Let’s be honest about what election season has become for those of us who try to keep the record straight. Every cycle, newsrooms gear up for the same losing game of whack-a-mole. A lie appears, we screenshot it, we fact-check it, we publish a correction, and then another lie pops up somewhere else. We spend our days chasing ghosts while the people actually responsible for the deception sit in air-conditioned boardrooms, sipping coffee and watching us exhaust ourselves. The truth is that we are not losing because we are bad at our jobs. We are losing because we are aiming at the wrong target. The Statements of Contributions and Expenditures filed with the Commission on Elections read like a masterclass in creative writing. A campaign will declare half a million pesos for “digital consultancy” or “influencer management,” and the Comelec will nod along. Nobody audits what that money actually buys. Nobody checks the digital footprint. Candidates are not paying for high-level strategy. They are paying for an army — a coordinated network of accounts designed to flood the zone, shift the narrative, and drown out anything resembling truth. Until we stop treating those filings as boring paperwork and start treating them as evidence of a deliberate operation, we will keep losing. The receipts are right there. We just haven’t learned to read them the way investigators would.
Now, let’s talk about that army, because we keep getting its members wrong. The people doing the actual posting, the ones whose accounts get suspended and whose names get dragged through public shame, are almost never radicalized political true believers. They are usually broke, precarious gig workers. Picture a college kid in an internet café, juggling data annotation, content moderation, and a dozen other micro-tasks just to make rent. That person is not a political mastermind. They are not plotting the downfall of democracy. They are taking whatever gig pays, and if the gig happens to be flooding a comment section with talking points, so be it. We vilify the disposable worker while the PR strategist who drafted the entire campaign gets promoted and celebrated. The architect keeps their industry respectability, insulated by wealth and connections, while the low-level troll gets their account nuked and their reputation destroyed. That is not justice. That is scapegoating. It lets the real culprits off the hook and makes us feel like we have done something when we have barely scratched the surface. If we are serious about fixing this, we need to stop treating the foot soldiers as the enemy and start following the chain of command upward.
The public relations industry knows exactly who these architects are. It is the worst-kept secret in the business. Ask any senior PR practitioner off the record, and they will name names. They will tell you which agencies run disinformation campaigns, which executives have built their careers on manufacturing consent, and which clients are paying for it all. Yet every attempt to draft voluntary codes of ethics against disinformation quietly fizzles out. Polite suggestions do not work when there is this much money on the table. We saw what happened in 2017 with Bell Pottinger, the British PR firm that was expelled from the UK’s professional association for running a racially toxic campaign in South Africa. That expulsion was not just a symbolic slap on the wrist. It drove the firm into administration. It killed the business. That is the kind of ruthlessness we need here. If self-regulation fails — and it has failed, repeatedly — then we need legal frameworks that penalize the agencies designing these digital burn-it-down operations. We need regulators who are willing to revoke licenses, impose fines, and make disinformation a career-ending move. Until then, the architects will keep operating with impunity, because they know that the worst that can happen to them is a strongly worded statement from a professional body that has no real teeth.
Here is the part that my own colleagues hate talking about. We know who the strategists are. We have known for years. But exposing them means biting the hand that feeds the newsroom. These same executives control massive corporate advertising budgets. They decide which outlets get the big campaigns and which ones get starved. If a paper in Iloilo or Manila goes after a powerful PR chief, the ad revenue mysteriously dries up. The phone calls stop being returned. The invitations to industry events stop arriving. So we write another fact-check. We focus on the what — the false claim, the doctored video, the misleading statistic — because investigating the who threatens the bottom line. This profound conflict of interest reduces journalism to digital janitorial work. We are the ones sweeping up the mess while the people who made the mess are upstairs at a cocktail party with our publishers. It is an uncomfortable truth, and it explains why so much disinformation goes unpunished. We cannot keep pretending that the only problem is a lack of fact-checkers. The problem is a media ecosystem that is structurally dependent on the very people who fund the lies. Until we find a way to break that dependency, our fact-checks will continue to be nothing more than band-aids on a hemorrhage.
The only way to break this machinery is to go after the wallet. We need to look at what worked in Brazil during the 2022 elections. There, the Sleeping Giants campaign did something simple but devastating. It relentlessly pressured brands to pull their advertising from disinformation sites. It made the business case for truth by making lies expensive. And it worked. Outside analysis put their success rate at over 80 percent. When the money stops flowing, the machine stalls. Brands do not want to be associated with toxic content, not because they care about democracy, but because it hurts their image and their bottom line. That is not a noble motivation, but it is a reliable one. Defunding is not censorship. It is a consequence. It is the market finally punishing those who have been poisoning the well. Civil society groups, local advertising watchdogs, and concerned citizens need to build a coalition that makes funding fake news too toxic for any corporate brand to touch. We need to track the advertisers, expose the connections, and make it clear that every peso spent on a disinformation outlet is a peso spent on destroying the public square. This is not about government regulation. It is about collective action. It is about consumers and citizens using their power to demand accountability.
We have spent a decade asking whether a post is true, and it has not saved us. We have built fact-checking databases, launched hotlines, and trained journalists in verification. And still the lies spread faster than the corrections. The truth is that we have been asking the wrong question. The question is not “Is this post true?” The question is “Who signed the check?” Because behind every viral lie, there is a budget. Behind every coordinated attack, there is a strategy. Behind every army of disposable trolls, there is a general who has never once risked their own reputation. We need to stop chasing ghosts and start following the money. We need to name the names, expose the budgets, and make the architects as famous as the lies they create. This is not a battle that will be won with better algorithms or more fact-checks. It will be won when the people who fund disinformation realize that they have more to lose than to gain. It will be won when we stop treating this as a technical problem and start treating it as what it is: a crime against the public trust. So let’s stop playing whack-a-mole. Let’s stop sweeping up the digital debris. Let’s go after the people who are actually responsible. The receipts are public. The evidence is there. All we need is the courage to follow it.