MindaNews examines apparent symptoms of influence operations following a narrative about a Mindanao Republic in the first quarter of the year. With maneuvers to initiate Constitutional amendments through an alleged people’s initiative, social media was awash with various contents that appeared to support the separation of Mindanao from the rest of the Philippines. We found that deepfakes and cheapfakes pollute the narrative, the methods being symptoms of influence operations for their lack of authenticity, and the reach numbering hundreds of thousands is proof of how easy it is to spread messages online whether these are genuine or not.
DAVAO CITY (MindaNews / 09 May) – Even if former President Rodrigo Duterte has backpedaled on his call for the separation of Mindanao from the Philippines, manipulated contents favoring the island’s independence circulated on Facebook and TikTok – using memes and artificial intelligence (AI) apparently aimed to keep the issue remain under public discourse.
And while the leadership of the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (BARMM) and at least 53 members of the House of Representatives from Mindanao ultimately rejected the idea, some contents went viral about a possible Mindanao Federal Republic.
The transition government in the BARMM is led by the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), which fought a decades-long bloody war for an independent Mindanao but eventually settled for autonomy under the Comprehensive Agreement on the Bangsamoro (CAB), which the Philippine government and the MILF signed in 2014 after 17 years of peace negotiations.
On January 30, Duterte told a press conference at the Grand Men Seng Hotel here that an independent Mindanao “will not be a bloody separation” from the Philippines but that they would gather signatures and go all the way to the United Nations.
Composed of 28 provinces and 33 cities in six regions, Mindanao is the country’s food basket and is home to rich deposits of copper, gold, nickel, and natural gas, among others.
Seated beside Duterte during the press conference was former House Speaker and now Davao del Norte First District Rep. Pantaleon Alvarez, who has been advocating for Mindanao independence. Duterte said he chose Alvarez to lead the movement because he was among the first advocates of the “desirability of Mindanao seceding from the Republic of the Philippines.”
On February 2, Presidential Peace Adviser Carlito Galvez, Jr. said Duterte’s call for an independent Mindanao was “unconstitutional.”
A week later, February 8, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. said the renewed call for Mindanao independence is “a grave violation of the Constitution.” “The new call for a separate Mindanao is doomed to fail for it is anchored on a false premise, not to mention a sheer constitutional travesty… I strongly appeal to all concerned to stop this call for a separate Mindanao.”
A total of 57 House members, 53 of whom are from Mindanao, signed a manifesto rejecting Duterte’s proposal for an independent Mindanao.
Lanao del Sur 1st District Rep. Zia Alonto Adiong said Duterte’s push for Mindanao to secede from the Philippines was an “insult” to the memory of those who died in the Moro struggle for self-determination.
“I guess my calling to our leaders, be more circumspect. We should not use independence or the issue of secession of Mindanao as a political slogan. We should not use that loosely in order to express our dismay politically,” Adiong was quoted in a February 14 press release from the Office of House Speaker Martin Romualdez.
In a press conference in Davao City on February 27, Duterte made a turnaround and urged people to stop talking about separating from the Philippines, claiming his call was just a “tickler,” a “pitik” (flick), a “panghadlok” (scare) and a “pangatik” (joke).
After the press conference, the 79-year-old Duterte told MindaNews he does not expect an independent Mindanao to happen within his lifetime.
In a statement on February 2, BARMM Interim Chief Minister Ahod “Al Haj Murad” Ebrahim, concurrent MILF chair, also rejected the calls for Mindanao independence. He urged for the faithful implementation of the gains of the CAB, which paved the way for the establishment of the Bangsamoro region.
“As the Chief Minister of the Bangsamoro Government, I stand firmly on adhering to the faithful implementation of the provisions of the Comprehensive Agreement on the Bangsamoro towards the right to self-determination,” Ebrahim emphasized.
While Duterte’s call for Mindanao to secede from the Philippines failed to muster the support of political leaders, some netizens pushed the idea using memes or explainers generated by artificial intelligence (AI), which can be used to create deepfake video or cheapfake audio.
Factcheckers and monitors of influence operations have repeatedly warned about the use of AI and the abuse of social media channels to sow misinformation and disinformation.
According to the DISARM Foundation, an open-source investigation tool to identify influence operations, cheapfaking is an effective means to spread disinformation. The material is either poorly edited or looks convincing enough to be viral. Deepfakes, on the other hand, use machine learning language to create images or content as if these were true. The foundation warns of the danger of the proliferation of deepfakes and cheapfakes.
The Mindanao Passport
After Duterte called for Mindanao independence, a photo of a manipulated Mindanao passport went viral on social media, with the term “Mindanese” also trending then. The post was an altered photo of a Philippine passport that appeared in a travel blog.
The original photo has a Philippine Passport with the Timor Leste visa arrival area in the background.
While a viral meme appears harmless, it shows the ease in which a photo can be manipulated and spread.
One such post, by Facebook Page Alamat Ng Piski, made rounds online and has gathered around 3.4K reactions, 76 comments, and 872 shares. Meta’s Crowdtangle tool identifies this post as having the highest number of shares based on the ‘Mindanese’ keyword. Alamat ng Piski has at least 285K followers as of April 27.
Crowdtangle combed through the posts on the keyword ‘mindanese’ and found at least 270,073 interactions from January 2024 to present. According to the Meta tool, there was a spike in the usage of the term across at least 126 posts during the period.
Internews’ Digital Insights and Literacy (DIAL) database also found at least three contents that went viral on social media.
The contents we monitored included both pro- and anti-separation/secession narratives. One YouTube video was created using AI and also narrated using AI. Another TikTok post used a flag of the defunct Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) and a likely AI-generated image to pose a question “gusto neyo ba mag hewalay Mindanao sa Philippines (sic).” [Translation: Do you want Mindanao separated from the Philippines?]
The ARMM was abolished upon the establishment of the BARMM in early 2019.
Fact-checkers and disinformation investigators use a tool called the DISARM Framework to identify the symptoms that could lead to disinformation. Influence operations typically use deepfakes and cheapfakes to either muddle narratives or create false contexts to gauge or create public perception on any topic. Cheapfakes use less sophisticated alterations of images, videos, or audio to create a false context surrounding an image or event.
Deepfakes, meanwhile, employ the use of artificial intelligence to create falsified reports, videos, or soundbites. An influence operation may use deepfakes to depict an inauthentic situation by synthetically recreating an individual’s face, body, voice, and physical gestures.
Other methods by disinformation actors include flooding the information space, the sharing of memes, the seeding of distortions in the hour’s surrounding events, and creating geographic segmentations where location-based audiences are targeted strategically.
Disinformation actors create conflict between subgroups, twist the narrative and take information, or artifacts like images, and change the framing around them.
What’s more, capitalizing on social media algorithms, some of these contents are only there to earn from anticipated traffic.
In the age of social media algorithms, especially the ones that create echo chambers, memes have become a potent language in the spread of any message. Memes come from a concept coined by Richard Dawkins where a “self-replicating unit of culture” pulls together reference and commentary, image and narrative, emotion and message. That said, memes are a powerful tool and the “heart” of modern influence campaigns, the DISARM Foundation said.
On YouTube, Future PH created a content that supposedly outlined the processes needed for Mindanao to separate from the Philippines. The content was narrated by a robotic voice.
The DIAL monitoring dashboard found out that the script for the Future PH was created easily with AI. A similar script can be generated on Gemini and ChatGPT when “legal and economic impact of the secession of Mindanao from the Philippines” is used as a prompt input.
In the examples for the Mindanao independence narrative, the DIAL database identifies some of the narrations whose scripts were likely generated by AI.
As of May 4, the post has received at least 767 views.
Another post by TikTok user @bradbuybradbuy used a flag of the defunct ARMM and a likely AI-generated image to pose a question “gusto neyo ba mag hewalay Mindanao sa Philippines (sic).” The post received at least 15.8K views. It had been removed from the platform, but we were able to archive an April 4 version.
TikTok User @paglinawanestenzo4 also posted a TikTok video that posed the question “What if Mindanao become [sic] a country?” The video incorporates a flipped version of the flag of the defunct ARMM. Most of the 2,000 comments favored the separation of Mindanao from the Philippines.
As of May 4, the post had gathered at least 613.2K views on TikTok, with 2,237 comments.
Those were done through cheapfaking content. Cheapfakes are also defined as the ability to create content through various means, such as AI and free editing software.
Aside from the memes, however, there were also attempts to draw support for Duterte’s call for an independent Mindanao using traditional media. For instance, a group calling itself the Mindanao Independence Movement proposed the establishment of a Federal Republic of Mindanao with the former President as interim head of state.
Lawyer Emmanuel Fontanilla, the supposed convenor of the group, said they will pursue the independence of Mindanao peacefully using the Kosovo model, hold rallies declaring the island’s independence, and seek recognition from Russia, China or Turkey.
Nothing has been heard of the group afterwards, as Duterte’s call fizzled out even among his supporters.
Why this matters
The Moro people in Mindanao and Sulu had fought for an independent homeland, resisting attempts by Spain and the United States to subjugate them, and later, their inclusion as part of the Philippines. In the post-war era, it was the war of secession that began in the early years of martial law and waged by the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) led by Chairman Nur Misuari that posed the greatest threat to the central government. The Moro people’s desire for independence was triggered by social grievances, including loss of lands to Christian migrants from Luzon and the Visayas.
After a bloody military confrontation and tens of thousands of lives lost, both combatants and civilians, efforts were made to arrive at a peaceful resolution of the armed conflict, beginning with the 1976 Tripoli Agreement that was concluded with the 1996 Final Peace Agreement between the government and the MNLF under Misuari. In March 2014, the Philippine government and MILF, which broke away from the MNLF in the late 1970s, signed the Comprehensive Agreement on the Bangsamoro, that paved the way for the establishment of the BARMM and the abolition of the ARMM.
Both the MNLF and MILF fought for independence but eventually settled for autonomy. The two revolutionary organizations now have their own political parties and are preparing for the first election of the 80-member Bangsamoro Parliament in May 2025. The elected officials will take their oath on June 30, 2025, marking the end of the six-year transition government.
Duterte’s call for independence last January 30 when Mindanao had already closed a horrid chapter of its history through the peaceful resolution of the decades-long Moro struggle, the establishment of the BARMM in 2019 and the involvement of both the MILF and MNLF in governing the region, did not gain wide support despite apparent influence operations on social media to push for his call to separate Mindanao from the Philippines. (Yas D. Ocampo / MindaNews)
(This report 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.)