The Fabricated Fury: Unpacking the “Bato” Copypasta and the Deception Within
Imagine scrolling through your social media feed, perhaps during a quick break or while unwinding after a long day. You see a headline that jumps out at you, something about a major legal victory, a “landmark ruling” that protects a prominent senator from foreign interference. It’s concise, compelling, and seems to confirm a narrative you might already be familiar with. This is precisely the kind of experience the now-infamous “Bato” copypasta was designed to evoke. This widespread block of text, copy-pasted and disseminated across Facebook, loudly proclaimed that the Supreme Court had “officially stopped any attempt to arrest or surrender” Senator Bato Dela Rosa to the International Criminal Court (ICC) or any other foreign authority. It presented itself as a triumph of national sovereignty, a powerful defiance against external pressure. But here’s the crucial, and frankly, unsettling truth: it was all a complete fabrication. Not a word of it was true. This wasn’t a genuine news report; it was a carefully constructed piece of disinformation, designed to spread rapidly and prey on people’s emotions and existing biases.
MindaNews, a diligent journalistic organization, quickly identified this circulating text as a falsehood. They saw the tell-tale signs of a “copypasta” – a term for information, often a block of text, that gets widely copied and pasted online, often without critical examination. What makes this particular copypasta so insidious is its timing and its target audience. It began to proliferate widely on Facebook, particularly within groups and pages that align themselves with former President Duterte – the political camp with which Senator Dela Rosa is closely associated. This wasn’t a random act of viral content; it was a targeted effort to manipulate public sentiment. The copypasta itself was a masterclass in emotional appeal over factual substance. It made no attempt to cite a specific court decision, a case number, an official statement, or even a legitimate news report. Instead, it leaned heavily on patriotic rhetoric, framing the supposed ruling as a “victory” against “foreign” interference. It was a narrative designed to resonate with nationalistic sentiments, to make people feel that their country and its leaders were being protected from outside forces, even as it offered zero verifiable evidence to support these claims. It was an opinion masquerading as a fact, an assertion without a foundation.
Delving deeper into the mechanics of this deception, MindaNews discovered that the widely circulated copypasta was actually an abridged version of a longer, earlier variant. This older iteration contained the same core claims and deceptive quotations, but with an added, even more audacious layer of falsehood. This lengthier version went so far as to invent a Supreme Court justice to lend an air of authority to its fabricated pronouncements. It quoted a supposed “Justice Remigio Kommando” as having laid down “the undeniable legal truth in no uncertain terms.” This fictitious Justice Kommando was then quoted as stating that “There is no domestic judicial process authorizing the arrest or surrender of Senator dela Rosa, … he is in danger of being immediately transported to a foreign tribunal without the safeguards of the Philippine Constitution.” This attempt to create a credible, authoritative voice for the fake ruling was a clear attempt to bypass critical thinking. However, a quick check of the Supreme Court’s roster of justices immediately exposed this particular lie. There is no judge by the name of Remigio Kommando among the 15 esteemed individuals who currently sit on the highest court of the land. The current Chief Justice is Alexander Gesmundo, and the Associate Justices are real people with real names like Marvic Leonen, Alfredo Benjamin S. Caguioa, and Maria Filomena D. Singh, among others. The invention of Justice Kommando was a bold, yet easily dismantled, piece of propaganda.
Beyond the outright invention of a Supreme Court justice, the linguistic characteristics of the longer copypasta offered further clues as to its deceptive nature. The user who first posted this variant, Glomerito Jimenez, inadvertently provided a roadmap to understanding its artificial origins. His “spiel,” as MindaNews aptly put it, exhibited several patterns that are increasingly being recognized as indicators of AI-generated text. Think about those often-excessive, sometimes unnecessary-feeling em dashes – a common habit of large language models trying to connect disparate clauses. Or the frequent use of “lists of threes,” where ideas are grouped into parallel triplets. Another tell-tale sign is the “antitheton,” a rhetorical device where two contrasting ideas are presented side-by-side, often in the form of “it’s not x; it’s y.” These aren’t just stylistic quirks; they are often emergent patterns from how AI models are trained on vast datasets of human text. They are computational shortcuts, often overused in ways that human writers might instinctively avoid. These stylistic markers, when found in combination, raise red flags for discerning readers and researchers.
Recent studies on the differences between human-generated and AI-generated journalistic text have shed light on these very characteristics. For instance, one study found that text generated by Large Language Models (LLMs) tends to feature a significantly larger amount of subordinate clauses. This tendency to string together complex sentences often leads to models relying on “excessive em dashes” to try and “connect” these numerous clauses in a coherent, albeit artificial, manner. Another study, evaluating advanced models like GPT-4o and Llama 3, revealed a propensity for a “noun-heavy style,” where “nominalizations” – turning verbs or adjectives into nouns – occur at 1.5 to 2 times the rate of human writing. This constraint often manifests in those familiar “lists of threes,” where nouns are grouped into parallel triplets to convey a sense of completeness or authority. The example cited by MindaNews perfectly illustrates this: “the ICC has no jurisdiction, no authority, no legal power whatsoever over the Philippines.” These aren’t just academic observations; they are practical tools for identifying potentially AI-generated content, especially when it’s used to disseminate misinformation.
Ultimately, MindaNews’s thorough investigation confirmed what their initial observations hinted at: there was absolutely no truth to the copypasta’s claims. They meticulously searched for any evidence of such a Supreme Court decision, resolution, advisory, press release, or official statement that would corroborate the quotes and claims made in the circulating text. Their search yielded nothing. There was no record – absolutely none – of any ruling that even remotely matched the dramatic, sovereignty-affirming pronouncements of the copypasta. This entire episode serves as a powerful reminder of the pervasive nature of disinformation in the digital age. It highlights how easily false narratives can be constructed, disseminated, and accepted, especially when they tap into existing political loyalties and nationalistic sentiments. It underscores the critical importance of fact-checking, of pausing before sharing, and of questioning information, particularly when it appeals strongly to emotion or lacks concrete, verifiable sources. In a world saturated with information, both true and fabricated, the ability to discern truth from falsehood is more vital than ever, and independent fact-checkers like MindaNews play an indispensable role in safeguarding informed public discourse.