Stark reminders this month on the need to fact check even photos and how much easier it is to frame events through them.
The first, a photo of President Rodrigo Duterte supposedly celebrating his birthday with a cup of rice for a cake.
While that was gimmicky in itself, it emerged soon after that the rice "cake" (not an actual rice cake like a bibingka) was part of a larger spread.
IT GOT SILLY PRETTY QUICKLY: Online bakeshop swamped with customers after creating Duterte-inspired birthday cake
The actual celebration included a roast pig, an actual cupcake (not a cake made of actual cups) and an attempted groping that the Palace assured the public was done in jest.
The head of the Philippine Information Agency tried to make it about the lechon—pointing out that members of the political opposition have also had lechon in the past—and not part of maintaining the president's image of a relatable everyman who eats at roadside canteens and celebrates his birthday with rice.
This was followed soon after by a release of more questionable photos, by the same source, last weekend, while the public was wondering aloud where the president was. He had skipped his usual weekly address and there were rumors that he was in poor shape if he was even in the country at all.
The "proof of life" photos and videos—of him, among other things, jogging and playing golf at night—were picked up by most newsrooms in Manila and some abroad but did little to address the rumors or the anxiety caused by the president's absence while the capital was grappling with high daily increases in coronavirus cases.
READ:Aides dismiss rumours circling Duterte's health, including one which said he has died in S'pore
It was a body double, some people said. Others pointed out that you couldn't even see the face of the man in the photos.
"When you push these pictures, we're inevitably pushing the narrative that they're trying to push through these pictures," award-winning photojournalist Ezra Acayan, chairperson of the Photojournalists' Center of the Philippines, said earlier this week in a TwitterSpaces discussion prompted by the release.
He said that it would be better for newsrooms to insist that handout photos be sent from the mobile phone that took them instead of being released over social media as has become usual practice, especially for the senator who enjoys easy access to Duterte. That way, he said, important metadata would be preserved.
Movement restrictions to address the pandemic and the risk posed by the coronavirus itself have made coverage difficult, but handout photos should still be vetted, Jes Aznar, another veteran photojournalist, said in the same discussion.
"A handout photo is good, especially for most local outfits because it's free, but the point is we have to treat it in a way that it is a material that came from a third party," he said.
Posting them "without questioning what it is, where it is, what it is for is like you published a press release word for word."
Lack of vetting of handout photographs, said Human Rights Watch researcher Carlos Conde, who hosted the online discussion, could affect other narratives, like in the government's "war on drugs," where police photo releases are sometimes the only ones available.
Elsewhere in Southeast Asia, outrage in Cambodia over colorized photos published in VICE of victims of the Khmer Rouge regime that turned out to have been altered to make the people in them smile.
"A controversial act of revisionism or powerful tribute bringing these black and white images to life, a debate over [artist Matt] Loughrey's edits took on new dimensions when it emerged many of the images had not only been [colorized] and enhanced, but doctored by the digital artist," Southeast Asia Globe wrote.
It was not up to debate for Cambodia's Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts, which called the photos "unacceptable, affecting the dignity of the victims, the reality of Cambodia's history and in violation of the rights of the museum as the lawful owner and custodian of the photographs," according to the Phnom Penh Post.
READ: Culture ministry: Take Tuol Sleng photos down, or else
VICE has taken down the photos, saying there had been a failure in its editorial process.
The president’s rice “cake” and night action shots remain up, part of the official record and of the zeitgeist, and, hopefully, has prompted reflection on other editorial processes.
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FROM THE D&D RESOURCES CHAT GROUP
Singapore's most expensive Facebook link: In 2018, Singapore blogger Leong Sze Hian shared an article about corruption allegations against Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong on his Facebook page, without comment. A court ordered him last month to pay around $100,000 in a defamation suit that Lee filed in response.
China Launches Hotline to Report Online Comments That 'Distort' History or 'Deny' Its Cultural Excellence: The Cyberspace Administration of China has put up a hotline to police online content and hopes that "most internet users will play an active role in supervising society…and enthusiastically report harmful information."
Revealed: the Facebook loophole that lets world leaders deceive and harass their citizens: A former Facebook employee alleges the social media platform did not act quickly enough or at all to coordinated inauthentic behavior and faked online engagement "in poor, small and non-western countries in order to prioritize addressing abuses that attract media attention or affect the US and other wealthy countries."
Holy Angel University in Angeles, Pampanga is signing a Memorandum of Agreement this morning for an international research project on disinformation.
HAU will be partnering with the Don Mariano Marcos Memorial State University, the University of Surabaya in Indonesia, Xiamen University in Malaysia, and Mahamakut Buddhist University in Thailand.