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A network of pages on Facebook (FB) has been posting organic and paid contents pushing for Charter change (Cha Cha) in a seemingly coordinated manner, an indication of an apparent influence operation (IO).
These FB pages are affiliated with Pilipinas Today that is managed by Sartine IT Solutions, which is linked to technology firm Breyalex. In 2018, the Guam-based Pacific News Center reported that Breyalex was allegedly behind the troll operations during the gubernatorial race in such United States territory.
MindaNews discovered Pilipinas Today and its network of FB pages posting the same Cha Cha narratives through a 1:06-minute long video posted by the Davao Secret Blog at 5:55 p.m. on February 28, which allayed the fears of the public on the moves to amend the 1987 Constitution.
The video was captioned:
“Hindi dapat katakutan ang economic Charter change: Hindi pagpapahaba ng termino ng pulitiko at hindi rin pagbuwag sa Senado ang layunin ng economic Cha-cha kundi ang malayang papasukin sa bansa ang mas maraming dayuhang mamumuhunan—puhunang magtatayo ng maraming negosyo at magbibigay ng trabaho sa mga Pilipino.
Malaya lamang na makakapagnegosyo sa Pilipinas ang mga dambuhalang foreign companies kung aalisin ng Cha-cha ang mga makalumang economic provisions sa 37-anyos nating Konstitusyon na pumipigil sa investors na itodo ang pamumuhunan sa ating bansa.
HUWAG MATAKOT sa ECONOMIC CHA-CHA, dahil ang HATID nito sa buhay ng mga Pilipino ay PAG-ASA at GINHAWA.”
To be clear, influence operation is not illegal in the Philippines. IO uses inauthentic, deceptive and/or concealed procedures, spread using either social media, news, or even messaging apps. It involves the use of disinformation, propaganda and other harmful content (such as harassment and attacks), delivered in different formats, in a manner that coerces or manipulates behavior and polarizes society.
As of April 1, the Davao Secret Blog video with a Filipino voiceover has been viewed at least 198,000 times. Sartine IT also manages the Davao Secret Blog, previously called the Davao Secret Confession that posted contents about relationships and steamy sexual encounters. Created on April 21, 2017, it has 187,000 likes and 224,000 followers.
Its post came four weeks after the Commission on Elections suspended on January 29 the proceedings on the alleged people’s initiative to change the 1987 Constitution.
In “prayer rallies” in the cities of Davao and Cebu on January 28 and February 25, respectively, former President Rodrigo Duterte rejected moves to amend the Charter, noting it will pave the way for “the Marcoses and their cohorts to perpetuate themselves in power.” Thousands of supporters attended both gatherings organized by a group called Hakbang ng Maisug.
Last March 18, the House of Representatives passed on third and final reading Resolution of Both Houses No. 7 (RBH7) with a vote of 288 in favor, eight against, and two abstentions.
RBH7 contained proposed amendments to the Constitution’s economic provisions, with proponents saying it would address restrictions on foreign ownership and advertising.
Pilipinas Today claims to be a media company, and was found to have at least 20 affiliate pages mirroring its contents. Pilipinas Today, whose logo is a black circle with the letters “pt” in white, has 541,000 likes and 583,000 followers.
It was created on June 3, 2019 with the name Mr. J. In February 2023, it changed names four times – Filipinas Today Mr. J, Filipinas Today AM, Pilipinas Today AM and the current Pilipinas Today.
Through a search of the Meta Ads Library, we found at least nine other profiles named “Pilipinas Today,” with varying page descriptions. These are separate pages with follower counts ranging from 106.2k to 1.5 million.

Both the Davao Secret Blog and Pilipinas Today have run advertisements on social issues, elections, or politics. Meta requires Facebook social media admins to indicate if they are running ads on those categories. It only allows verified accounts to post ads, which lists the advertiser and how much was spent.
According to its Ad Library, the Davao Secret Blog boosted a pro-Cha Cha post last February that it paid for.
A copy-paste of the Davao Secret Blog’s video caption would unravel the seemingly coordinated posting of the same contents by the Pilipinas Today network, using Meta’s CrowdTangle, a public insights tool that help publishers, journalists, researchers, fact-checkers and others analyze and report on what’s happening across social media.
Facebook Page Link | Page Name | Followers (as of March 16, 2024) |
https://www.facebook.com/WTFSartine | WTF Radyo | 1,438,088 |
https://www.facebook.com/pilipinastodaybatangas.org | Pilipinas Today Batangas | 1,204,191 |
https://www.facebook.com/FilipinasTodayAM | Filipinas Today AM | 940,739 |
https://www.facebook.com/pilipinastoday.net | Pilipinas Today | 889,696 |
https://www.facebook.com/filipinasbisaya | Filipinas Today Bisaya | 792,698 |
https://www.facebook.com/pilipinas.blog | Pilipinas | 764,577 |
https://www.facebook.com/pilipinastodayam | Pilipinas Today | 583,886 |
https://www.facebook.com/pilipinasvisayas.org | Pilipinas Today Visayas | 555,431 |
https://www.facebook.com/PilipinasRealtalk | Pilipinas Today Realtalk- | 490,604 |
https://www.facebook.com/pilipinastodaybatangas | Pilipinas Today | 389,451 |
https://www.facebook.com/filipinastodayam.org | Filipinas Today AM | 370,381 |
https://www.facebook.com/pilipinasradyo.org | Pilipinas Radyo | 330,963 |
https://www.facebook.com/filipinosocialclub | Pilipinas Today Club | 303,693 |
https://www.facebook.com/filipinastoday | Filipinas TODAY | 276,173 |
https://www.facebook.com/davaosecretblog | Davao Secret Blog | 226,079 |
https://www.facebook.com/peoplestonight.org | Peoples Tonight | 200,772 |
https://www.facebook.com/pilipinastodayilocos | Pilipinas Today Ilocos | 171,985 |
https://www.facebook.com/pilipinastodayqc | Pilipinas Today QC | 155,316 |
https://www.facebook.com/theworldtonight.org | The World Tonight | 119,655 |
https://www.facebook.com/pilipinastodaylaguna | Pilipinas Today Laguna | 50,745 |
These 20 different Facebook pages generated around 3,240 reactions, 1,548 comments, 307 shares, and at least 2,530,000 accumulated views as of 8:38 p.m. on March 31.
The other FB pages of the network also posted a video of the same Cha Cha content, translated in Cebuano.

In a Manila Standard story, Renesar Deunida, Sartine IT chief executive officer, admitted that Pilipinas Today is their client.

On its website, the Bonifacio Global City, Taguig-based Sartine IT describes itself as a company that offers “online reputation management services” to businesses and political parties who want to “change audience behavior.”
The company’s ventures into political social media operations show various patterns that qualify under influence operation, including the posting of the same contents in mirror pages. MindaNews sought an interview with Deunida through his LinkedIn profile, calls to the listed phone numbers on Sartine’s website and email, but there was no response to the request as of posting.
In terms of political ads, there are at least two key advertisers in several of the sampled Facebook pages – Pilipinas Today and Wanna Fact PH (WFPH). The latter claims to be a media/news company, but the website it listed, www.wannafactph.com, does not have news contents since its creation in 2023.
When we keyed in WFPH on Meta’s Ad Library Report, these results came out, covering the period August 2020 to March 10, 2024:
Page name | Amount spent (in Pesos) | Number of ads in Library |
Pilipinas Today | 3,321,385 | 3,430 |
Pilipinas | 2,688,157 | 1,677 |
Wanna Fact PH | 2,072,183 | 960 |
Pilipinas Today Kyusi | 1,144,935 | 942 |
Pilipinas Today | 955,021 | 724 |
Pilipinas Today Batangas | 570,285 | 202 |
Filipinas TODAY | 511,662 | 155 |
Pilipinas Today | 501,428 | 232 |
Larry De Costa | 495,790 | 363 |
Pilipinas Today QC | 479,465 | 226 |
The Big News | 382,595 | 117 |
Peoples Tonight | 368,442 | 170 |
Pilipinas Today Ilocos | 317,040 | 162 |
Pilipinas Today Club | 315,746 | 140 |
Pilipinas Today Visayas | 296,505 | 194 |
Filipinas Today AM | 263,478 | 212 |
Metro Manila Blog | 209,598 | 66 |
About Metro Pacific | 202,440 | 227 |
The Big News | 150,500 | 40 |
Bagong Ngayon | 145,943 | 62 |
Pilipinas Today Laguna | 133,440 | 74 |
Romeo Momo | 121,942 | 47 |
Pilipinas Today Mindanao | 113,384 | 54 |
Filipinas Today AM | 111,742 | 34 |
Tambayan | 96,925 | 37 |
Now Na | 91,498 | 21 |
Brian Lim | 72,423 | 32 |
Pilipinas Today | 49,997 | 21 |
St.Peter Radyo | 34,371 | 11 |
QC Kyusi Blog | 17,564 | 9 |
Breyalex | 17,120 | 10 |
Raul Recto | 17,000 | 6 |
PNOY | 14,000 | 8 |
Pilipinas Magazine | 11,800 | 6 |
Support Lokal | 11,500 | 3 |
Rudy Farinas Blog | 8,927 | 3 |
JUST Filipinas | 5,800 | 11 |
Pilipinas Today | 5,500 | 3 |
Pilipinas Today | 5,200 | 3 |
Filipinas Next Message | 4,000 | 1 |
Pilipinas Today BisMin | 2,000 | 2 |
Samira | 1,000 | 1 |
Buddy | 1,000 | 1 |
As can be gleaned from the table, the lowest amount paid by WFPH during the period is P1,000 while the highest is P3,321,385, totalling P16,340,731, regardless of the client and content.
Of the first nine sampled pages, WFPH used 8,685 ads since August 2020, spending P12,260,846. Most ads were paid to reach an estimated one million FB users.
To reiterate, while the activities of those FB pages are not illegal in nature, their behavior falls under influence operation.
For its part, Meta has a strict policy on the use and abuse of Facebook profiles, including coordinated inauthentic behavior.
“In line with our commitment to authenticity, we do not allow people to misrepresent themselves on Facebook, use fake accounts, artificially boost the popularity of content or engage in behaviors designed to enable other violations under our Community Standards,” it said.
With hundreds of thousands of followers, the influence of pages like Davao Secret Blog and Pilipinas Today’s network cannot be ignored. If the choice of messaging is to be the basis, Davao Secret Blog and Pilipinas Today could be part of a larger network of social media pages that seem to push a political agenda.
According to an open source framework designed by the DISARM Foundation, actors who wish to push their agenda through influence operations have various methods to achieve their campaigns.
Their activities range from the creation of hashtags, compromising of legitimate accounts, creation of personal and inauthentic news sites, and the leveraging of inauthentic news sites.
These actors flood the information space with inauthentic sites that amplify news and selected narratives.
From available open source data, it appears that Sartine IT Solutions has the machinery to influence major political messaging, across various platforms.
In May 2021, Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism executive director Carmela Fonbuena interviewed FB Philippines policy head Clare Amador on the effect of using the platform in the campaign of candidates for the May 2022 elections.
In that article, the PCIJ found out that the highest spending for the 2022 elections alone reached P4.5 million as of May 2021, a year before the elections.
In a step towards campaign finance transparency in the Philippines, Facebook has started monitoring political advertising in the country through its Ad Library.
The Ad Library shows that several potential candidates in the 2022 elections had started advertising on the social media platform more than a year before the May 2022 polls.
Sen. Sherwin Gatchalian, who was expected to seek re-election then, topped the list, spending P4.5 million at the time. (READ: Potential bets start advertising on Facebook as 2022 campaign shifts to social media)
Throughout the years, studies have shown that political principals have used and abused the vulnerabilities of social media to their own advantage.
In 2018, Jonathan Corpus Ong of the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Jason Vincent A. Cabañes of De La Salle University published Architects of Networked Disinformation: Behind the Scenes of Troll Accounts and Fake News Production in the Philippines, a study slicing through the methods that social media disinformation networks have used in the country.
The study examined the phenomenon that surrounded the years leading to and following the 2016 elections and took a layered approach to the architecture of disinformation, not only in the Philippines, but also in places like the United States, Russia, China, and Macedonia.
One of the network architectures described by the study includes the financing of troll farms and fake news producers around 2016. During their investigation, the proponents uncovered the influence infrastructure in local politics through first hand interviews with strategists, influencers, and fake account operators.
(This alert was produced with support from an Internews initiative aiming to build the capacity of news organizations to understand and monitor disinformation and influence operations in the Philippines.)