Evolve or Die

Last March 6, I tweeted “TikTok will be a significant platform for the 2022 National and Local Elections.” The tweet elicited a lot of reactions, ranging from concurrence to violent disagreement; from mild amusement to personal attacks leveled at me for supposedly encouraging this nonsense when I should be suppressing it. Fast forward to earlier this week when I received an already much shared TikTok video of a politician doing a dance. And it’s still only 2020. The 2016 elections proved that social media was a force to be reckoned with. Up until that point, the great hope was that social media would blossom primarily as a voter information and voter education platform. What transpired, however, underscored how naïve that point of view actually was. Instead of being a useful tool for benign purposes, social media’s potential as a tool for malignant partisanship took center stage and has refused to relinquish it ever since. Just like this quarantine we’re all suffering under, it doesn’t look like things will be getting better any time soon. Post-2016, the COMELEC tried to address the weaponization of social media by asking legislators to draft rules that would regulate the use of online platforms for political campaign purposes. Unfortunately, they took a hard pass, leaving the COMELEC with only two options. Either do nothing, knowing full well that the elections of 2019 would see political campaigns taking maximum advantage of the lack of any social media regulatory framework; or try to get some sort of regulation on the books, based on whatever authority the COMELEC already had under existing laws. The COMELEC opted to do something – but what? As far as election management is concerned, there are two key areas that need attention: the unregulated spending on social media as a platform for political campaigning; and the use of social media as a means of misinformation and disinformation. Early on, it was clear that the COMELEC could do little against misinformation and disinformation without potentially encroaching on free speech. And, in any case, controlling people’s access to social media – one of the more popular proposed solutions whenever talk turns to fake news – lay well beyond the scope of the COMELEC’s authority. This left unregulated spending as the most logical entry point of COMELEC into the fray. By placing social media within the coverage of the Fair Elections Act (Republic Act 9006), essentially treating it as a form of mass media, the COMELEC was able to require social media corporations and other entities providing internet-related services to provide information regarding political advertisement, as well as call for the registration of official campaign web pages, blog sites, and social media pages. These moves, despite some early misapprehensions by the public and political players, sought only to provide the COMELEC with a means to monitor how much money the campaigns poured into social media; knowing how much was spent makes enforcement of the spending caps possible. There was never intent nor attempt to regulate the content of political adverts or throttle the right of private citizens to express their political preferences online. But 2022 is still two years down the road. Between now and then, who knows what new platforms will emerge. The pace of technological development may very well make the COMELEC’s social media regulation measures – which were arguably cutting edge in 2016 – woefully obsolete by the time the next election comes. TikTok didn’t even exist in 2016 and it’s already well on its way to being adopted by every politician with enough confidence to gyrate in front of a video camera for up to a minute. Even now, it is difficult to see how the COMELEC’s regulatory framework as written would have any meaningful impact in the face of a campaign built around such video sharing apps. Clearly, there is a need for the regulatory framework to evolve, and evolve quickly. It’s almost Darwinian. This article was originally published in the BusinessMirror.