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The Philippine government has said that the country's communist
insurgency will be defeated by mid-2019. However, Mark Wilson shows
that the insurgency is thriving in cyberspace, using multiple
social media platforms to carry out recruitment campaigns and to
spread its ideology.
Key Points
Open-source research reveals an online network of Philippine
communist insurgents who use social media to disseminate their
propaganda and recruit new members.
Jane's classifies this online network in two broad categories:
local militant commands and politically focused organisations.
The militants will likely remain active on the mainstream
social media platforms of Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter as they
face little in the way of online crackdowns.
On 31 October, Philippine Secretary of National Defence Delfin
Lorenzana announced that the military was on track to defeat
communist militants who have waged a five-decade insurgency against
the government. He said that in 2018 alone, 907 rebels had
voluntarily surrendered, 1,238 rebel firearms had been seized, and
210 barangays (local government districts) had been cleared of
communist influence.
The insurgency is led by the New People's Army (NPA), the armed
wing of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP). In July 2016,
President Rodrigo Duterte declared a unilateral ceasefire with the
communists in an attempt to forge peace. However, those efforts
fell apart, with the government claiming that the NPA was still
carrying out attacks while negotiating for peace. On 23 November
2017, Duterte terminated the talks and declared that the CPP and
NPA were "terrorist" organisations.
Nevertheless, although the government is focusing on the ground
war, Jane's research shows how the NPA and the CPP have cultivated
a strong online presence across the social media platforms of
Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube. This presence is
reinforced through retweets, mentions, and hashtags that link
NPAcommands with official CPP media outlets, as well as the
National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP), an umbrella
leftist organisation that has conducted peace talks on behalf of
the NPA-CPP.
NPA Commands
Jane's has classified the insurgency's online activity into two
categories: the NPA commands that claim attacks, drive recruitment
campaigns, post photographs of life in militant camps, and promote
Maoist ideology; and CPP and NDFP activities, which play a more
strategic role in offering guidance to NPA militants, defending the
militants from criticism, and boosting the fighters' morale. These
posts also try to bolster NPA recruitment by exploiting political
and military developments on the ground.
Jane's has identified at least 19 NPA commands with an online
presence. Six of these commands limit themselves to the blogging
platforms Blogger and WordPress. The rest are more social-network
focused, using Facebook and Twitter as their media outlets.
The commands are located throughout the Philippines. Jane's
mapping of their online presence indicates that commands in certain
regions tend to gravitate towards the use of particular social
media platforms. For example, those on the southern islands of
Mindanao, Negros, and Palawan tend to use Facebook, while those in
the central regions of Bicol, Calabarzon, and Visayas favour
Blogger.
When claiming an attack, NPA commands post written statements,
but the NPA commands on Facebook and Twitter have adapted their
approach, creating stylised images with key details of an attack
that lend themselves to being easily shared on social media.
