To understand the impact of disinformation in the Philippines, RIWI engaged over 19,000 Filipinos from April 9 – May 25, 2020, collecting unique insights that challenged some of the most common assumptions about public perception of news and media.
This new report, Information Dystopia and Philippine Democracy, dives deep into the findings that were gathered during this survey, one of the largest-ever public perceptions and citizen engagement studies in the Philippines. The report explores the cultural and emotional dimensions of disinformation and how they form part of the broader political transformations taking place in the Philippines. In addition to the RIWI data, other data sources are pulled upon for triangulation and further analysis to illustrate the complete picture of trust, awareness, and consumption of information and media. With all of this rich data, the report examines how the Philippine disinformation ecosystem fits into the regional landscape and formulates a set of strategic and programmatic recommendations to better tackle the issue of disinformation in the Philippines.
As a core partner in the Initiative for Media Freedom (IMF), a 5-year program funded by USAID, RIWI’s full stack of capabilities are being utilized to conduct this largescale baseline survey, several message tests, and will eventually be scaling a programmatic campaign to half a million internet users in the Philippines.