The rise of trolls in the Philippines (and what we can do about it) Jason Vincent A. Cabañes University of Leeds Jayeel S. Cornelio Ateneo de Manila University Original citation: Cabanes JVA and Cornelio JS (2017) “The rise of trolls in the Philippines (and what we can do about it)”. In N Curato (ed) A Duterte Reader: Critical Essays on the Early Presidency of Rodrigo Duterte. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, pp. 233-252. The promise of social media is to democratize public participation. But accompanying it is the curse of hate. There are, regrettably, no signs that social media will be any less virulent any time soon. Still recovering from the battlefield that was the 2016 presidential race, social media in the Philippines continues to be a site for animosity and spite. This is far from the ideal of a digital public sphere that can be a site for critical yet engaging discussions. Mainstream media in the Philippines—and some foreign media outlets as well—have linked the emergence of this phenomenon to Duterte’s rise to power (see Almario-Gonzales 2017; Caruncho 2016a; Ressa 2016; see also Lamble and Mohan 2016; Williams 2017). As some observers have pointed out, some of the key perpetrators of this virulence are President Rodrigo Duterte’s supporters. They are social media users—with both verified and suspicious accounts—who seem to take every opportunity to attack Duterte's critics. They are collectively referred to as trolls, which, as our discussion below will show, is not an unproblematic category. Their attacks range from a simple rebuttal to a concerted assault on prominent figures by shaming them. These entities have caused anxiety and panic among not just other online users but also journalists and commentators. Political trolling in itself is neither new nor unique to the Philippines. Political communication strategists have long been “weaponizing” various media platforms to generate for their clients a competitive advantage over their political opponents (Burroughs 2013, 260). Even before the advent of Internet 2.0, strategists from the early 1990s right up to the 2000s were already using, amongst other tactics, mudslinging stump speeches and negative television ads (Ansolabehere and Iyengar 1995; Scammell and Langer 2006). In the Philippines, these activities began appearing not soon after, starting as well in the early 1990s and further ratcheting up by the early 2000s with the lifting of the ban on political advertisements in the mainstream media (Bionat 1998; Perron 2008). Emblematic of these trolling activities was the campaign to label the late Senator Miriam Defensor- Santiago "Brenda" (which was short for brain-damaged). Although this label was first concocted to undermine her status as one of the leading contenders during the 1992 presidential elections, it was an attribute that continued to hound her subsequent attempts to run for public office. What the Philippine and foreign mainstream media have gotten right, however, is the newness of the intensity that has come to characterize the online version of political trolling in the country. This is a trend that one can also see in many other contexts, from similar 1