Marcos, F

cory aquino yellow revolution (radio veritas) not cell phone?

NO MERRI

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Facebook Used the Philippines to Test Free Internet. Then a Dictator Was Elected

NO LNX

Facebook Used the Philippines to Test Free Internet. Then a Dictator Was Elected.

By Jake Swearingen

Sept. 4, 2018

A pool of blood remains at the gutter where an alleged drug user was killed by unidentified assailants in Manila, Philippines. Photo: Ezra Acayan/NurPhoto via Getty Images

In 2013, Facebook hit upon an idea to grow its user base: It would subsidize internet access to Facebook on mobile devices in countries where cellular data was pricey, physical internet infrastructure was poor, and the smartphone revolution meant many leapfrogged from having no internet access at all to using their smartphone as their only source to the web. It found the perfect country to test this out on, in the 100 million citizens of the Philippines, calling it “Free Facebook.”

If the idea sounds familiar, it’s because Facebook attempted to do a version of this in many more countries with its “Internet.org” plan, hoping to get basic internet access to billions of people living without it — access that would come thanks to subsidies from Facebook. Internet.org was largely a failure, thanks to pushback by local governments, telecom companies, and human-rights organizations. Meanwhile, Free Facebook remains wildly successful in the Philippines. As outlined by BuzzFeed News reporter Davey Alba, the company serves as the de facto ISP for many Filipinos:

Thanks to a social media–hungry populace and heavy subsidies that keep Facebook free to use on mobile phones, Facebook has completely saturated the country. And because using other data, like accessing a news website via a mobile web browser, is precious and expensive, for most Filipinos the only way online is through Facebook.

Roughly 69 million Filipinos have access to the internet today, of those nearly 100 percent have a Facebook account. In the U.S. and Canada, for comparison, 87 percent of people with internet access use Facebook. (Zuckerberg, when told by the CEO of Filipino website Rappler in April of 2017 that 97 of the population with internet access was on Facebook, reportedly asked, “What about the other 3 percent?”)

Two years after the launch of Free Facebook, Rodrigo Duterte mounted a presidential bid, casting himself as the tough-on-crime, anti-elite Everyman ready to bring back jobs and order. Posts about Duterte, full of memes, propaganda, and outright libel (one opponent, now in prison on a dubious drug charge, saw a fake sex tape circulate on Facebook with her in it) did extremely well on Facebook, as nearly any inflammatory content does. When Duterte said he would dump the bodies of executed drug dealers “into Manila Bay, and fatten all the fish there,” the post immediately went “viral, viral, viral,” bragged one of his two social-media directors.

:{:{He won handily, and his rule has been brutal. At least 12,000 people have been killed during Duterte’s crackdown on drugs, and hundreds of thousands of Filipinos have been jailed, many of them opponents of Duterte himself.}:

Meanwhile, his social-media team has actively worked to bring in social-media influencers to prop up Duterte’s regime (think Filipino versions of social-media creatures like Mike Cernovich, Laura Loomer, or Jack Posobiec) working closely with the Duterte administration — sometimes directly on the government payroll — to spread fake stories such as a deposed Supreme Court justice was caught attempting to flee the country. Meanwhile, news sources seen as unfriendly to the Duterte campaign have increasingly come under fire, including banning all reporters from an outlet from the presidential palace.}:

Look: Absent Facebook, Duterte almost assuredly would have assumed power and began his dictatorial rule over the Philippines. But Facebook’s News Feed algorithm, attenuated to surface anything that attracts attention, amplifies dictators and demagogues like Duterte. In one egregious example, a fake sex tape spread quickly through Facebook of one of Duterte’s opponents having sex with her chauffeur. “De Lima is not only screwing her driver, she is also screwing the nation,” quipped Duterte.

Facebook says it’s working to police the content in the Philippines better. “We know we were too idealistic about the nature of these connections and didn’t focus enough on preventing abuse or thinking through all the ways people could use the tools on the platform to do harm,” said a Facebook spokesperson to BuzzFeed News. “In the Philippines, this includes the roll-out of third-party fact-checking, better detection of bad content, improved enforcement of our policies, and deeper support for the country’s digital literacy efforts.” (Ironically, many of Facebook’s content moderators who would end up doing this work live in the Philippines.)

:{:{There’s a peculiar callousness in Facebook using entire countries as testing environments. Last year, the company wanted to know what happen if it split the News Feed into two separate streams: one only populated by posts created by friends, and one only for posts created by media publishers. Instead of testing this on a small percentage of American users, it simply flipped the switch in six countries: Bolivia, Slovakia, Sri Lanka, Serbia, Guatemala, and Cambodia. Media organizations suddenly saw their websites’ traffic plummet, fake news stories flourished, and Facebook shut down the experiment within weeks , apologizing in a post that the company “received feedback that we made it harder for people in the test countries to access important information.”}:

About 66 million people — roughly the population of Texas, Florida, and New York combined — live in those six countries. Each country has its own particular news ecosystems, cultural norms, and political challenges. For Facebook, the countries represented a handy way to try out some A/B testing. To be very cynical about it, it also probably affected Facebook’s decision that those six countries bring in significantly less advertising dollars than Texas, Florida, and New York.}:

In the Philippines, its Free Facebook program has become so successful that it’s hard to imagine how Facebook and the Philippines could ever untwine themselves from each other. (Indeed, the company partnered with Duterte’s government to build an undersea cable connecting the Philippines to the U.S. and Asian countries.) And even after Duterte leaves office, whenever that may be, the Philippines will still be a country where one website’s algorithm determines what 97 percent of internet users look at.

There are, of course, no parallels to be drawn between the Philippines and the United States.

Correction: An earlier version of this story cited that 97 percent of Filipinos with Internet access have a Facebook account. According to the data from WeAreSocial, that number is actually 100 percent; 97 percent of Filipinos with internet access were on Facebook in April 2017. The post has been updated to reflect that.

SourcesHow Duterte Used Facebook To Fuel the Philippine Drug War [Buzzfeed]

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DN 1 25

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Maria, could you say, specifically, I mean, in a place like the Philippines, there’s — almost 90% of the population in the Philippines is on Facebook. And how is Facebook used, not only in terms of posting information, but also as a means of communication, and the way in which misinformation has spread on Facebook in the past, not only, of course, in Myanmar, which is the example that you cited, but also in the Philippines and elsewhere?

MARIA RESSA: I mean, very specifically, our past president, Rodrigo Duterte, used the design of what was an advertising and marketing platform of Facebook to do information operations. I was getting an average of 90 — nine, zero — hate messages per hour, free speech used to stifle free speech. But beyond that, these networks of information warfare, networks of disinformation literally changed our history in front of our eyes, setting the stage for the election of Ferdinand Marcos Jr., the only son of our dictator who was in power for 21 years, Ferdinand Marcos. You’ll remember Imelda Marcos and her shoes. Her son, Ferdinand Marcos Jr., won overwhelmingly in our presidential elections, because, literally, Filipinos were taught in information operations — YouTube, Meta and Facebook — that Marcos was not a dictator, in 1986 ousted in people power; instead, he was the greatest leader the Philippines has ever known.

AMY GOODMAN: In 2021, the Rohingya refugees actually sued Facebook’s parent company Meta over its failure to stop violent hate speech on its platform, which contributed to the bloody military crackdown of the Rohingya Muslim community by the military in 2017 in Burma, also known as Myanmar. Law firms in the U.S. and U.K. launched the legal effort on behalf of the Rohingya around the world, including in Bangladeshi refugee camps. Plaintiffs demanded over $150 billion in damages. The U.N. found as many as 10,000 Rohingya were killed by Burmese forces during the 2017 genocide, though some estimates put the death toll at twice that. Over another 730,000 people were forced to flee the country. I just want to go to a quick video, part of a video, produced by Amnesty, featuring a survivor of the Rohingya genocide.

SAWYEDDOLLAH: My name is Sawyeddollah. I am from Myanmar, but now I am living in Bangladesh, Cox’s Bazar, as a forcibly displaced Myanmar national. [translated] I personally experienced that online hate speech turned into offline hate for us. There were many different things on Facebook against us, which turned the people of Myanmar against us. I saw many different anti-Rohingya posts on Facebook. For example, I still remember a post that said, “The birth rate of these Bengali [Rohingya] people is very high. If it remains continuously like this, we will become their slaves. Now they are our slaves. Let’s go for action.” I knew about the option of reporting hate speech to Facebook. I already reported some hate speech to Facebook, but it only said, “Thank you for reporting. This post doesn’t go against our community standards.”

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to bring Siva Vaidhyanathan into this conversation, author of Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy, a professor at the University of Virginia. And I wanted to go to this issue of hate and how deadly it can be, whether we’re talking about Burma, Myanmar, or whether we’re talking about the United States. I mean, you have, just giving a bunch of examples, roughly seven in 10 lesbian, gay, bisexual adults have encountered any harassment online. Fully 51% have been targeted for more severe forms of online abuse. You have roughly about a third of women under 35 may have been sexually harassed online. You have — a study of 51 countries reveals 38% of women had personally experienced online harassment. Professor Vaidhyanathan, if you can talk about the connection to hate and how that connects to, well, your headline of your Guardian piece, “Mark Zuckerberg has gone full Maga”?

SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: Right. Well, let’s be clear about this change. And I’m really thrilled that you’ve started this conversation by going beyond the United States. What Mark Zuckerberg announced the other day clearly only applies to the United States in terms of its specificity. In the United States, since 2017, Meta has been trying to at least appear that it’s taking content moderation seriously. And let’s remember, the proper phrase to describe what we’re talking about is “content moderation.” Fact-checking was never part of the formula. It’s not about facts. It’s about protecting users. It’s about protecting people from things like harassment, for protecting groups of people from campaigns and movements, people like citizens of my town, Charlottesville, Virginia, who encountered a flood of violent right-wingers in the summer of 2017 through a movement that was largely organized through Facebook. So, the idea here — and why Zuckerberg has appeared before Congress multiple times swearing that he’s doing a good job — has all been about the United States.

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http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/06/2016-donald-trump-paul-manafort-ferinand-marcos-philippines-1980s-213952

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdinand_Marcos

Ferdinand Emmanuel Edralin Marcos (September 11, 1917 – September 28, 1989) was President of the Philippines from 1965 to 1986. He was a lawyer, member of the Philippine House of Representatives (1949–1959) and a member of the Philippine Senate (1959–1965). He was Senate President in 1963. He had been the leader of Ang Maharlika, a guerilla force in northern Luzon.^[1] As Philippine president and strongman, his greatest achievement was in the fields of infrastructure development and international diplomacy. However, his administration was marred by massive authoritarian corruption, despotism, nepotism, political repression, and human rights violations. He benefited from a large personality cult in the Philippines during his regime.^[2] In 1983, his government was implicated in the assassination of his primary political opponent, Benigno Aquino, Jr.. The implication caused a chain of events, including a tainted presidential election that served as the catalyst for the People Power Revolution in February 1986 that led to his removal from power and eventual exile in Hawaii. It was later alleged that he and his wife Imelda Marcos had moved billions of dollars of embezzled public funds to the United States, Switzerland, and other countries, as well as into alleged corporations during his 20 years in power.

....

By 1984, his close personal ally, U.S. President Ronald Reagan, started distancing himself from the Marcos regime that he and previous American presidents had strongly supported even after Marcos declared martial law. The United States, which had provided hundreds of millions of dollars in aid, was crucial in buttressing Marcos's rule over the years.^[25][unreliable ^source?] During the Carter administration the relation with the U.S. soured somewhat when President Jimmy Carter targeted the Philippines in his human rights campaign.

In the face of escalating public discontent and under pressure from foreign allies, Marcos called a snap presidential election for 1986, with more than a year left in his term. He selected Arturo Tolentino as his running mate. The opposition united behind Aquino's widow, Corazon, and her running mate, Salvador Laurel.

The "People Power movement" drove Marcos into exile and installed Corazon Aquino as the new president. At the height of the revolution, Enrile revealed that his ambush was faked in order for Marcos to have a pretext for imposing martial law. However, Marcos maintained that he was the duly elected and proclaimed president of the Philippines for a fourth term.

The Philippine government today is still paying interest in public debts incurred during Marcos' administration. It was reported that, when Marcos fled, U.S. Customs agents discovered 24 suitcases of gold bricks and diamond jewelry hidden in diaper bags and in addition, certificates for gold bullion valued in the billions of dollars were allegedly among the personal properties he, his family, his cronies and business partners surreptitiously took with them when the Reagan administration provided them safe passage to Hawaii. When the presidential mansion was seized, it was discovered that Marco's wife had over 2500 pairs of shoes in her closet.^[26][27]

http://www.consortiumnews.com/archive/lost6.html

In his new book, Bare Knuckles and Back Rooms, Rollins recounted a dinner he had with a top Filipino politician in 1991. Over drinks, the man casually asserted that he had delivered an illegal $10 million cash payment in a suitcase from Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos to Ronald Reagan's 1984 re-election campaign.

"I was the guy who gave the ten million from Marcos to your campaign," the Filipino told Rollins, who was Reagan's 1984 campaign manager. "I was the guy who made the arrangements and delivered the cash personally. ...It was a personal gift from Marcos to Reagan."

...

But the Marcos-Reagan money story is near the core of the corruption that permeated the 1980s. Indeed, the story begins when Reagan was battling to unseat President Carter in 1980. Some witnesses who claim knowledge of alleged Reagan efforts to sabotage Carter's negotiations to free 52 U.S. hostages then held in Iran maintain that Marcos contributed some of the money used by Republicans to bribe key Iranian mullahs.

Longtime Friends

Certainly in 1980, Marcos was in Reagan's camp. They had been friends for years, since 1969 when President Nixon assigned Reagan to represent the United States at the gala opening of Imelda Marcos's multi-million-dollar cultural center in Manila. Reagan charmed the Philippine president and his wife as the former beauty queen danced with the former actor.

In 1980, Marcos also was annoyed by Carter's nagging about human rights and frightened by Carter's inability to protect another despot, the shah of Iran, from ouster and a humiliating exile. As U.S. president, Reagan would drop the human rights lectures, look the other way on Marcos's renowned corruption, and defend Marcos as an important Asian ally. Vice President George Bush would even toast Marcos for his "adherence to democratic principles."

Documentary evidence about the alleged Marcos-to-Reagan payoffs first surfaced after Marcos was ousted by a revolution in March 1986. As Marcos's fall neared, Reagan arranged for the dictator to be flown to Hawaii. Marcos's opponents then ransacked government files and found a Feb. 17, 1986, letter signed by a senior Marcos aide, Victor Nituda.

In the letter, Nituda warned Marcos that Reagan's emissary, Sen. Paul Laxalt, R-Nev., was demanding that sensitive files, including ones listing the 1980 transactions, be turned over to the Americans before Marcos could go to Hawaii. Nituda's letter specifically cited accounts set up for Reagan and his 1980 campaign manager William J. Casey, who, in 1986, was Reagan's CIA director.

Laxalt "expects all documents checklisted during his last visit or the deal <[>for a Hawaiian exile] is off," Nituda wrote. The first two documents listed were "1980-SEC-014: Funds to Casey" and "1980-SEC-015: Reagan Funds Not Used."

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kleptocracy, deal with Mossbacher, Bush 1 fundraiser Big L 88

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http://www.mail-archive.com/ctrl@listserv.aol.com/msg18433.html

Nineteen

CLOAK AND DAGGER

WHETHER FERDINAND FIRST APPROACHED

the CIA about Yamashita's Gold, or the CIA

approached him, is not important, for he had been involved with the Agency

intermittently since the early 1950s. Where the gold was concerned, the group

he dealt with was a .veritable Who's Who of American clandestine operations.

Among them were some of the same men fleetingly exposed in the Iran-Contra

scandal�a quasi-private military intelligence cell calling itself "The

Enterprise" and engaged in worldwide intrigues for the White House involving

huge black-bag payoffs. Marcos and Ver themselves were implicated in the

Iran-Contra scandal for providing the false end-user certificates that

allowed the secret team to divert arms wherever it wished.

...

For the next decade Iran provided a useful laundering facility and

opportunities for the sort of arms deals that secret agents like to engineer

on the side. These included the resale of weapons stockpiles left over in

Thailand. So while Marcos gold and Chinese flight capital moved through

Australia to Teheran and Beirut, some of the proceeds helped grease the way

for new business arrangements. Nugan-Hand served as an intermediary in the

sale of at least one spy ship to the Shah of Iran. In Teheran Richard Secord

was the chief Pentagon representative in these deals. Everything was

sold-from jet fighters and radartransparent patrol boats (made of carbon

fiber and exotic plastics) to espionage equipment, AWACS spy planes, and

missile systems. Clines established a company called the Egyptian-American

Transport and Services Corporation (EATSCO), and began looking for other

outlets for weapons.

Ferdinand's role in many of these CIA weapons deals was to provide false

end-user certificates in order to mask the real destination. The procedure

was simple. As the world's largest weapons dealer, when America sold

armaments to another country, Congress required guarantees that the weapons

would not be resold to a third country without authorization. This guarantee

was provided in the form of certificates that specified exactly to whom the

weapons were going. The certificates had to be approved individually by the

State Department and the Pentagon. Fabian Ver, as chief of staff of the

Philippine armed forces, signed end-user certificates stating, for example,

that the weapons were being resold by Israel to the Philippines. That was

enough to satisfy Congress and the Pentagon, who knew that anything involving

the Philippines would be hopeless to trace. Instead, the weapons would go to

countries that were blacklisted.

For reasons of their own, members of the secret team were showing increasing

signs of operating independently of the CIA establishment. Some of this was

inevitable, due to the multiplication of CIA proprietaries, bogus banks, and

laundering operations.

That came to an abrupt halt when Jimmy Carter became president, decided to

clean house, and immediately ran head-on into this rightwing cabal.

n excerpt from:

The Marcos Dynasty

Sterling Seagrave�1988

Harper & Row, Inc

ISBN 0-06-015815-8

https://www.mail-archive.com/ctrl@listserv.aol.com/msg18433.html

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mosbacher bush 1 p 88

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Then something happened. Popular Philippine opposition leader Benigno Aquino was assassinated. The U.S. Department of State and Shultz immediately condemned the assassination. But who was responsible? President Marcos put together a half-hearted investigation—but Shultz and his team were not buying it. The five-person Philippine investigative group was eventually disbanded and replaced. With the new investigation, General Ver, a top military official and close ally of Marcos, was implicated in the assassination. Yet Marcos was unwilling to distance himself from Ver.