No meeting with Robredo or her team, Meta says of suspended lawyer's conspiracy claim
MANILA, Philippines (Updated 2:07 p.m., Jan.31) — Facebook’s parent company, Meta, did not have a meeting with Vice President Leni Robredo or her team for the removal of accounts supportive of presidential aspirant Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr, contrary to an ubstantiated claim of a suspended lawyer running for senator.
"No one from Meta has recently met with the vice president or her team, or made any agreement to remove political content from our platforms,” a Meta spokesperson told Philstar.com in an email on Friday.
The spokesperson added: "We do not arbitrarily censor peaceful political speech on Facebook, and we will only remove content or accounts if they violate our Community Standards."
A source in the Robredo campaign also told reporters that no such meeting happened.
Larry Gadon, who is running for senator under Marcos’ ticket, claimed on Thursday that Robredo’s camp met with Facebook officials supposedly to remove or suspend accounts of supporters of Marcos and his running mate, Davao City Mayor Sara Duterte-Carpio. He claimed to have a source in "Facebook Philippines" who told him about the alleged meeting.
Gadon further claimed that Robredo’s campaign was behind the recent purge of pro-Marcos Twitter accounts.
But what he left out was that Twitter suspended these accounts after its investigation found that these violated its policies against platform manipulation and spam. The Marcos campaign has also distanced itself from those accounts.
Social media platforms often shy away from content-based restrictions and instead suspend or remove accounts or content if they violate their policies on having multiple fake accounts.
RELATED: Facebook blocks lawmaker's accounts for COVID-19 misinformation
This was also the case when Facebook removed in September 2020 two networks of accounts originating from the Philippines and China for violating its policy against coordinated inauthentic behavior, or the use of fake accounts.
The Chinese network which Facebook took down had a “particularly striking” focus on Marcos’ sister, Sen. Imee Marcos, who was running for senator at the time, according to social analytics firm Graphika.
Marcos Jr. has previously denied employing troll farms, stressing that his supporters on social media are "real."
Gadon, who ran for senator in the 2019 elections and lost, has a penchant for making false claims.
To name a few, he has made wrong claims on mask use and other pandemic mitigating measures, on the United States’ sanctions against former International Criminal Court prosecutor Fatou Bensouda and on the health of the late President Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino.
The Supreme Court has suspended Gadon and ordered him to explain why he should not be disbarred over a vulgar video aimed at journalist Raissa Robles.
(Editor's note: A previous version of this article referred to Sen. Imee Marcos as former Sen. Ferdinand Marcos Jr.'s brother. She is his sister and this has been corrected.)
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