AI used for political influence campaign in Philippines – report

MANILA, Philippines — Online trolls are now using generative artificial intelligence to influence political discussions through inauthentic comments on social media platforms in the Philippines.

A new report released by OpenAI, the organization behind popular generative AI chatbot ChatGPT, detailed how the tool was used to “generate bulk volumes of short comments in English and Taglish,” mainly to promote the agenda of the Marcos administration.

“The comments were posted by accounts on TikTok and Facebook, and focused on politics and current events in the Philippines,” the report read.

The influence operation in the Philippines was among the case studies featured in the OpenAI report that focused on how the organization detects and prevents “malicious uses of AI.”

OpenAI said it banned several ChatGPT accounts that originated in the Philippines over what it called “Operation High Five.”

“The threat actor used ChatGPT to support several stages of a political influence campaign targeting audiences in the Philippines. The stages included content analysis, comment generation and generating PR materials relating to the campaign,” read the report.

The campaign, linked to a local commercial marketing company, used five channels on TikTok to promote the agenda of President Marcos.

“Our investigation identified these five TikTok channels, which appear to have begun posting in mid-February 2025. Each channel posted the same videos with different captions. The comments generated by this operation were then posted by dozens of TikTok accounts in reply to those videos,” read the OpenAI report.

“The TikTok accounts that posted the comments did not post any videos, did not follow any other accounts and typically had 0–10 followers. This commenting activity may have been designed to make the TikTok channels look more popular than they actually were,” it added.

On Facebook, the comments generated using ChatGPT were used to reply to news reports posted by mainstream news organizations.

OpenAI said there is no indication that the mainstream outlets had any connection to the operation, noting that the Facebook comments were posted by accounts that typically had no friends.

‘Princess Fiona’

According to OpenAI, the comments generated using the operation were mainly brief but partisan.

Aside from praising Marcos, there were also comments used to criticize Vice President Sara Duterte, including repeated references to her as “Princess Fiona,” a character from the Shrek movie series.

The period covered by the operation coincided with the campaign period for the midterm elections.

It was also the height of the conflict between Marcos and Duterte, which was marked by the Vice President’s impeachment and the arrest of former president Rodrigo Duterte.

“This network posted a large volume of content – at least in the thousands of comments across TikTok and Facebook. However, none of the comments that we identified online during our investigation received more than single-digit replies, likes or shares, and most received none at all,” OpenAI said in its report.

“According to the threat actor’s own prompts, the goal of the Facebook commenting was to inundate the comment sections. This appears to have been, at best, partially successful,” it added.

Last month, TikTok also confirmed the existence of influence operations to support or attack candidates during the recently concluded midterm elections in the Philippines.

The popular short-form video platform said over 573,000 fake accounts were removed from the platform from March 24 to May 12, the day of the elections.

Another 550,000 spam accounts were also blocked by the platform from being created in the Philippines during that period.

In addition to the fake accounts, TikTok said it also discovered three “covert influence networks” that targeted Filipino audience.

The three networks, removed from the platform in April, all operated from the Philippines and “created inauthentic accounts in order to amplify narratives favoring certain politicians and criticizing others, within the context of the 2025 Philippine midterm election.” — Christine Boton, EJ Macababbad