleground of the digital media campaigns has been the issues that differentiate them and their families. For example, one anti-Marcos Jr campaign has put out a deepfake video showing him sniffing “polvoron”,  the name of a local crumbly pastry used to euphemistically refer to illegal substances. This depiction contrasts Marcos Jr with the Dutertes’ signature tough stance on drugs, but this is something that the President has pushed back on.  Meanwhile, an anti-Duterte campaign has circulated a “fake news” item where the Vice President expresses support for a professional basketball player who was caught on CCTV firing a gun at someone after an altercation. This marks Duterte as different from the Marcos Jr administration, which has branded itself as tough on criminals, even if it has been criticised for chasing after fugitives linked to the Dutertes.

In light of these current dynamics, those engaged in countering online influence operations must understand the implications of the Filipino electorate’s preference for a strong leader. Their susceptibility to manipulative campaigns that connect with this yearning is sometimes regarded as democratic backsliding, but the reality is more nuanced. Filipinos are not simplistically desiring a return to an authoritarian regime. They do not really want an autocratic regime as much as they want to put in power someone who cares genuinely enough for ordinary people to act swiftly and decisively on issues that matter. Such a stance of many Filipinos can be analysed as one of democratic ambivalence: a disenchantment with their past experiences with Philippine-style democracy but also continued hope for its future possibilities. 

Pushing back against the online influence operations that predominate in the Philippines requires a reimagination of the possibilities of democratic politics in the country. We need counter-influence operations that make the case for moving away from the dynastic, personal, and factional politics of the elites, and charting a course towards social inclusion and collective participation in national and local politics.

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