Photo: Ezra Acayan/Getty Images
On February 11, the official campaigning season for the 2025 Philippine midterm elections kicked off. Around 70 million registered voters will cast their ballots for 18,280 seats across 14 posts, from senators to municipal councilors. Perhaps the most critical of these elections are the 12 open Senate seats. The midterm elections are a temperature check on a simmering proxy war between President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. and Vice President Sara Duterte. Though traditional campaigning will play a significant role in the fates of these candidates, much of the battle will be conducted online and over the airwaves.
The Marcos and the Duterte families have both employed information operations, including narrative management and online troll armies, to engineer a political comeback (for the Marcoses) and solidify their grips on power. Since the Marcos-Duterte tandem swept to office in 2022, however, the information space in the Philippines and its neighbors has evolved. The Philippine troll army model has been mirrored throughout Southeast Asia, notably through “buzzers” aiding Indonesian president Prabowo Subianto’s ascent to power in 2024. Deepfakes and AI-powered scam calls have grown more ubiquitous. Meanwhile, the major tech platforms that host Southeast Asia’s digital footprint have fewer incentives for regulation and fact-checking. Influencing the 70 million Filipinos going to the polls will be crucial for either side to advance their agenda.
As it was in 2016 when Rodrigo Duterte, Sara’s father, won the presidency, this year’s Philippine elections could again serve as a blueprint for online influence operations in other contests around the world.
At the center of the midterm elections are President Marcos and Vice President Duterte. In 2022, the pair won office in a landslide. Shortly after they were elected, cracks began to show and their once formidable “UniTeam” slate split into two rival camps, with the strain intensifying over the years. For the past three years, the House of Representatives and the Senate have been firmly in the grasp of Marcos’s allies. House Speaker Martin Romualdez, who is also the president’s cousin, and Senate President Francis “Chiz” Escudero have been instrumental in passing key legislation for the Marcos administration. And though holding the Senate in the by-elections will be key to passing Marcos’s agenda over the final three years of his presidency, the stakes are significantly higher for the vice president.
Sara Duterte was recently impeached by the House of Representatives for alleged misuse of confidential funds and making live streamed threats against the president and his family. She will face a trial in the Senate in July, after the by-elections that will decide half of the chamber. If the polls return a more Marcos-aligned Senate, it could seal her and her family’s fate. Should she be convicted, Duterte would be barred from holding any political position for life, dashing her presidential hopes in 2028. This would also jeopardize her family’s position and her father’s freedom, as the Marcos administration has said it is open to cooperating with the International Criminal Court’s ongoing investigation into former president Rodrigo Duterte’s bloody war on drugs.
The two families have significant social media presence and deep-rooted political machinery. With the UniTeam now fractured, the 2025 election will see the two sides use their tactics on each other. The Marcos camp, having spent decades cleaning up their image, does not have an extensive history of attacking the Dutertes. Marcos, usually more reserved and genteel, spoke out against his predecessor at his opening rally for the 2025 midterms on February 11, speaking out against the war on drugs and emphasizing the integrity of his slate as a slight dig against Sara Duterte.
The Duterte camp’s tried-and-tested disinformation apparatus, however, is now pointed squarely at the Marcoses. Originating under the elder Duterte’s presidential term, trolls identifying as Diehard Duterte Supporters (DDS) flooded social media spaces such as Facebook, often in coordination with Rodrigo Duterte’s staff and with his tacit approval. After the collapse of the UniTeam partnership, DDS trolls offered a brief preview of the misinformation they were willing to dish against their former partners. In July 2024, a deepfake video emerged in DDS social media circles of President Marcos allegedly sniffing cocaine. Former President Rodrigo Duterte had repeatedly claimed that Marcos was a drug addict. Under Duterte, government-funded troll armies ran roughshod against his opposition, burying the information space in disinformation. In 2022, this apparatus, in tandem with the Marcos family’s decades-long rehabilitation campaign, proved effective in taking space from the opposition.
Ironically, the Marcos administration is now leading efforts against disinformation despite having benefitted so significantly from it in 2022. In 2023, the administration launched a media literacy campaign to root out fake news, arguing that “fake news should have no place in modern society.” In January 2025, the House of Representatives held an executive briefing to shed light on the extent of information machinery within the country. The House expressed its intent to invite representatives from major social media platforms to explain their anti-disinformation, anti-bullying, and sensitive content policy. Facing pressure from the incoming Trump administration, Meta announced in January 2025 that it would be ending its official fact-checking campaign on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. It would replace official fact-checking with a community notes feature, similar to Elon Musk’s X platform. As implemented on X, the community notes feature failed to address disinformation surrounding the U.S. elections in November 2024.
In February 2025, the Philippine House of Representatives announced an investigation by the House committees on public order, public information, and information and communications technology. Google, Meta’s Facebook, and ByteDance’s TikTok will be investigated by the committee in hopes of understanding what role they play in spreading disinformation. With U.S. tech executives at President Trump’s ear, it is unlikely that significant efforts toward regulation will take place. The lack of digital regulation in the United States has given free rein to the world’s major tech platforms, with harmful consequences for democratic health in the Philippines and Southeast Asia.
The House of Representatives is especially concerned about China’s growing role in the Philippine disinformation space. Chinese influence campaigns are in a prime position to take advantage of the ongoing feud. A February 2025 report found that X accounts with Chinese names have spread fake news undermining the Marcos administration’s stance on the South China Sea and defending the Duterte family. Public perception against China is already at a record low due to ongoing tension in the South China Sea and concerns about Chinese subterfuge, most notably through the highly publicized Alice Guo case in 2024. At the same opening rally on February 11, Marcos himself more forcefully spoke out against the Duterte camp’s pro-China perspectives, accusing former president Duterte of being too lenient against China despite its aggression toward the Philippines. Interfering in these elections in favor of pro-China candidates would allow Beijing to create a more conducive environment for its revanchist policy aims.
The proxy war between the shattered UniTeam alliance will continue to test Philippine democracy and Filipinos’ faith in institutions. In the Philippines, virality, brand, and identity trump almost all policy promises. It is no coincidence that Marcos’s Senate slate is chock full of career politicians, celebrities, and media personalities. With the U.S. government unwilling to rein in its platforms and China eager to stoke divisions, the Philippines will again be patient zero for a new kind of political warfare in Southeast Asia.
Japhet Quitzon is an associate fellow with the Southeast Asia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.
