The Philippines long had a terrible reputation for

telecommunications, with Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew

famously saying that in 1992, “98 percent of the
population are waiting for a telephone, and the other 2
percent for a dial tone.”

Above, a rice farmer in the Philippines uses his mobile

phone to send a text message. Photo: IRRI Images.
However, beginning with the administration of Fidel
Ramos (1992-1998) and followed by President Estrada
(1998-2001), the telecoms industry was liberalized, and
phone ownership skyrocketed. While there were more
landlines available, much of the growth was in mobile
phones. Soon the Philippines was the texting (SMS)
capital of the world – to the point where the practice
played a part of the ouster of President Estrada early in
2001. When the Senate impeachment trial was suddenly
adjourned without verdict, the text message went around
“meet at EDSA.” Crowds gathered in the middle of the
night and refused to leave the main Manila thoroughfare
until he left the presidential palace.
Fast forward to the present, and we have Facebook being
used by more than 25 percent of the population – ranking
8th in the world, while other social media networks (such
as Twitter) are rapidly growing in popularity. In
September 2011, the Philippine Trust Index,
commissioned by EON The Stakeholder Firm, was
released. The study revealed that 68 percent of the
respondents view online news sites as the most trusted
sources of news and information while 49 percent trust
social networking sites.
These impressive metrics are telling about usage, but
more needs to be done to understand the impact that
social media has. A good example was the exciting
initiative by ABS-CBN, “Boto Mo Ipatrol Mo” (patrol
your vote) that was part of the general introduction of new
technology in election coverage. The network
aggressively reached out through advertisements and
roadshows to get people to sign up for the system, and to
post their observations and comments. The effort received
per day 500 reports by email, 103 calls, and 3,058 texts
during the electoral campaign. BMPM peaked with
87,419 “Boto Patrollers” in its database, 125,487 fans on
Facebook, 23,111 supporters on Twitter, 6,960 members
on its microsite, and 3,701 members on Multiply.
The May 2010 automated election was indeed much
improved, with lower levels of violence and being
generally accepted as producing honest results. But any
impact of BMPM needs to be assessed in context – for
instance, the fact that there were 76,000 different voting
places across the country means that many observers are
needed. The long-established Parish Pastoral Council for
Responsible Voting, along with its Muslim partner
organizations in Mindanao, mobilized well over 400,000
volunteer observers who not only sent in reports but
forwarded copies of election returns so that results could
be cross-checked.
The Asia Foundation has long partnered with
organizations who try to move forward through
technology, helping to sponsor in May 2005 the first
Philippine Blogging Summit. Five years later, in the
rapidly transforming social media landscape, we
supported civil society organizations to leverage this
technology to reach out to the general public – in this case
as part of human rights advocacy work in the Philippines.
Learning to exploit the popularity of online social
networking sites to advance their social and political
campaigns and to drum-up public support, human rights-
based organizations underwent a training on “Digital
Activism.” This focused on the use of social networking
sites (Facebook), blogging (WordPress), microblogging
(Twitter), web tools and applications (Google
documents), live streaming, and mobile activism.
With the support of USAID, we conducted the first series
of trainings in June 2010. Out of 37 human rights-based
organizations, including representatives from the
Commission on Human Rights, that participated, 30
created their official Twitter account while 16 have
official Facebook accounts. Monthly monitoring of these
social media accounts reveal that they continue to be
active with an average of one post per week that is
human-rights related.
Representatives from human-rights organizations
participate in a Digital Activism training conducted by
The Asia Foundation in Zamboanga City.
Building on the gains of the June 2010 training, the
Strengthening Human Rights in the Philippines (SHRP)
program conducted an Expanded Digital Activism
Training in partnership with DAKILA – Philippine
Collective for Modern Heroism. The second series of
trainings saw over 100 NGOs and key government
agencies trained throughout the country. An online
communication plan was introduced as one of the new
modules for this second series. Social networking sites are
incorporated in official communication plans of the
organizations, thus optimizing digital media as one of its
components.
A total of 74 new blogs, 11 new Facebook pages, as well
as 188 posts in 89 blogs were created during and after the
training. Many participants initially shied away from
creating Twitter accounts due to the perceived hassle of
maintaining the account, yet 36 new Twitter accounts
were created. Each organization represented in the
Expanded Digital Activism Training has established at
least one form of web presence for their organization.
The participants have since started using either
organizational or personal online accounts in promoting
their causes and have adopted a strategic approach to
conduct human rights advocacy work in digital media.
Some examples of these are:

 Ardan Sali of the Bangsamoro Center for Just Peace

in the Philippines used the blog he created to design a
prototype website of Tiyakap Kawagib. He
demonstrated his understanding of website
architecture in organizing the pages of the site in a
clean and user-friendly interface.
 On the International Day of the Disappeared, Aug.
30, 2011, participant Ed Atadero posted about
removing profile photos in remembrance of the
disappeared. This became part of a large Facebook
meme, which was covered by GMANews.TV.
 Right after the Davao City training, Liezl Bugtay,
one of the participants, used the online application
Storify to document Davaoeños’ Twitter reactions to
a news item on Mayor Sarah Duterte in her blog.
 During the actual trainings, participants used the
twitter hashtag #Digibak (short for Digital Tibak.
Tibak is the local term for activists) for information
 they learned during the training. The same hashtag
was used to identify all attendees of the training
nationwide.
 The collective Philippine human rights blog
HROnlinePH organized a fellowship and participants
to contribute to the blogsite.
 During the 2011 State of the Nation Address, some
attendees initiated the use of the hashtag
#WeWantPnoyTo, a call to make President NoyNoy
Aquino aware of the different concerns of advocates.
This spread among Expanded Digital Activism
participants, as well as among members of their
organizations. It became one of the 10 most trending
hashtags in the Philippines during that week.
 Emil Tapnio, co-author of this article, gained
prominent Twitter followers from opinion-makers
and international and local media whose interest was
captured by his recounting of the training.
Clearly, development workers saw this avenue as an
inexpensive yet effective way to instill advocacy into the
stream of public consciousness. The civil society
organizations we trained knew that social media is most
effective when it supplements the traditional mode of
campaigning to encourage collective action against
human rights abuses. As mobile phones reach even the
most remote citizens, and internet penetration – and along
with it social media usage – widens its reach in the
Philippines, these tools will become potentially more
valuable to civil society, citizens, and officials in their
advocacy efforts. As skills in these tools are acquired,
careful attention needs to be paid to how much impact is
generated on the daunting development challenges facing
the country.