Fil-Am Group Launches TrollExposer Website

A group composed of people with dual citizenship – Filipino and American – is set to expose trolls who are at the forefront of widespread disinformation to influence the results of the May 9 elections.

On Monday, May 2, the US Filipinos for Good Governance (USFGG) launched TrollExposer.com, a website dedicated to exposing troll pages, accounts and groups on Facebook that are behind the spread of fake news and disinformation on social media.

The group said corrupt, powerful and wealthy politicians have financed mammoth troll armies to influence the results of the elections, “frequently with the help of the government and foreign state sponsors like China.”

“While the rampant disinformation favors him, presidential aspirant and dictator son Ferdinand Marcos Jr. continues to deny he has trolls and even challenged the public to find a single troll of his,” USFGG said in a statement.

The group obliged and has exposed a hundred Marcos trolls, who coordinated with each other through fake accounts in order to spread fake news against presidential candidate and Vice President Leni Robredo.

“Our country has become extremely polarized through vigorous troll activity. Trolls have found fertile ground to saturate the public with disinformation. These lies have been allowed to spread through Facebook for years,” said Eric Lachica, USFGG coordinator in Washington.

“Having the presidency decided based on lies that rewrite history and hide the fact that much of this troll activity is state-sponsored will be a tragedy. We hope it is not too late to detoxify the minds and hearts of our people,” Lachica said.

Liz Derr, founder of Troll Exposer, said fact checkers and efforts by social media platforms to limit disinformation have not been enough to stop the spread of fake news.

Derr said the Troll Exposer is a new weapon in the arsenal against disinformation.

“Rather than focusing on content, Troll Exposer publicly exposes social media accounts that are spreading this harmful disinformation so everyone can see who these liars are,” she said.

People are desperate to understand which news can be trusted, who to believe and what can be done to save our democracy from further division.

TrollExposer.com provides analysis of the troll networks and activities, and the direct links to the troll Facebook accounts so the public can explore the pages of the trolls themselves.

The group said people do not need to trust sources they might view as biased since they can literally do their own research to discover the activities of the trolls and find out if the content they view online is actually the result of a covert influence operation, rather than authentic narratives from real people.

“If we can’t get social media platforms to enforce their own community standards, then we need to act ourselves. It is the right of every person to defend themselves from being manipulated by false information,” said Loida Lewis, national chair of the USFGG.

“That’s the reason we turned to Troll Exposer. The spread of harmful disinformation, manipulated narratives and false propaganda needs to stop,” Lewis said.

“We’re calling on Mark Zuckerberg and Meta/Facebook to immediately take down these fake posts and disable the trolls identified in TrollExposer.com to reduce the disinformation on the platform in the run up of the elections,” Lewis added.

The group said that false narratives and propaganda that get spread by trolls on social media allow dictators and kleptocrats to weaken democracies around the world.

“We’ve seen how dangerous disinformation and conspiracies can be in the US. In the Philippines, the danger is great and the need for action is urgent,” the group said.

It said the vitriol and divisiveness created by these trolls is making a Jan. 6-type event in the Philippines more and more probable, regardless of the outcome of the elections.

“Meta/Facebook must act immediately to help protect our democracy by removing the lies that have divided us,” it said.