Three weeks before the 2026-2027 school year opened in June, a promise began to glow in the Facebook feeds of millions of Filipino parents. It came from a page with a news-sounding name, PH News Now, and a video that looked unmistakably broadcast-ready. A woman in professional attire, seated against a studio backdrop, looked into the camera and said in Filipino: “Do you have children who will be entering school this year? Get them to join. They will get P10,000 to buy school supplies and packed meals. Read our post and register using the online form; public and private, all levels, can apply.” There was no government seal, no official source, no credible logo. But parents were not in the mood for skepticism. School season is one of the most financially crushing times of the year in the Philippines, and an incentive of P8,000 to P10,000 felt like a lifeline. They shared the post in family group chats. They sent it to neighbors. They filled out online forms with their children’s names, ages, and schools, hoping to secure a little relief before classes began. Millions of views piled up, mostly from parents holding on to a promise that did not exist. VERA Files fact-checked the clip and found that the anchor was not a human being at all. The video had been generated using artificial intelligence, a conclusion supported by the Deepfakes Analysis Unit of the India-based Trusted Information Alliance and by human scrutiny of the studio lighting and the anchor’s unnatural inflection. The page itself was created on April 21, barely a month before the post went viral. Between May 2 and May 5, it published six clips, each uploaded twice, drawing more than 1.5 million views, 40,800 reactions, 12,326 comments, and 10,964 shares. There was never any school incentive. There was only revenue for whoever built the page and waited for the algorithm to do its work.
PH News Now was not a conspiracy masterstroke; it was a rational response to the rules Meta has set. In October 2024, Meta announced the Facebook Content Monetization beta, a program designed to fold its three older payout schemes—In-stream Ads, Ads on Reels, and performance bonus—into one unified system. Meta began inviting roughly one million creators who were already earning on the platform, with a wider rollout in 2025. The transition was completed on August 31, 2025. To get into the program, a page or digital creator needs an invitation, which usually arrives after reaching at least 10,000 followers and roughly 600,000 total watch-minutes across videos in the preceding 60 days. The creator must live in an eligible country and keep the page free of serious violations. Once inside, however, the logic is entirely quantitative. Creators are not paid because a post is accurate; they are paid because eyes linger on it. Views, watch time, and audience reach are the currency. Accuracy is nowhere in the formula. It enters the system only afterward, if and when a third-party fact-checker rates a post false. By that time, the ad money has already been counted, the payout has already been earned, and the page can simply delete the post or let it fade. Meta’s content monetization policy does say misinformation is not eligible for monetization, but the policy is reactive, not preventive. It depends on fact-checkers catching every false post before it can spread, which is impossible in a system designed to reward speed. The gap between performance and accountability is where pages like PH News Now found their business model. They did not need to break any rule to earn income from the account. They only needed to perform well enough to be invited into the program, and then to keep performing until someone caught them.
To understand what this system feels like from the inside, listen to Dante Binamera. He is 57 years old, a public school teacher at Gabao National High School, and a radio disc jockey for Radyo Natin. He did not set out to be a professional Facebook creator. One day, during a graduation ceremony, the rain poured down so hard that the students were soaked, but they kept singing, refusing to let the weather ruin their moment. Binamera pulled out his phone and recorded the scene. The clip went viral, and it gave him something he had never expected: enough reach to enter Meta’s monetization program. “Dati eme-eme lang, pero nang kumita ako, sumeryoso na,” he said. He learned the process in real time. You need to reach 600,000 minutes of views; when you do, Meta notifies you. Then you fill out a form with tax information, and once approved, a dashboard appears showing your earnings. Payouts arrive on a regular schedule, marked PAID on the 21st of each month, then transferred to his bank account three to five days later. His first payout was in five digits, and he was elated. He has now earned close to six digits in total, but he has kept his teaching job and his radio work because he knows the platform income is never secure. “Anytime your account can be taken down, can be hacked,” he said. He knows this from experience. Meta suspended his account for six months after he re-shared a post about medicine that fact-checkers later flagged as fake news. He had received a warning earlier for a similar share, but Meta never told him exactly which post had triggered the suspension or what specific rule he had broken. He thought his account would never come back. When it did, he had learned a bitter lesson: what earns money is not necessarily what is true. A video of a basketball brawl that turned into a fistfight gave him 2.2 million views and became his biggest earner. Ordinary posts, like scenic views, barely moved. Content that makes people feel anger or pity is what takes off. The payout rate itself is inconsistent; he once had a friend earning just $0.10 per 1,000 views. “Ang gulo ni Meta,” he said. Asked if creators knowingly post falsehoods for money, he admitted, “Just for the sake of money. Actually, that is the mindset of most Facebook users.” He used to think that way too. Now, with nearly six digits in total earnings on the line, he thinks twice. “If you post something wrong, there is so much backlash. A lot comes back to you.”
Binamera’s caution is not shared by everyone. The economics of disinformation have created a class of repeat offenders who have learned that even when they get caught, the penalty is small and the money is already banked. A June 2026 investigation by What to Fix, a tech policy and accountability nonprofit, analyzed 290 Facebook pages that had been fact-checked at least ten times by Meta’s third-party partners between 2020 and 2025. The conclusion was stark: Meta’s existing mitigation measures fail to prevent repeat disinformation offenders from accessing monetization programs. The investigation also found that 84 percent of pages suspended or demonetized for repeated violations regained monetization access within a month, some in as little as two days. The revolving door is not an accident; it is the natural result of a system that treats enforcement as an afterthought. In the Philippines, authorities have begun to notice. The Criminal Investigation and Detection Group, then under Maj. Gen. Nicolas Torre, said platform monetization was incentivizing content creators to spread false news. The National Bureau of Investigation began monitoring 20 vloggers accused of doing exactly that, and by March 2025, two of them already faced arrest warrants. That same month, agents arrested Wendelyn Apduhan Magalso, a 30-year-old vlogger from Oslob, Cebu. She was accused of altering a TV5 news post to falsely attribute a quote to President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., making it seem as though he planned to legalize illegal drugs. In her statement to investigators, she did not claim to have been trying to make a political point. She said she made the post to earn money from views. She was charged under the Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012. Her case is a reminder that the victims of this system are not only the parents who believed a fake school incentive, but also the creators themselves, who are swept into arrests stemming from a platform’s decision to pay for anger.
None of this has moved Meta to change its approach, at least not publicly. VERA Files reached out to Meta multiple times while reporting this story, asking why pages repeatedly flagged for disinformation remain eligible for monetization and how the Content Monetization Program accounts for accuracy in its payouts. The company did not answer. PH News Now has since been taken down, but the person who created it is probably still out there, operating under a different name, using the same AI-generated anchor, the same script, the same promise that refuses to die. Five other pages identified by VERA Files show the pattern clearly. Pinoy Trend and Masang Pilipino have carried monetization status since 2019, meaning Meta has continued to pay them across three different versions of its payout system despite years of fact-checks flagging their content as false or fake. PH Now has been monetized since 2020. Pinoy Trending and News Ngayon were first recorded as monetized in March 2025, around the time Meta was migrating creators into its unified Content Monetization Program before the full rollout in August. These pages are not anomalies; they are a cohort, a living experiment in what happens when a platform decides to pay for performance and leave truth for later. For every page that is deleted, another one rises to take its place. The names change, the faces are generated, but the math remains the same. The only requirement is reach, and reach is easy when you know what makes people click.
The story of PH News Now is not really about a fake video. It is about the quiet collapse of trust in the spaces where Filipinos get their news. Parents who shared that post were not foolish; they were hopeful, and in a country where every peso counts at the start of a school year, hope is the easiest thing to exploit. The creators who spread falsehoods are not all villains; some are struggling, underpaid people who discovered that the algorithm rewards rage and pity and the unusual. But the system itself has no conscience. It pays for performance and treats accuracy as an afterthought, a correction that arrives after the damage is done. Dante Binamera, who once thought only about the money, has changed because he felt the consequences directly. He lost his account for six months over a single re-shared post. He learned that the same audience that made him earn could turn on him just as quickly. “When you post something wrong, there is a lot of backlash. A lot comes back to you,” he said. He still posts, still earns, still checks his dashboard, but now he asks a question before pressing publish: is this true, or does it just feel good? If Meta truly wants to fix the monetization machine, it must change the formula itself. Pay for accuracy, not just attention. Make fact-checking automatic and immediate. Ban repeat offenders permanently, not for a month. And treat the victims of misinformation—the parents who registered their children for a nonexistent incentive, the viewers who believed in a fabricated anchor—as more than just engagement numbers. Until then, the page may be gone, but the pattern remains. The next viral lie is already waiting, and the algorithm is ready to pay for it. With bigger money, as the popular saying goes, comes great responsibility. That responsibility belongs not only to creators, but to the platforms that taught them to ignore it.