what arrived in the morning news.’’ But Rappler
reporters found that the police versions of the
murders often didn’t match witness accounts.
‘‘Some of the victims seemed to be innocent
men whom the police had set up,’’ Talabong says,
‘‘planting drugs and guns to make it look like
these were suspects who resisted.’’
One of Rappler’s most enterprising reporters,
Patricia Evangelista, began to cover the killings.
In a typical piece, ‘‘Jerico’s Angel,’’ published in
November 2016, Evangelista documented the
shootings of a young man named Jerico Cami-
tan and his ex- girlfriend, Angel, by motorcycle-
riding killers, who left a sign on Camitan’s chest
identifying him as an ‘‘animal’’ and a ‘‘drug
dealer.’’ The article portrayed the couple as
almost certainly innocent victims and said that
accusations of drug dealing had become ‘‘an
excuse for murder.’’ Rappler also disputed the
death count of 2,167 announced by the Duterte
administration at the end of 2016, reporting that
about 4,000 more shootings that the government
had listed as ‘‘unexplained homicides’’ were in
fact part of Duterte’s drug war. ‘‘If you report-
ed those numbers,’’ Ressa says, ‘‘you would get
hammered by the police and by the regime.’’
At Malacañang Palace, Duterte seethed about
Rappler’s reporting. Panelo, his spokesman, told
me: ‘‘I told Ressa: ‘You know why the president
is pissed off with you? Because you are the one
who started the false narrative of drug- related
people being killed’ ’’ deliberately. He added:
‘‘I don’t know if you know, 164 policemen were
killed, 747 seriously injured. Are you telling me
that there was no resistance coming from these
people?’’ Evangelista broke news that there were
strong indications that the police were hiring
vigilante gangs to carry out murders and that
victims were being targeted online. In May,
three years into the campaign, by which point
the number of drug- related deaths had reached
as many as 30,000, Ressa published Evangelista’s
two-part series, ‘‘The Kill Lists of San Fernando.’’
Four politicians in a small Cebu Province town,
including the mayor, she reported, had been
shot, three of them killed, after being repeat-
edly accused of drug dealing and corruption
and appearing on a ‘‘kill list’’ on a Facebook
page called Political Stories From San Fernan-
do. Evangelista identifi ed the fi gure behind the
incendiary posts as a businessman and politi-
cal rival of the mayor named Ruben Feliciano.
Feliciano denied posting the list of names and
accusations on Facebook, but then admitted to
Evangelista that he had called for the killing of
the politicians in speeches as a way of off ering
support to Duterte’s war on drugs. ‘‘I said, ‘I will
kill you,’ ’’ Feliciano told Rappler.A couple of months before Duterte won the pres-
idency, Ressa started to notice that his campaign
was putting out disinformation about rivals —
‘‘a cascade of lies,’’ she calls it — that bounced
around the online echo chamber. Rappler had
done an intensive analysis about how Facebook
worked in the country. Roughly 47 million peo-
ple were on Facebook, nearly half the country.
Getting content to go viral required creating
what Ressa called an ‘‘information cascade,’’ gen-
erated by ‘‘niche accounts’’ linked to ‘‘bound-
ary spanners’’ whose social media connections
crossed social groups, classes and geographical
areas. A typical niche account had around 150
people in his or her ‘‘sustainable relationship’’
network, she says, but by jumping across group
boundaries, a single message could reach mil-
lions of people.
When it came to news about the president
and his policies, Duterte and his aides appeared
to have studied the same data. ‘‘The weaponiza-
tion of information happened just after he tookoffi ce in July,’’ Ressa told me. ‘‘Then it ramped
up in October 2016, at the height of the drug
killings.’’ Ressa and her team compiled a data-
base that she called the Shark Tank, tracking the
insulting terms and disinformation campaigns
that cascaded on Facebook against Duterte’s
critics: Rappler was derided as ‘‘Crabbler,’’
political rivals were all bayaran, Tagalog for
‘‘corrupt.’’ It seemed, Ressa says, a ‘‘concerted,
systematic campaign.’’
As they continued to investigate, Rappler
reporters identifi ed 26 interlocking Facebook
accounts with phony identities — a so- called
sock- puppet network — that, Ressa says, infl u-
enced some three million people. But the fake
Facebook accounts were just a fraction of what
she calls the ‘‘patriotic trolling’’ universe; real
infl uencers served an important amplifying role.
Ressa and her team focused on three Duterte
supporters with vast online social networks:
Margaux Uson, a popular singer and dancer
whose band, Mocha Girls, was known for post-
ing racy videos online, garnering her millions
of Facebook fans, before she turned her Face-
book page into a pro- Duterte message board
and posted virulent attacks on opponents. These
messages — relentlessly referring to journalists
as ‘‘press titutes,’’ for example, and claiming that
they had joined with Western critics to under-
mine Duterte’s war against drugs — were picked
up and propagated by two other key nodes: Sass
Rogando Sasot, a transgender activist, and R. J.
Nieto, or ‘‘Thinking Pinoy,’’ a self- styled voice
of the middle class with a popular blog about
politics and current events. ‘‘Uson played to the
mass base, and the attacks were picked up and
amplifi ed in middle- class accounts,’’ Ressa says.
The result, she says, was a sharp plunge in sup-
port for the news media and other targets.
The artifi cial creation of a seemingly grass-
roots social media buzz — ‘‘astro turfi ng’’ — was
instrumental, Ressa claims, in gaining popular
support for Duterte’s prosecution of Leila de
Lima, a human rights activist turned senator who
criticized the extrajudicial killings. ‘‘They were
three steps used against de Lima, attacking her
credibility, violently denigrating her as a sexu-
al object and spreading viral hashtags,’’ Ressa
says. The hashtag #Arrest LeiladeLima, Ressa
observed, trended on social media for weeks
before de Lima was arrested in February 2017
on drug- related conspiracy charges, which she
denies; she has been in prison ever since.
Rappler’s series about disinformation, which
ran in late 2016 and 2017 and was consolidated
on a micro site called Media, Society and Digi-
tal Transformation, had signifi cant impact. This
year, Facebook identifi ed and took down hun-
dreds of pages, accounts and groups, mostly in
the Philippines, for ‘‘coordinated inauthentic
behavior,’’ all of them linked to a group started by
Nic Gabunada, Duterte’s social media strategistThe New York Times Magazine 45