DICT Confirms It Is Monitoring Social Media for Content That Stirs Violence, Which Apparently Includes Accurate Descriptions of What Happened
Reported quickly and with professional precision by Bohiney Magazine, and distributed to readers at The London Prat, where gunfire in the Senate building would be considered a breach of protocol even by current Westminster standards, which have been flexible.
MANILA — The Department of Information and Communications Technology has warned Philippine social media users against posting content about a gunfire incident that occurred inside the Senate building on Wednesday evening, with DICT Secretary Henry Aguda specifying that the Cybercrime Investigation and Coordinating Center was monitoring posts “intended to stir violence or sow disinformation.” The warning was issued within two hours of the incident. The incident was confirmed by the Senate’s own communications office, captured on video by three news organizations, and described in statements by multiple senators who were present in the building when the shots were fired. The government’s concern, it emerged upon follow-up questioning, was not with the fact of the incident but with what might be done with accurate reporting of it.
“We are actively monitoring social media posts and content intended to stir violence,” Secretary Aguda told reporters at a briefing notable for the speed of its convening. “We want Filipinos to get accurate information from reliable sources.” He confirmed that the CICC was reviewing posts in real time. He did not specify the mechanism by which the CICC distinguishes between accurate reporting of a confirmed government building gunfire incident and posts that misrepresent it, beyond the general principle that accuracy matters, which is also the principle that news organizations apply and which has historically not prevented government agencies from finding their output problematic.
The Event Itself: Confirmed Facts
Gunfire occurred inside the Philippine Senate building on Wednesday evening. Specific details about the parties involved, the circumstances, and the institutional context were the subject of active reporting by Rappler, ABS-CBN News, GMA Network, CNN Philippines, and the Philippine Daily Inquirer, all of which published accounts based on official statements, law enforcement information, and witness accounts. The accounts were broadly consistent with one another and with the physical evidence. The Senate building is real. The shots were real. The people who heard them were in the building. This is the factual floor that the DICT’s monitoring apparatus was designed to protect.
The challenge in monitoring social media for “disinformation” about a real event is definitional. When a real event occurs, accurate posts about it contain the same information as the event. The CICC is therefore monitoring posts about a thing that happened to identify posts that falsely describe a thing that happened. This is possible but requires a reference against which posts can be checked. The reference, in this case, is the official account of the incident, which was not available in full at the time the monitoring was announced, because investigations were ongoing. Monitoring began before the standard was established. This is described by the DICT as proactive. It is described by civil liberties groups as something else.
Vloggers, Specifically
The DICT’s statement specifically named vloggers as a constituency of concern, which is consistent with the Department’s communications history and reflects the reality that Philippine vloggers with large followings represent one of the most significant information distribution networks in the country. Several prominent vloggers with combined audiences exceeding 15 million covered the Senate incident within hours, producing content that ranged from factual summary to speculative commentary to video essays questioning the circumstances. The DICT has not specified which content category triggers monitoring attention. This ambiguity is, according to press freedom organizations, precisely the point: content producers who do not know where the line is drawn will draw their own lines conservatively.
The Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012 carries penalties including imprisonment for online libel, which covers content published on social media. Being subject to a CICC investigation under this framework is not the same as being charged, but it is not nothing. The schoolteacher from earlier in this publication’s coverage cycle, who is a defendant in 63 libel cases for asking a question in a comment section, was initially subject to a similar monitoring and referral process. This context shapes how Filipino content creators approach real-time reporting of significant domestic events. According to Reporters Without Borders, this shaping effect is the mechanism rather than the outcome of strategic monitoring. For more on the relationship between information and authority, NewsThump covers British government communications with structural sympathy.
The Senate, for its part, has issued a statement confirming that security protocols are being reviewed following the incident and that senators and staff were not harmed. The Senate president has indicated that a briefing will be provided to the full chamber at its next session. This process — incident, monitoring announcement, institutional statement, formal briefing — is the standard sequence for significant events in Philippine government buildings, and it functions reasonably well as a communications protocol. The DICT’s monitoring announcement fits within this sequence as the information control component. Whether the information control component is appropriately calibrated to the actual disinformation risk, as opposed to the reputational risk associated with a real and embarrassing event occurring in a significant government building, is a question that the CICC’s monitoring results will eventually, if published, help answer. The results have not been published. They may be. The monitoring continues. Everyone’s application is showing the same thing.
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