Presidential Elections in the Philippines: Social Media

On the Frontline: Facebook

In the Philippines, young people will decide the elections. They will determine whether Rodrigo Duterte, Jejomar Binay, Mar Roxas, or Grace Poe becomes the next president of the country.

Almost half of the electorate in the Southeast Asian nation of 100 million people is under the age of 35. The notable statistic and other, official government data demonstrating the power of young Filipino voters are not lost on the four candidates leading the race to Manila’s highest office. How effectively the candidates reach this critical, election-deciding segment of the electorate will depend on how effectively they use social media.

Duterte, who launched his campaign on the 9th of February almost exclusively with assistance from volunteers, cannot succeed unless the young people at the heart of his grass-roots movement translate their social media prowess into votes at the ballot boxes on the 9th of May.

But he will have to overcome the well-oiled political machinery of Binay, Roxas, and even Poe, who could be disqualified from the contest. (The Philippines’ Commission on Elections, or Comelec, in early December ruled that Poe does not meet eligibility requirements. Poe, with citizenship in the United States as well as in the Philippines, only recently established permanent residency in the Southeast Asia nation. Poe has appealed the ruling, and she continues her campaign with the expectation that her candidacy will be validated, after all.)

Roxas, especially, wields social media as a weapon with which to fight his opponents. He uses Facebook to recruit young people to launch attack ads against Duterte. But he expects that the target of his recruitment efforts will deliver a positive response to a negative campaign.

Will young Filipinos agree to follow Roxas’ path into a business-as-usual future?

Recent surveys have indicated how important social justice is to young people around the world who increasingly see a bleak future for themselves in a world in which an increasingly smaller segment of the population comes to dominate an increasingly larger segment of the population.

The reason that Duterte attracts growing legions of supporters across the thousands of islands which comprise the Philippine archipelago is clear. The mayor of Davao City offers an alternative to a system in the Philippines in which a traditional oligarchy has locked its people into a perpetual state of poverty.

In Davao City, the capital of Mindanao, the southernmost of the three principal island divisions of the Philippines, Duterte has overseen a dramatic transformation. He has transformed one of the murder capitals of the world into one of the safest cities in the world. He has eradicated over the years criminals from the streets and from the ranks of government.

Duterte pledges to do the same across the Philippines if elected president of the country. The growing legions of supporters behind Duterte believe that he not only can do it; they believe that he will do it.

Comelec held the first in a series of debates among the candidates on the 21st of February. Polls conducted across social media at the conclusion of the debate indicated Duterte as its winner. If people under the age of 35 are the primary users of social media, then in the Philippines they are signaling that the possibility of regime change becomes more real every day.