How journalists and a drag content creator are working together to fight disinfo in the Philippines
These are some of the best sessions from Splice Beta 2023. This episode features Your Tita Baby and Jen Aquino.
In response to the rise of fake news on social media, Philippine media startup Probe launched a fact-checking campaign called Tsek/Eks. To engage the younger demographic, they collaborated with influencers, in an initiative that was unheard of in the media space. The fact-checking campaign leaned on Probe's archives, leveraging historical videos to debunk misinformation.
At Beta, Jen Aquino, the company’s managing director, talked about how Probe's fact-checking efforts gained recognition, which led to their inclusion as one of the verified fact-check signatories of the International Fact-checking Network in 2020.
However, recognising the limitations of traditional media, Probe expanded its approach by partnering with international media support and collaborating with diverse content creators.
Their partnership with Your Tita Baby, a drag queen content creator, highlighted Probe's strategy to involve unconventional voices in the fact-checking campaign. Your Tita Baby emphasized her unique perspective as a Gen Xer with a foot in both the millennial and baby boomer generations. This approach aims to bridge communication gaps and engage a wider audience in discussions about history and politics.
The transcript
This audio recording from Splice Beta 2023 was transcribed by OpenAI’s Whisper and turned into paragraphs by OpenAI’s ChatGPT 3.5. These tools can make mistakes, especially when adjusting for and paraphrasing spoken words. Check important information against the actual podcast.
Thank you again for taking the time to be here and to share what we've been working on. Sorry, but we have to start the presentation with me first, so be patient, okay?
I want to begin by taking you to the very start where it all began. I want to introduce our small but very productive production company. So, I am from Probe. It's an independent media production company founded by broadcast journalist Cheche Lazarro. In the 1980s, this is Probe, your Friday night news magazine for television. Some of you may remember that the Probe team began nearly two years ago as Probe on Channel 2. Probe is an investigative news magazine that comes up. So, we are one of the pioneers of documentary filmmaking and we are also the first investigative news magazine in the country.
Fast forward to 2016 to keep up with the changing times. We started doing content for digital. We produced digital series covering politics, history, culture, and the arts. As you can see, Cheche is still active up to now, and let's have a good conversation. We've been continuously producing shorts for Facebook and other social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok. We also worked with international partners, and some of them are still working with Probe. So, we usually produce documentaries about topics in the Philippines for them.
It's also important to highlight that in 2019, we started to work on Probe archives. In its 30-year run as a production company, we have put together an extensive collection of archives covering the stories done by Probe since the 1980s. So, from 2019, we have been digitizing 14,000 tapes, including U-matic and Betacam tapes, turning them into usable materials for social media. Because Probe has been in the business since the 1980s, we have seen it all. It adds to the revolution, the rise of people power, and as you have seen, we've covered a lot of historical milestones, including tragedies, poverty since the 1980s though. I think it's still the story of the Philippines up to now.
So, these are now readily available. These are now digitized, and the dream is to finish everything, finish digitizing everything in 2025 so that more people will have access to our work. So that educators and colleagues in the industry can use our materials to produce more stories.
Our work online also made us realize the proliferation of fake news in social media. While we continue to produce content that aims to encourage people to be more critical and to produce accurate content, we can't help but wonder what can we do more. In 2021, we were lucky enough to be one of the fellows of a fact-checking fellowship. We got in, and we thought to ourselves, okay, maybe this is what we can do more. So, we welcome our fact-checking era.
We introduced Tsek/Eks — Tsek if it means correct or true, Eks meaning false or wrong. When we produced Tsek/Eks, a fact-checking campaign, a lot of our colleagues in the Philippines have already been fact-checking. They will write articles and reports on fake news, and again we thought to ourselves, what can we do differently? So, we did something unusual. We tapped content creators to work with us. We believe that we have to work with people who have the influence, the impact, and the reach. Unfortunately, in the Philippines, those people are no longer the media practitioners.
In 2016, under President Rodrigo Duterte, there was a massive public media distrust. They just don't like to hear the news from journalists anymore. So, in a way, we have to compete. So, the fact-checking campaign of Probe aims to target the millennials and the Gen Z because we believe in the power of the youth because they're so tech-savvy. One influencer said yes to Probe in a heartbeat. This is McCoy Dubs, over a million followers. And we specifically approached him for the project because the fact-checking campaign features a relatable character.
You know that there are blood sugar levels, right? McCoy Dubs is a Filipino tita, nosey and sometimes has the tendency to spread fake news. So for Probe, we feel that his character is very powerful and relatable. Don't embarrass me, my sister-in-law. You're my best friend in college. Here she comes.
Another unique selling point of our fact-checking campaign is the use of Probe archives because who can fake videos or documentaries that were actually aired in the past? Our allies and our followers online would comment and would fight with trolls saying, "This is not fake because we've seen it in the 1990s. We grew up with Probe. We know Cheche Lazaro and the Probe team." So we were so surprised and so happy because our fact-checking campaign started online discussions. People started sending us items for fact-checking. People started asking for copies of our old documentary so that they can learn more from it. And we feel that that is a mark of success.
In 2020, this year, last May, we are very proud because we are now one of the verified fact-check signatories of the International Fact-checking Network. In the Philippines, there are only five signatories. All four signatories are newsrooms and news organizations. We are the only one focusing on videos, and I think that we have started moving conversations forward.
But we can't just, you know, keep fact-checking and doing videos with McCoy Dubs. So the next question is, what's next? Thankfully, partners and potential friends started noticing our work. This year, we are working with international media support, and they are helping us expand our campaign.
I would like to introduce somebody, one of the content creators that we are working now. This content creator checks all the boxes, entertaining, can cover a lot of generations, very relatable. And this is Tita Baby.
So Tita Baby is a drag queen, and even before working with Probe, Tita Baby has already content on disinformation and fake news. So as you can see, she is again another relatable character.
Excuse me, excuse me, excuse me, Jennifer. I hear my name. Hello everybody, good morning. Did you fact-check my name? Your escalator is not working, CIC. What do you mean? You are Tita Baby, right? Yes, hello, good morning everybody. Did you expect that it will be me, that you saw last yesterday in the plenary? Of course not. Welcome, welcome, thank you. My name is Tita Baby. I am a motherly auntie of social media and now of Philippine Drag. I started my career as a content creator, but some content creators cannot go on stage and speak like me. Look, the Filipinos are laughing because it is true. So now, working together with Probe, we are not only going to stay in the realms of social media, we can actually now go out and speak the truth. Thank you Jen for inviting me and IMS is here, thank you very much. Of course, Alan and Rishad, I'd like to thank you for inviting me over. Tita Baby, I think they want to know why you think you are perfect for this fact-checking campaign.
Okay. Candidate number one. Thank you very much for that very interesting question. Why am I perfect? I am always perfect, period, for anything. But particularly for this campaign, first of all in the Philippines, I don't know if in your countries this is the same, but in the Philippines there is an auntie culture. Tita is Filipino for auntie. Okay, the Filipinos are very fond of their mothers and their aunties, very maternal culture. And the opposite side of the mother is your auntie who is a strong-willed, very tactless, very vocal, and very successful because she doesn't have children. You know what I mean, right? So there is a very strong Tita culture or auntie culture in the Philippines and I think that is one of the gifts that I discovered while I was doing my social media work. Yeah. And that's one. Number two. While there are any baby boomers here, raise your right foot. Right foot. Right hand? Baby boomers? None. Or at least nobody wants to admit. Millennials. Millennials? Wow. More millennials. Okay. Now, there is a silent war going on between the baby boomers and the millennials. The millennials will say, you know what? You are destroying our world. You emptied the seas of the fish. You destroy our environment. Meanwhile, the baby boomers are like, we are older, we know everything. Right? Meanwhile, there is a generation in between them. It is called Gen X. And I am actually a Gen Xer. I was born back in 1978. So, you know, while they are bickering, your strong-willed tita just, you know, have wine and popcorn watching their bickering. But in reality, you know, some points of the boomers are correct. Some points of the millennials are correct. But you know what? I am always correct. So as a Gen Xer, I actually lived a part of the history that the millennials haven't seen. You know? Meanwhile, the millennials, I have the wisdom that some sort of boomers have. Yeah.
So it is a perfect bridge to bridge communication from history, especially for this project, talking about history and politics. I have been there. Probe was one of my personal resources when I was young. Seeing the 1986 revolution, I was living my life as a young woman of age six. Yes, I was a woman already. Age six, watching, living the life of the end-pales of the martial law. I was there. So when millennials ask me, how do you know the truth? I was there. You know? And they will not believe baby boomers because again, they have a negative connotation or a negative background for millennials. I don't know if all the millennials here agree with that. But you know, it doesn't matter if you agree with that as long as you agree with me. So that's my second reason why I feel like I'm perfect for this project.
And lastly, I again don't know Thailand has been very, has a very robust drag culture. Even before it entered the mainstream media through RuPaul's Drag Race, Thailand has a very robust drag culture. In the Philippines, it is just about to emerge and become completely mainstream. Because RuPaul's Drag Race, I don't know if you know that. Just Google it. I know. You're fact checkers. You fact check that. RuPaul's Drag Race entered the Philippines a few years back, and then there was an explosion of an industry that, you know, the Filipinos never knew existed. So I think it's a perfect time for drag queens like myself or drag artists like myself to actually use that time and the platform that we have to speak about the truth. You know? And I'm a literal tita in my real life. Out of drag, I am a little tita. My attitudes, my behavior, the way I think, you know, popcorn and wine every night. You know? So I really feel that there is a lack or a gap in truth storytellers telling the truth. My drag, if people ask me, why do you do it in drag? My drag is just an art. If Picasso's medium was painting, Mariah Carey's medium is music. To tell stories, the way I tell my story is through my medium, which is drag.
Will you be laughing at me if I look like a 45 Filipino congressman standing here? Of course not. Correct? So I think this project is very powerful, and that is why I believe. Ms. Judge, that is why I believe I am the perfect beauty queen for this project. Thank you very much, candidates number one. Thank you very much. I was warning Jen yesterday, and she was like, oh, tita baby, you know, I'm going to go on stage first, and then I will call you on stage, and okay, how long are you going to give me? 15 minutes? Oh, that's not enough. I'm very talkative. Thank you, Jen.
You might also want to ask, like, so what now? Are you just going to produce short videos with drag queens? No. We won't stop in producing videos because this project also aims to capacitate other content creators. We're very proud that we're working with an additional five to six content creators. All of them have a big following, and aside from producing disinformation, anti-disinformation videos for Probe, we will also bring them to schools. We will do fact-check training in seven schools in the zone Visayas and Mindanao, and we aim to build a group and find allies so that the fact-checking work will continue.
I'm sure the journalists here and media practitioners can relate when I say that every day, it gets harder to do our job. For me as a video documentarist, video editing, video producing takes time. I have experience not sleeping for four days just for a documentary, and when you publish it, you'd see that you'd get, what, 100 likes, 40 shares? Okay, but is that the best we can do, or is that the best this documentary can reach? So I have questions like that, but at the end of the day, Probe, a former legacy media, a journalist like me, and Tita Baby, who has one video, just one video, with 1.4 million views, are both here together, then there is hope. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Now we are going to take some of your money. Thank you. If you have any questions, please address them to Jen.
Hi, thank you very much. Really interesting. I was wondering because you were mentioning that some of the influencers you work with did post some fake news on their accounts before?
Yes, we're actually working with one new content creator who actually has no idea how sharing and posting works. This person with, again, a high number of following will just share stuff from the internet because it's getting viral. So just to, you know, like a bandwagon effect. So we will work with him, and that's the takeoff point of the story of this content creator, so that it's again relatable that, you know, these things happen, but it doesn't mean that we can't do anything about it. So these content creators that we will work with will undergo fact-check trainings from Probe and our partner media organizations that are also verified signatories of the IFCN. Yeah, because I was wondering what happens when the campaign stops and then this person continues his own or her own career and maybe posts again fake news, you know? But they will get trained as well in fact checking. They will be. They will be getting training from us and as while they are under Probe, we're looking at this long term, we have an open corrections policy so that in the event that, you know, there are inaccuracies in their content, we are open to being transparent and actually correcting the uploaded piece.
It's very rare in the Philippines to have that open corrections policy. They can also, we also have a designated email where they can send their tips or if they think that the fact-check pieces are biased or not fair.
Allow me to dovetail something, Jen, and add something. As a content creator also, I believe that my fellow content creators need to learn how to apologize. Need to learn how to apologize and need to skillfully correct their mistakes. And through what Probe is doing, if they will be empowering creators like myself on the proper way of correcting fake news or correcting emotional posting, then that will be a very powerful tool to actually, you know, convince the followers, convince the people.
I've seen content creators who posted, you know, media, videos, pictures, or even news that weren't true or that created negative emotions through the community. And I find that those who are humble enough and skillful enough to actually correct their mistakes have more credibility. I'm sorry. Okay. I'm very sorry. I will correct myself now. Yes. Oh, yes. I will take note of that and remind Jen. Yes. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much.
Tito, thank you for coming. Thank you for also coming to our Disinformation Forum earlier in the year. Just to both of you, is there a code of ethics that the content creators are signing up to as part of this program? The fact-checking campaign in general has a set of code of ethics and guidelines for the project. So we don't necessarily have to see it differently for the content creators because we will not see them as content creators, but fact-checkers like us as well because they will undergo training. So these guidelines will be applicable to them.
But I think it's more important that before the campaign started, Probe has been transparent with our parameters. What are we going to fact-check? What are the requirements for fact-checking? And most importantly, what is the rating system of these fact-checks? So to answer your question, yes, they will have to follow our code of ethics and the guidelines of fact-checking. And these guidelines are fair because to begin with, when you're a storyteller, when you're a content creator, when you're a journalist, everything should start from the truth.
But just to clarify that, being journalists, you and I, they're actually not just agreeing verbally, they're actually signing up to a code of practice. Yes, yes, yes, they are.
Just to follow up from Chris, and be absolutely clear, what it is, is it also a kind of a pre-publication fact-check? Is there an option for that or is it only after it has come up? Okay, the video series will cover two things. Actual fact-checks, which are actually already like when fake news is already proliferated and you do the fact-checking. So we will do that.
But we also have what we call this information reporting slash media literacy campaign. So some of the content creators we're working with are covering topics on health, agriculture, economics, and history. So we're trying to do a video series that aims to pre-bunk possible fake news. Like for example, there are many misconceptions and many myths on the medical field, about our economy, and of course history. So we are producing videos covering these topics.
Yeah, but I was also thinking, I mean, that sounds great, but us boomers, for instance, we were used to having an editorial room and with an editor to go through things. But in this case, if you work with influencers, YouTubers and so on, they do not have that and therefore it just goes out. But could they then have a possibility of consulting and say, okay, beforehand we are going out with this. Under this campaign, each content creator will work with an editorial head and a producer. So we will actually apply the processes that we have for our fact-checking campaign. So there will be no difference.
They will follow guidelines. They will undergo training. They will learn how to use our materials, our archival materials, how to vet sources. So they will, in a way, they will not do this on their own, but the goal is for them to continue doing this when they do their content, even after the campaign or the project has ended.
Hello. Hi. I have two questions. One, what I've seen behind the scenes with fact-checking is a lot of times media organizations bicker with the fact-checkers. And usually, there's a conflict that ensues after the fact-checking is done, especially when there are platform-specific demotions and so on and so forth. How do you handle that conflict with creators when you're pointing out their, you know, in corrections or false news?
We've been doing this fact-checking campaign since 2021, and we haven't had problems with the content creator that we've worked initially, Macoy Dubs, but in the event that that will happen, I think it's very important to really start on the same page, like you have to be on the same page. What is this project all about? What is the process? What is the system? And then, again, if we do not agree, of course we cannot force them to fact-check items that they're not comfortable with, because these content creators will not fact-check political stuff, you know, only. So they have to be comfortable with the topic that they will cover, but for our content creators that will cover history and medical, I mean, history and other social issues, we are actually working with fact-checkers who are expert in their fields.
Like, for example, one content creator that will cover historical myths and will debunk fake news online on history is a historian and an economist. So I think that also helps. We're not just tapping content creators because they're popular or they have following. We carefully chose who to work with.
My second question is, since you have all this archive, are you planning to use some sort of AI for, let's say, image banking to make sure that people are rating the images properly, because there's not a lot of databases of videos out there. Archiving in the Philippines, I guess, has just started its work, really. I mean, I think we're only, we're a member of Filipino archivists in the Philippines. There's an organization and they've only begun work, I think, in the 90s. So technically, we're all just racing to finish digitization. So we haven't had plans on that because we also don't have partners who can help us as well because we're not very AI media or yet. So if you have ideas or you know people who can work with us or who can help us, we're very open to that.
Thank you. Hi, I'm Nuna from IMS and I just want to ask Tita Baby how your audiences have reacted to these campaigns, positive, negative, and is there a difference from the content that you otherwise post?
For the first question, as an example, back in the election year, this past presidential election of the Philippines, I was tapped and I've been working with creatives, musicians, celebrities who were actually some of the jump starters of the editorial evolution back in 1986. So in terms of content and fact-checking amongst that group, I knew that I was in a good place if I worked with them.
Now, moving on to actually presenting it on my social media, there were actually both negative and positive feedback. However, what I notice is when I get negative feedback, it looks like it's generic. It's not organic and creators actually can, if you're an experienced creator, you can actually decipher which ones are robots or trollers and all that. I had a lot of those and I don't reply to them because if you feed them, they'll just grow.
On the other side, positive side, I feel like my audience or the audience at large really wanted something else as an outcome of the elections to the point that they were actually direct mailing me, messaging me directly and telling me that I was doing a good job for telling the story, that the humor that I inject is just the salt and pepper to taste. But the real meal was producing the story or the content. So there were a lot of personal and heartfelt feedback positively. The negative ones, although I'm not saying there were organic negative ones, there were, but I feel like it discredits them because there were a lot of trollers.
So there, on your second question, I find that humor for me or drag is just the appetizer for what the message is. I use it because if I come to you or anybody and tell them that this is the truth, point blankly, there will be a lot of resistance. So I use my gift as a comedy queen or a drag queen to actually just put a little bit of salt and pepper to taste on the truth. It will be more palatable and just probably inspire thought and thinking just to accept what I'm presenting and the story that I'm telling. I hope I answered your question.
And I'd like to share also that even before we started doing the fact-checking campaign with the content creators, we continued producing a lot of critical stories on our social media platform and even producing documentaries for TV network. We produced an investigative documentary about the impact of coal in the Philippines and highlighting one big business, the San Miguel Corporation, in that documentary. We also published a documentary playlist of all the documentary pieces done by Probe about the Marcoses. So it's a very brave playlist in public. We didn't get threats or anything and we were quite happy about that. But a week after we posted our fact-check campaign piece with Makoi Dobbs, when it reached half a million views, our website was down. So we thought that we are a small team member, so I texted my associate, did you pay our website subscription? I couldn't access it. No, no, no. It's automatically deducted from my credit card. And then I called up our IT guy and he said, that's a DDoS attack. So at first we were surprised and then we were happy because it meant that we have arrived. So there are consequences like that, but that's I think part of the job. So for me, I'm a very idealistic person as long as you hold on to truth, you can carry on. Thank you.
I just wanted to ask you one question about legacy media collaborating with social media influencers because I also have a background. I started off in a small newsroom. It's a legacy newsroom, it's print and there are a few of those where I'm from in Ethiopia. And I see them now struggling. I've left that newsroom, but they're really struggling, but they've been around for decades, like over 30 years. And I just can't see them collaborating with influencers because I feel like the question they would ask or they would be so negative in terms of we are doing serious work. And it would take away from that credibility that we worked for so many years to build. And I just want to know what your answer to that is. How do you answer that?
I also work and still working with a very traditional broadcast journalist. She's a multi-awarded journalist and a very serious one. But we had a very serious conversation also that I don't think we're that relevant anymore. People, I'm sorry to say this, it's not coming from a bad place, but many people don't know you anymore. And then she said something like, Jen, it's not about me. How can we make this, how can we turn this around? So I told her, we have a crazy idea and we reported it to her. We actually introduced Makoy Dobbs to Cheche Lazaro and then we filmed their conversation to also add credibility to Makoy Dobbs because you can't just have an interview with a journalist or a legitimate media organisation.
So to answer your question, I think you have to realise that the story is not you. We are not here for you as a journalist. It's about sending the message across. It might be funny, but if our fact-check piece can reach 1.4 million, I'll take it. Again, you won't sleep for four days and then what, you'll have 100 likes. So it's really about choosing your battle.
If there are no more questions, I think we'll have to end this session before I start crying. If you want to work with us. I thought we will end at five o'clock. Again, thank you very much for having Probe. If you need archival footage for your work, if you need footage of the Philippines from the Philippines, you know who to call. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, everyone. Thank you.