Sabotaging our public spheres and citizens

I write this piece, similar to some of my previous columns, in the aftermath of International Labor Day (May 1) and World Press Freedom Day (May 3). Serendipitously, the news cycle for the first week of May this year was occupied by two public concerns directly posing challenges to the rights and histories covered by both commemorations.

First, we have the contentious reframing of the General Education Curriculum (GEC) by the Commission on Higher Education (CHED). If the ongoing release of multiple statements by Filipino scholars are any indication (such as that of the Philippine Political Science Association¹ and a looser coalition of Filipino education stakeholders²), there seems to be unity in critiquing the move as not only ill-conceived pedagogically, but that this policy also poses great risks on the employment of many faculties and education workers nationwide. Furthermore, reducing the GEC to accommodate global market demands continues to affirm the decades-long critique of the neo-liberalization and privatization of Filipino higher education. It confirms allegations of our obsession in producing workers actively prohibited from developing critical thinking and a sense of sociopolitical responsibility.

Second, we have the recent arrests of political content creator Franco Mabanta (who spearheaded the online platform Peanut Media Gallery Network) for allegations of extortion, as well as ex-broadcaster Jay Sonza’s for unlawful publication and cyberlibel. Both Mabanta and Sonza, it should be noted, have been identified with the Duterte influence and disinformation networks. These two cases are only a few among the disturbing persistence of disinformation-oriented actors. These do not only sustain the problematic and unproductive dominance of the Marcoses and the Dutertes’ narratives, but further poison the spaces previously occupied by public broadcasting and professional journalism.

At face value, these two news items are not explicitly related. I, however, would like to take this opportunity to draw a through-line between these.

The attacks on liberal arts education and the persistence of bad-faith content peddlers are emblematic of a problem practically every 21^st century society, regardless of their level of development or their level of sociopolitical freedom, is dealing with today: the continued erosion of our public spheres. By public spheres, I refer to the common space for citizens to properly engage, debate, and facilitate democratic discourse and national community-building. There is a direct line between reducing the ability of a country’s population to think for itself, and not genuinely addressing rampant disinformation that is actively trying to impose on how people should think and interpret the realities they live in.

The late German social theorist Jürgen Habermas (who died last March and is best remembered for his 1962 book The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere) famously argued that participation in the public sphere should prepare and allow people to more actively and effectively engage the political process (and the institutions that govern/control them). Subsequent debates on this theme (foremost among them the works of critical theorist Nancy Fraser) would pose warnings on the stability of societies’ public spheres. Failure to address systemic, informational, and discursive inequalities will actively contribute to their neglect and abandonment, if not the flat-out fragmentation of shared norms, values, and political baselines.

It is not an exaggeration to say that the Philippines is currently reaping the costs of ill-advised choices made in education policy, not to mention our market-oriented media environment. By stigmatizing liberal arts education and stymieing careers requiring social sciences, humanities, and education expertise, we sustained a status quo where access to such knowledge is gatekept. With an information environment openly controlled by vested interests and dominated by marketing and public relations, audiences are not only hampered from distinguishing between proper analysis and heavily marketed opinion (in a manner akin to a societal Dunning-Kruger effect, if you will), they are incentivized to rely on personalized influences altogether.

Our countrymen, long mistrustful of elite-dominated liberal democratic politics, have gravitated away from traditional lines of socialization (where media and formal education belongs) towards informal and newly established spaces of information and discourse, however problematic and below standards they may be.

Japanese political scientist Wataru Kusaka, who previously described the division of the Filipino public in his 2017 work Moral Politics in the Philippines, would further document the shifting attitudes of “new-age Filipinos” towards forming alternative discourses from established norms (directly sustaining the disciplinary ideologies and moral narratives of the previous Duterte administration) in his current 2026 monograph

(trans. “The Philippines: Hoping for Rebirth Through Coercion”).

The current impasse, therefore, is this. Our old institutions are still grappling with the longstanding mistrust imbibed by the larger Filipino population (not helped by the sabotaging of basic education and access to empowering higher education). Their isolation and suspicion, therefore, forces them to build their own information and political ecosystems at their own expense, under the clientelist manipulation of actors under the Marcos and Duterte disinformation networks.

As long as these chasms are not bridged, we will continue to reproduce the same mistakes, and the next election cycle by 2028 may continue to reflect this fragmented public sphere. Making sense of how to reestablish common standards and values (through genuine solidarity and superseding political and cultural inequalities) remains the most urgent call of our time.

¹ https://tinyurl.com/2b9t33ry

² https://tinyurl.com/2avmgl3c

³ https://tinyurl.com/2bl2mjhn

Hansley A. Juliano serves as an instructor with the Department of Political Science, School of Social Sciences, Ateneo de Manila University. He is finishing his doctoral research at the Graduate School of International Development, Nagoya University.