MISINFORMATION and fake news on social media have reached crisis levels and now pose a serious threat to the country’s democratic foundations, a House leader warned on Tuesday as the House Tri-Committee resumed its investigation into digital disinformation.
Responding to a question from House Deputy Majority Leader Paolo Ortega V of La Union, Meta’s Director of Public Policy for Southeast Asia Dr. Rafael Frankel said the company was ready to work with Congress to help protect users and uphold democratic values.
“Would Meta support a Philippine regulatory committee for social media platforms so that they can partner and help out that the same regulatory committee if it was formed? I believe your presence here would be a big help and a good sign in this inquiry. But again we are aiming towards a regulatory committee that would help us especially combat fake news,” Ortega said.
Frankel, replied: “I’d be more than happy for Meta as a company to engage with the Philippine government and Congress on any type of regulations that you are considering when it comes to these issues.”
“I think we have now many years of experience in terms of working with governments around Southeast Asia, Asia Pacific and globally to come up with modalities and regulations that really can help protect users but also protect freedom of expression, that try to properly balance freedom of expression and safety in Meta of course account for local nuance,” he continued.
“It’s really important that countries have there own solutions and we are happy to share what we feel like works, what been more challenging and what doesn’t work. We’ll be very happy to engage Congress on that issue. And we appreciate the opportunity and thank you for it,” Frankel added.
In response to Ortega’s question, Frankel said Meta has Filipino moderators that look at potential violations of community standards.
He added that Meta’s local third party checkers “are looking to determine if pieces of contents are misinformation.”
“We work with three third party fact-checkers in the Philippines— Vera Files, Rappler and AFP (Agence France-Presse). And again all of them of course are local and have local context, local native language capabilities,” Frankel added.
In checking contents, Frankel said “we prioritize the most severe harms first. It is not necessarily a first in first out content moderation system.”
“We prioritize the most harmful pieces of content first. For example if we see that there are reports of child exploitative imagery that’s gonna jump all the way to the top of the queue. If we see reports of terrorism content, incitement of violence, those type of things. Those are going to jump ahead because of the potential to cause harm. That’s the type of process we use,” Frankel explained.“When it comes to misinformation… what we can do is we can ourselves send contents for the fact checkers to check or the fact-checkers can do it themselves. They have the ability not to wait for us and to actually check contents on their own. And what we see in the Philippines is they are very robust. I think we have some of the must robust fact-checkers in the world active in the Philippines,” he added.
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