[DECODED] How Filipinos online are coping with the Middle East crisis

It’s been over a month since the US and Israel attacked Iran, and the world has since been grappling with the fallout. For us Filipinos, the effects were felt at the household level, with gas prices soaring week after week.

Three weeks into the war, The Economist listed the Philippines among the 15 countries that are most vulnerable to the energy crisis, along with our neighbors Vietnam, Thailand, and Indonesia. It cited the countries’ oil and gas imports, Gulf remittances, foreign exchange reserves, and external government debt.

While analysts were categorizing vulnerabilities, ordinary Filipinos were already living the dire consequences – and out loud – on the most used social media platform in the Philippines: Facebook.

At The Nerve, we try to make sense of recent events through the lens of data, technology, and the stories unfolding across social media. This is because for a country that has an internet penetration rate of 83.8% of the total population, the digital sphere is where many people first encounter, discuss, and make sense of major events.

A look at a representative sample of public Facebook posts about the Middle East and its impact on the Philippines showed that the majority of the posts (71%) were concerns about the domestic and economic effects of the war, rather than the geopolitical implications. This suggests that Filipinos online aren’t necessarily following a war, but are managing a cost-of-living crisis that a war caused.

Topic map of public Facebook posts about the Middle East crisis, from February 28 to April 6. Using natural language processing, The Nerve clusters each post into topic themes based on their semantic similarity.

About 40% of the posts were about fuel prices, many of which expressed fear and frustration with the rising prices of oil, transport fares, electricity, and food, such as rice and groceries, all of which do not keep up with the stagnant rate of wages. Another 31% were about the Philippine government’s actions so far, including criticisms.

What’s more interesting is that when we zoomed in on the posts, many of them contained humorous tones, often making fun of the Philippines’ unpreparedness and their own misery.

Screenshots of humorous posts found in the dataset

The data showed Filipinos coping through humor, and it’s not the first time that we’ve noted that in our reporting. 

In a previous Decoded story about memes and brainrot, we noted how Filipinos, particularly the younger generation, used humor as a response to fear, politics, and disasters. Because humorous online posts are bite-sized, they provide online users a way to acknowledge and process tension, anxiety, or dissent without direct confrontation.

[READ FULL STORY HERE]

But we don’t just study trends; we also study disinformation. And we know that, like humor, disinformation travels the same way: fast, rides with emotions, and is easy to share.

Since the war broke out, Rappler has published at least 11 fact-check articles about the crisis. Some of them, like the humorous posts above, were kind of absurd. For example, there was a claim that the “Sara Sky” tanker delivering Russian oil to the Philippines was linked to Vice President Sara Duterte, just because of the similarity in the names.

There was also a false claim that said Kim Jong Un announced his participation in the war, which tracks with a meme format portraying the North Korean leader as having FOMO (fear of missing out) that had taken hold on the internet.

Some, however, were not so funny. Just yesterday, Malacañang asked the Department of Justice to investigate at least three false posts for sowing “panic and confusion” among the public, including claims of an energy lockdown and fuel shortages.

While humor can be an effective coping mechanism, it also lowers the barrier for suspending disbelief. And in an already distorted information landscape, that barrier is significant.

We don’t want to police the jokes, but it’s worth observing how both humorous posts and disinformation often exploit emotions. Understanding that overlap allows us to understand the possibilities they create, and the vulnerabilities they expose. – Rappler.com