Classes were suspended at Talisay City National High School yesterday due to a threat made over the weekend on Facebook by an unverified account using the name “Zane Bacalso.” The poster wrote, “bantay mo ugma TCNHS naay mamusil,” and offered the students condolences in advance.
The post has since been deleted, but Mayor Samsam Gullas was right to take the incident seriously by suspending classes, deploying a SWAT team, and reminding everyone that posts like these “are never a joke and must always be treated as credible until proven otherwise.”
The past two weeks have had the nation on edge because the very safety of its schoolchildren is at stake. After the June 22 Tacloban school shooting that killed three students and injured 20 others, a series of threats followed across the country. There was a shooting threat against a private school along Leon Kilat Street, Cebu City, where police found nothing; threats in Batangas and Escalante, and now another in Talisay City, Cebu. Yesterday morning, another school shooting “threat” posted on social media was reported in Olango Island, Lapu-Lapu City.
The Philippine National Police now warns of a surge in school threats and concedes that many, if not all, are false. The Department of Education has also warned that a student who makes a bomb or school-shooting joke may not be permitted to enroll next year.
I say this is not the entire story, and I see another angle in the current situation. It reminds me of the NAIA ‘laglag-bala’ controversy in 2015, which, in my view, was at least partly manufactured by disinformation networks linked to the 2016 presidential election.
The same opening exists now. The current wave of school threats can be exploited by disinformation networks to build a politically useful narrative --that our schools are not safe, and the government is nearly helpless. Fear manufactured at this scale, especially with children cast as possible victims, is never neutral. Someone always benefits from that kind of narrative.
In 2015, whether the issue was Mamasapano, the Yolanda disaster, the daily agony of the MRT commute, or laglag-bala itself, one message kept surfacing across social media. The government cannot protect you. What you need is a punisher. After the election, the bullet stories quietly vanished from our feeds.
Of course, this past incident does not prove that the current problem itself is manufactured. The Tacloban tragedy was real. What can be manufactured, though, is what comes out from the “architects of networked disinformation”, the strategists, influencers, and click armies that helped sweep a political brand into power. So forgive what may sound like an insensitive question at a time when the country is afraid of school shootings. Who benefits from a nation of terrified parents?
In 2015-2016, the old familiar line was that the streets were not safe and that only discipline and a strong hand could save you. Now, watch for the updated version in the coming days. This time, the message will be that the schools are not safe. Watch for the synchronized posts and the identical memes suggesting that campuses were safer when a mother ran the Department of Education, confidential funds and all.
That is why Senator Risa Hontiveros’s response deserves attention. She is focused on the evidence. Her Senate committee named an actual predator. It is 764, a nihilistic online network tagged as a national security threat by the FBI. It allegedly grooms vulnerable children through games and chat groups toward self-harm, sextortion, and violence, and may have influenced the Tacloban shooters.
Let’s focus on this. Precision, not panic that disinformation channels can exploit.