SATURDAY, MAY 7 , 2022. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE K A
The WorldYEMEN
Saudi-led coalition
transfers prisoners
T hree planes carrying 117
Yemeni prisoners held by the
Saudi-led coalition landed Friday
in the southern port city of Aden
as a truce between the country’s
warring parties entered its
second month, the Red Cross
said.
The Saudi-led coalition
fighting in Yemen announced
last week that it would release
163 prisoners to its rivals — the
Iran-backed Houthi rebels — in
support of a cease-fire
agreement between the warring
sides. The agreement, brokered
by the United Nations, aims to
pave the way to an end of
Yemen’s 8-year civil war.
The Houthis however, denied
that most were war detainees.
Abdel Malak al-Ajery, a member
of the Houthi body known as the
National Delegation, tweeted
that the men who were returned
were Yemeni laborers who were
arrested while working in Saudi
Arabia. The International
Committee of the Red Cross,
which facilitated the
repatriation, said it had
interviewed the detainees before
they traveled to verify their
identities and confirm that their
wish was to return to Yemen.
The truce, which went into
effect on April 2, is the first
nationwide cease-fire in Yemen
in six years.
— Associated PressISRAELMinister touts plan f or
4,000 settler dwellingsI srael is set to advance plans
for the construction of 4,
settler homes in the occupied
West Bank, the interior minister
said Friday, drawing warnings of
“serious consequences” from the
Palestinian Authority.
If approved, it would be the
biggest advancement of
settlement plans since the Biden
administration took office. The
White House is opposed to
settlement growth because it
further erodes the possibility of
an eventual two-state solution to
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Interior Minister Ayelet
Shaked, a staunch supporter of
settlements, tweeted that a
planning committee would
convene next week to approve4,000 homes.
Nabil Abu Rdeneh,
spokesman for Palestinian
Authority President Mahmoud
Abbas, said the planned
approvals would have “serious
consequences on the ground.”
— Associated PressSri Lanka president declares
emergency as protests grow: Sri
Lanka’s president declared a
state of emergency Friday amid
widespread public protests
demanding his resignation over
the country’s worst economic
crisis in recent memory.President Gotabaya Rajapaksa
has issued a decree declaring a
public emergency effective
Friday. Sri Lanka is near
bankruptcy, having announced
that it is suspending repayment
of its foreign loans, and with its
usable foreign currency reserves
plummeting below $50 million.
It has $7 billion in foreign loan
repayments this year. The
announcement comes as
protesters demonstrate near
Parliament while others
continue to occupy the entrance
to the president’s office,
demanding that Rajapaksa and
his powerful ruling family quit.China plant workers clash with
guards over lockdowns:
Hundreds of workers at a
technology factory in China
clashed with authorities and
flooded past isolation barriers
after weeks under lockdown, a
stunning breakdown in the
Communist Party’s efforts to
contain coronavirus i nfections.
The Shanghai factory, which is
owned by Taiwan’s Quanta
Computer Inc. and makes
devices for Apple among others,
has been operating under tight
restrictions since the beginning
of April. In a video shared onTwitter and YouTube, workers
rushed through barriers and
tangled with guards in white
protective gear who tried to keep
them inside. Quanta employees
confirmed the Thursday evening
clash, while the company did not
immediately provide comment.
One worker said that people are
worried about further tightening
because there are positive covid-
19 cases on the campus. The
government is taking a central
role in managing the plant’s
operations, said another
employee on-site.Danish tourist killed in
roadside bombing in Iraq: A
Danish national was killed by a
roadside bomb while cycling in
northern Iraq, local Kurdish
authorities said Friday, blaming
Turkish Kurdish insurgents for
planting the device. According to
a statement from police in the
Dahuk region, Torbjorn
Methmann died in an explosion
Thursday. Police said Methmann
and his companion, William
Karlsson, also a Danish national,
were cycling in the
semiautonomous Iraqi Kurdish
region when Methmann’s bicycle
struck the roadside bomb.
— From wire servicesDIGESTANDREW MEDICHINI/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Vatican Swiss Guards arrive for their swearing-in ceremony Friday
at the Vatican. Every year on May 6 — the date in 1527 when 147 of
their predecessors were killed protecting Pope Clement VII during
the Sack of Rome, according to Vatican News — n ew recruits swear an
oath of allegiance and officially begin their service.BY REGINE CABATOvalenzuela city, philippines
— In the final stretch of the Philip-
pines’ pivotal presidential elec-
tion, the underdog campaign is
mobilizing public flash mobs, a
“truth army” to fight online disin-
formation, and door-knocking by
pink-shirted volunteers inspired
by the candidate’s stay-positive
philosophy.
On Monday, they and the
c ountry will see whether the effort
has given Vice President Maria
Leonor “Leni” Robredo enough
momentum to overtake front-
runner Ferdinand Marcos Jr., son
of the late dictator.
Robredo has faced a tough fight
from the start. Her young canvass-
ers have been heckled and even
had water dumped on them as
they’ve sought voters’ support.
During one group’s recent foray
into a low-income neighborhood
in this city just north of the capi-
tal, only a few people asked for
campaign literature, and from be-
hind a closed door, a woman
called out that the canvassers
shouldn’t even bother knocking:
“We’re solid Marcos here.”
But although Robredo was still
a distant second last month in
polling by Pulse Asia, her num-
bers were up eight percentage
points from earlier in the year. A
surge in the final weeks could still
make the election competitive —
and prevent the Marcos family
from returning to power.
A lawyer and social activist who
entered politics after her hus-
band’s death, Robredo defeated
Marcos to win the vice presidency
in 2016. In office, she became em-
broiled in a combative relation-
ship with President Rodrigo Du-
terte. (The Philippines elects its
president and vice president sepa-
rately, and Duterte and Robredo
are from different parties. Term
limits block him from running for
reelection.)
Ten candidates are in the run-
ning, but since beating Marcos in
2016, Robredo has been in the
crosshairs of an intense smear
campaign focused on both her
professional and private lives.
Yet her star-studded rallies still
draw hundreds of thousands. In a
country where politics and enter-
tainment collide, beauty queens,
rock stars and high-profile celeb-
rities offer her endorsements. Art-
ists paint murals of her.
Robredo’s main message is a
variant of the radical love strategy
used by the opposition in Turkey
against President Recep Tayyip
Erdogan. The approach rejects
polarization by listening to the
supporters of populists rather
than speaking over them and by
prioritizing issues that are highly
relatable, such as hunger and em-
ployment.
The election will test this strat-
egy and the capacity of Robredo’s
campaign to have an impact in an
information ecosystem largely de-
fined by paid propagandists.
In the Philippines, nearly ev-
eryone is online, but most people
are not adept at distinguishing
between disinformation and au-
thentic reports, according to
Miguel Rivera, director of the
A teneo Martial Law Museum. He
calls it a “perfect-storm example”
of what happens when people
have access to social media plat-
forms but low media literacy.
“We have high technical litera-
cy ... but we have not developed a
communicative culture,” Rivera
said. “We have not really estab-
lished how we talk to each other
about our common problems.”
The answer, said Anton Lim,
Robredo’s campaign manager for
the southwestern region of the
southern island of Mindanao, is
an army of volunteers that he
hopes can combat a rampant
c ulture of vote-buying with trips
to far-flung communities. They
must debunk conspiracy theories
such as the one that falsely claims
Robredo killed her husband (he
died in a 2012 plane crash) as well
as fake scandals targeting her
three daughters. They persevereout of a sense of frustration.
“I feel it in my gut that if we
don’t help her win ... it will make
our life as community develop-
ment workers hard,” Lim said. “If
we have another six years of [dis-
information], the damage will be
permanent.”
Robredo enjoys a broad range
of support, from Catholic Church
leaders to farmers whose land
rights she once fought for. But she
is struggling to crack Marcos’s
popularity across all social groups— at least according to the polls.
Analysts describe her brand of
“slippers” leadership — named for
the flip-flops she wears on the
campaign trail — as the antithesis
of the traditional politics of dynas-
ties typified by Marcos.
The grass-roots initiative is
“challenging the traditional no-
tion of patronage and clien-
telism,” said Ela Atienza, a politi-
cal science professor at the
U niversity of the Philippines-
Diliman.Complementing the door-to-
door efforts is a volunteer opera-
tion to combat disinformation.
Anton Carranza is an adminis-
trator for the Digital Warriors, a
network of more than 400 group
chats that he calls Robredo’s
“truth army.” After concluding
that social media companies were
not doing enough to fight disin-
formation, Carranza helped orga-
nize private citizens to seize con-
trol of the algorithm — and narra-
tive — from sophisticated, full-time troll armies that blanket so-
cial media with material support-
ing Marcos.
When news items about Robre-
do are deluged with hate, his vol-
unteers — many of whom are re-
tirees or professionals working
outside office hours — flood the
posts with likes and positive com-
ments to neutralize the trolls. Pro-
Marcos accounts typically try to
undermine Robredo and spam
comment sections with negative
remarks.
The network’s house rules are
simple: Uphold zero tolerance for
fake news. Battle on “neutral
ground” such as news articles.
And do not engage with trolls and
propagandists directly.
“We’re the quick-response
team,” Carranza said. “Let’s inten-
sify house-to-house [campaigns],
but let’s not leave the social media
front of the fight.”
Though Robredo has a substan-
tial presence on Facebook — and
in fact was the largest spender on
Facebook advertisements last
year of all the candidates —
Y ouTube is effectively Marcos ter-
ritory.
The platform has fostered pro-
Marcos conspiracy theories for
years. Even though YouTube an-
nounced that it has taken down
400,000 videos uploaded from the
Philippines with misinformation
in the last year, experts believe it is
too little, too late and will make
little difference in the election.
“Everything that is borderline
or gray, ambiguous ... distortion,
cherry-picking, all the other more
strategic disinformation tactics
they use — it’s not part of what can
be taken down,” said Fatima Gaw
of Digital Public Pulse, a project
monitoring election discourse on
social media platforms.
Gaw’s research previously
found that 8 of 10 Marcos-related
YouTube videos sought to rewrite
the family’s history and that the
platform’s algorithm amplified
amateur content and hyperparti-
san propaganda as opposed to
news and academic sources.
Video blogger Marc Santos
Gamboa, who backs the presiden-
tial run of Manila Mayor Francis-
co Domagoso, explained that con-
tent creators are incentivized to
produce pro-Marcos content be-
cause there is so much of it on the
site, guaranteeing a following and
viewership. This allows creators
to make a sizable profit through
the YouTube Partner Program,
which allows creators to monetize
their channels.
“YouTube is where brainwash-
ing happens,” Gamboa said. “If I
switched to [Marcos] now, I would
make two or three times what I’m
making.”
The challenge will be how to
sustain Robredo’s popular move-
ment after the election. If she
loses, said her spokesman, Barry
Gutierrez, the movement could
turn into “the foundation for the
opposition.”
In the narrow alleys of Valenzu-
ela City, 17-year-old Janviper
Calacday admitted that he had
skipped a week of school so he
could knock on doors for Robredo.
“I realized [fighting] on Face-
book was wasting my time, be-
cause we’re up against paid trolls,”
he said. “I can retake my classes,
but not the elections.”
In one house, an elderly woman
asked for Robredo campaign ma-
terials, even while her husband
tried to shoo the volunteers away.
Her neighbor came and grasped a
volunteer’s arm, looked him in the
eye and said, “Please work very
hard.”As presidential vote nears, Leni Robredo’s pink-clad volunteers try to turn the tideof her campaign with door-knocking and an online push against disinformationLISA MARIE DAVID/REUTERS
Vice President Maria Leonor Robredo, top, speaks at a February rally in Quezon City. The target of an intense smear campaign, she is
running well behind Ferdinand Marcos Jr., son of the late dictator, but still draws crowds like the one above Monday in Baguio City.JES AZNAR/GETTY IMAGESIn Philippines,an election‘truth army’