As an active part of the National Task Force for the West Philippine Sea (NTF-WPS), Commodore Jay Tarriela of the Philippine Coast Guard (PCG) naturally has become the favorite bashing target of the “pro-China” army of trolls, as well as those behind the “fake news” flooding online social media platforms. After all, Tarriela is the designated spokesman of the PCG on West Philippine Sea issues.
Tarriela told us at our Kapihan sa Manila Bay news forum last Wednesday that he has become part of the consistent pattern of “fake news” consisting of “false narratives” apparently being managed and controlled from foreign origins. Tarriela rued these “fake news” are traced all the way to China, using online platforms lorded over by obviously unscrupulous Filipino vloggers.
Whether wittingly or unwittingly, Tarriela believes there ought to be a law to protect our national security against people engaged in such “fake news,” without sacrificing the enshrined constitutional rights on free speech and on the free press in the Philippines.
“Everybody is entitled to his own opinion but we are not entitled to distort facts,” Tarriela asserted.
“You would not waste time coming up with such a narrative countering our position in the West Philippine Sea just because hobby mo lang gumawa ng fake news… I’d like to believe they’re really getting incentives out of this,” Tarriela surmised. He admitted they have yet to come up with concrete evidence to pin down any one and hold them accountable for any specific criminal offense.
According to Tarriela, those behind the “fake news” run on “three levels of engagement” and “six narratives” used in peddling falsehoods, notwithstanding the fact that the Philippines was upheld by the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) in July 2016 that set aside Beijing’s “nine-dash line” based on historical claims over the entire South China Sea. The Hague-based PCA ruled in favor of our country’s 200-nautical mile exclusive economic zone (EEZ) around the WPS in the South China Sea.
According to Tarriela, the NTF-WPS review showed the “initiators” are the social media influencers with “massive following” who post articles against the WPS as the first level of engagement. The second level of engagement comes from the “disseminators,” or common social media users with consistent posting of anti-WPS and anti-Marcos administration contents. At the low end of engagement are the “re-posters,” or those who fall victim to false information and share it with the general public.
In short, we can call them the naïve and gullible who do not know anything at all about the WPS.
As part of the NTF-WPS’s education campaign, Tarriela showed copies of the hardbound comic book, “Ang Mga Kuwento ni Teacher Jun.” With the main character resembling a caricature of President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr., it is a Taglish comic book launched last February at the National Library to simplify understanding the importance for Filipinos through generations to help protect our own WPS.
As the head of the PCG WPS Transparency Group, Tarriela monitored “false narratives” based on the evaluation of at least 1,500 posts on social media reviewed from February 2023 to January 2025. At the end of their review, it indicated at least six such “false narratives” with obvious Beijing versions, especially on the incidents of “aggressive” maneuvers of the Chinese Coast Guard (CCG) vessels within, if not inside, the EEZ and traditional fishing grounds of Filipino fisherfolk.
First, blaming the United States (US) in the so-called “rift” in the WPS to divert the blame away from China. Second, there is no such WPS but is only a product of the imagination of the Philippine government. Third, the Philippine government itself is causing the confusion. Fourth, the WPS issue would bring or cause war to erupt in the Philippines. Fifth, the WPS issue is not a concern for the struggling Filipino masses.
And lastly, WPS “messengers” like Tarriela are being shot down by malicious claims and smear campaigns. Regarded as the most popular, outspoken defender of the WPS, Tarriela gets hit on most of these “fake news.” Not that he minds these personal attacks on him but he was more concerned about the national security implications of such “false narratives” spreading in the favorite social media platforms of Filipinos like Facebook, YouTube and lately TikTok.
The NTF-WPS also found three “intersecting” interest groups behind the “pro-China trolls,” Tarriela added. One group staunchly defended detained former Bamban, Tarlac mayor Alice Guo. The nationality of the ex-Bamban mayor was earlier unmasked in the Senate hearings on illegal Philippine online gaming operators (POGOs) as actually a Chinese and not a Filipino-Chinese. Tarriela further noted the “pro-China trolls” also tried to “downplay” and twist facts on the apprehension of suspected Chinese “spies” by Philippine authorities earlier this year.
Thus, Tarriela welcomed the initiatives of the 19th Congress to look into possible legislation to arrest the proliferation of “fake news” impinging on our country’s national security such as on the WPS issues. He, in fact, was invited as one of the resource persons as deputy spokesman for the NTF-WPS during the past two public hearings of the House tri-comm on the reported spread of “fake news.”
Three standing committees in the House of Representatives, collectively called the tri-comm, are tasked to look into the dissemination of “fake news” and malicious contents on social media platforms, including self-proclaimed “influencers” and vloggers.
The tri-comm acted on a privilege speech last Dec.16 by Surigao del Norte Rep. Robert Ace Barbers who deplored certain vloggers, mostly identified from the ranks of so-called “DDS” or Duterte Diehard Supporters.
Based on these leads they gathered, Tarriela disclosed, the DDS completes the third “intersecting” interest group behind the “pro-China trolls.” Despite Republic Act 10175, or the Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012, Tarriela urged anew Congress to come up with a law that could punish social media users publishing contents that “compromise national security.”
Even without any law yet, Tarriela remains confident of beating the “pro-China troll army” in the information war on the WPS, strengthened by the unity of Filipinos to collectively hold the line.