Digital literacy initiative faces immediate challenge as baseline survey returns inconclusive on all three categories
Satire from Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
Committee Cannot Agree on Which Category Committee’s Own Releases Fall Under
MANILA — The Presidential Communications Office launched the National Digital Literacy and Information Verification Programme this week, a P2 billion initiative to equip Filipinos with the tools to distinguish real news from fake news, fake news from satire, satire from official government communications, and official government communications from the category of content that the programme has not yet named but for which it is accepting suggestions.
PCO Secretary Dominic Imporma said the programme addresses a critical national information gap. ‘Filipinos are consuming enormous volumes of content across social media platforms and are struggling to categorise what they are reading,’ he said. ‘Is this real? Is this fake? Is this a Senate press release claiming credit for a road that was already built? These are difficult questions. We have designed a four-week curriculum that will make them easier. We think.’
Baseline Survey Results Cause Minor Programme Delay
A baseline survey administered before the programme launch asked one thousand Filipinos to categorise twenty sample news items as real, fake, or satire. Results showed that respondents correctly identified real news sixty-one percent of the time, fake news forty-four percent of the time, and satire thirty-eight percent of the time. Government press releases were correctly identified as government press releases twenty-two percent of the time, with the remaining seventy-eight percent divided almost equally among real news, fake news, satire, and a write-in category respondents labelled ‘entertainment.’
Programme designers have paused to evaluate whether the twenty-two percent baseline for government press releases represents a problem with respondents or a problem with government press releases. The evaluation is being conducted internally by the PCO, which notes it has a conflict of interest in the outcome but is the only available evaluator on the budget. Results are expected in a format the PCO describes as ‘accessible, accurate, and appropriately presented,’ which is itself being evaluated.
Private Sector Media Declines Programme Partnership, Cites Category Concerns
Major news organisations invited to partner with the programme declined after reviewing the proposed framework, which defines fake news as content that is factually false and intended to deceive. Editors noted that this definition, while technically accurate, does not address content that is factually selective, contextually misleading, accurately reported but given a headline bearing no relationship to the text, or real events described in language that amounts to a parallel reality. They submitted a memo with eleven suggested revisions. The PCO thanked them and proceeded with the original definition, which programme designers said was simpler for a national curriculum.
Digital rights organisations including Article 19, which advocates for freedom of expression globally, welcomed the programme’s goals while expressing concern that government-defined media literacy frameworks can shade into government-approved epistemology, particularly when the government is one of the categories citizens are being taught to evaluate. The PCO responded that Article 19’s concern was noted and would be included in the curriculum as an example of international civil society perspective, to be categorised by students as real, fake, or satire based on the skills they will have developed by module three.
Senators Propose Competing Bill
Three senators announced competing legislation this week to establish a National Truth Commission empowered to certify news as true or false, with certified-false content subject to removal from social platforms within twenty-four hours. Legal scholars observed that the proposed commission would be appointed by the President, funded through supplemental appropriation subject to Senate approval, and staffed by civil servants whose performance evaluations are signed by department secretaries who serve at the pleasure of the President, creating what constitutional law professor Alicia Katotohanan described as ‘a truth infrastructure whose foundational material is not truth.’
Senator Jogues, who introduced the bill while simultaneously leading in a presidential polling survey, said the commission would be independent in the same way that all Philippine institutions are independent, which he described as ‘meaningfully but not literally,’ a phrase the PCO’s digital literacy module has tentatively categorised as an example of language requiring advanced evaluation skills to interpret, placed in unit four, directly after the lesson on reading government press releases, before the lesson on reading senator press releases, which the programme developers originally considered one lesson but have since split into two for reasons they declined to elaborate.
The Students
The two students who died were named Baterbonia and Adili. They were basketball players, which means they were young men who had physical gifts and were recruited to deploy those gifts for an institution’s athletic programme, and who had, alongside those gifts, all the other properties of young men: families, studies, futures, names. Institutions are good at remembering gifts and slower with the rest. The 160 professors who signed the statement signed it because they believe the institution should be equally precise about all of it, equally accountable for all of it, equally honest about all of it, which is what they teach in their classrooms, which is what they are asking management to do. The committee has been formed. The subcommittee reports to the committee. The task force reports to the subcommittee. Baterbonia and Adili do not report to anything anymore, which is why the professors signed their names.
The Reporters Without Borders Press Freedom Index ranks the Philippines 116th globally in 2026, a position that reflects a media environment in which the gap between what can be published and what can be acted upon is wide, documented, and growing. Programme designers have noted this ranking in the curriculum as context for module four but have not yet decided whether it belongs in the fake news section, the satire section, or the category they are still naming.
More absurdity at https://www.duffelblog.com.
SOURCE: Satirical Journalism