[Rappler’s Best] Our Facebooking soldiers

“Noong mga batang reporter tayo, ang mga sundalo panay ang kudeta. Ngayon, panay Facebook kuda.” (When we were young reporters, soldiers mounted various coup attempts. Nowadays, they rant on Facebook.)

That was my comment, punctuated with an LOL emoji, in a small chat group I have with old friends as news about the sacking of an Army colonel broke on Friday, January 9. 

Not that I’m advocating for a coup instead of kuda. But it bears noting that leaders in the defense-military establishment have looked away for far too long from the social media habits of their soldiers-turned-content creators — habits that have rewired their brains, reshaped their behaviors, reduced their perspective on war to sheer propaganda, and diminished the profession.

The past week saw two Facebooking officers — one on active duty, the other long retired — getting punished for what essentially have been the persona they acquired through the many likes and shares that they’ve harvested on social media. 

• On Monday, January 5, the police arrested retired air force general Romeo Poquiz at the airport upon his arrival from a vacation in Thailand, over his allegedly seditious posts online. Poquiz (109,000 Facebook followers as of Monday, January 12) has been blasting anti-corruption, anti-government posts on Facebook and helped establish the United People’s Initiative, a gaggle of military pensioners who joined the massive September protest rallies last year against the flood control scandal. He was able to mobilize just a few protesting retirees. Prior to this, a meeting that they sought with Armed Forces chief of staff Romeo Brawner Jr., which was granted, later churned out narratives about an impending coup that had the supposed muscle of the Iglesia ni Cristo. A flurry of leaks and denials followed — typical military psyops that some swallowed hook, line, and sinker.
• Who is Poquiz? A 1981 graduate of the Philippine Military Academy (the class that once ruled the police-military establishment under the late president Noynoy Aquino), Poquiz’s last post before retiring in 2014 was chief of the air force’s 2nd air division that exercised command and control over all air assets in the Visayas. Former president Rodrigo Duterte rewarded him with board memberships after he retired: at the Bases Conversion Development Authority and later, the Philippine National Oil Company. Based on his previous posts, he campaigned actively for the Uniteam of then-presidential candidate Bongbong Marcos and then-vice presidential candidate Sara Duterte in the 2022 elections. When the Uniteam broke up, Poquiz turned into a Marcos critic.
• He’s a staunch defender of Army Colonel Audie Mongao, who was relieved on January 9 from his post at the Army’s Training Command after his Facebook declaration that he was withdrawing his “personal” support from President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. His Facebook account as a “digital creator” has gained more than 3,000 followers.
• It didn’t help that just days before, Mongao’s commander, Major General Michael Logico (himself active on Facebook), took his oath as a newly promoted general before the President, along with other officers.

The irony is, the defense-military leadership had unleashed a weapon on social media that is now ranged against it. Under Duterte, it encouraged, coddled, and protected active-duty officers and soldiers who peddled lies, red-tagged harassed activists and journalists, and engaged in political punditry on Facebook and YouTube. 

Commanders embraced social media as an effective propaganda weapon in their never-ending wars and especially in light of China’s sophisticated info warfare — without rigor in its implementation nor care for its consequence. On Facebook, soldiers shed off their uniforms and acted like any other user: posting selfies and groupies, sharing boodle-fight meals and travels, making psywar pages, and then, eventually, putting up multiple fake accounts that targeted Duterte critics. On YouTube, they created their own channels.

They got infected with the algorithmic virus that boosted their reputation, made them fall in love with themselves and their kuda, and took time away from the core habits — AND restrictions — of soldiery.

• In 2020, we exposed the chief of the National Intelligence Coordinating Agency at the time, Alex Monteagudo, as a consistent sharer of fakery on Facebook from as early as 2016, when he used fake information as the basis of a report he submitted to the Senate. He justified this by saying they reflected the “artistic expressions of our people.” Read about it here. 
• Let’s not forget the star influencer of them all, retired general Antonio Parlade, who, as a powerful Army commander under Duterte, red-tagged journalists and activists, prompting the military to probe him. In 2023, the Ombudsman reprimanded him and his anti-communist partner Lorraine Badoy. He’s still at it. Recently, Parlade red-tagged a respected lawyer and environmentalist, Tony La Viña (a board director of Rappler). 
• The Philippine National Police used social media to harass suspected drug addicts during Duterte’s brutal drug war. Read about it here.
• The defense and military leaderships under Duterte defended these overt war methods when military units got entangled in various controversies involving their use of Facebook. An Army captain and two others were identified as being behind a network of accounts that Facebook suspended for displaying inauthentic behavior. We took a deep dive in this story.
• In 2014, before Duterte came to power, the military held its first social media summit, with around a thousand soldiers in attendance. The event launched a 45-page social media handbook for the Army that “will remind us of our unwavering responsibility as soldiers.” I wonder what happened to that handbook, or if it’s been revised at all.

In today’s age of cognitive warfare, content creation is a tactic that any respected armed institution must deploy. But deployed in a vacuum, without institutional oversight, and unaided by a coherent strategy, such a tactic turns soldiers into vain, clout chasing content creators. General Brawner needs to fix this — assuming he knows it needs fixing.

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– Rappler.com

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The views expressed by the writer are his/her own and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of Rappler.