Filipino Twitter Has A Dark Side, Too

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Social media brings the world to your doorstep. This is an age of easy access to everything, and unfortunately, this also means that society’s monsters are in closer proximity to normal life than ever.

Weeks ago, a Filipino Redditor posted about an extremely alarming issue in r/Philippines, the dedicated subreddit for the Filipino community. He had been browsing a thread in a separate international subreddit, in which users discussed how disturbingly easy it is to find child pornography on Twitter. To his horror, the Philippines figured into this thread, as users unearthed specific hashtags that aggregated illicit content involving Filipino children. Photos, videos, outbound links, and suggestive invitations from the underbelly of the sex trade in the Philippines are all just a search away, barefaced, on one of the largest and most popular social media platforms in the world.

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It really doesn’t take much to find this sort of content, which is why this is so alarming. Child pornography and other dubious and potentially exploitative content tend to get mixed up with the hashtags of the Alterverse—a loosely organized Filipino Twitter community of anonymous men and women who engage in sexual exhibitionism and participate in hookup culture. As a platform, Twitter is hospitable to subcultures like these, because its policies are more "maximalist" when it comes to free speech. But the Alterverse generally involves consenting adults, so while its content is explicit, it isn’t quite as decidedly objectionable.

The real problem arises on Twitter's fringes: hashtags can also lead users to some truly monstrous content, some hidden under innocuous hashtags, others appropriated from the Alterverse. An otherwise innocent hashtag like #kiddiemeal takes on a truly dark meaning when placed in certain contexts:

WARNING: DISTURBING CONTENT AHEAD

WARNING: This tweet contains nested links to child pornography, whose possession is illegal in most parts of the world.

In our own stomach-churning trip down this depraved rabbit hole, we’ve encountered several explicit photos of teenage boys and invitations to group chats labeled “14 to 17.” There were also links to webcam pages with labels that implied that the subjects were minors. But the most revolting Twitter content that we’ve seen with our own eyes are highly sexualized photos of a little boy, no older than 10, tweeted by an account that also posted dubious outbound links.

Twitter's nature makes it hard to police, and its own policies state: "Twitter allows some forms of graphic violence and/or adult content in Tweets marked as containing sensitive media."

There are limits, of course, and Twitter's policy warns that they may ask an account to take down a post if "it crosses the line into abuse towards a person, group, or protected category" and "if [Twitter] receive[s] a request" to take down a photo. Children and underage minors fall into a protected category, and sexual trafficking is clearly abuse. In other words, child pornography is clearly not allowed on the platform—but, based on what we've seen, it seems that pornographers and traffickers have easily circumvented these rules. The same things that make Twitter a safe haven for the Alterverse makes it difficult to police for criminal elements.

Lately, while the Twitterverse has complained about the speed with which fake Elon Musk accounts have been suspended, accusations that the platform has been slow to act on reports of "sensitive images," including child pornography, go as far back as 2012.

Policing social media has been a thorny topic for all the platforms, and depravity will find a way to infiltrate the most well-guarded corners of our existence. But that only serves to underscore the most disturbing fact of the matter: As long as you know the right hashtags, child pornography is apparently just a few clicks or taps away on Twitter—a universe we ourselves inhabit on a daily basis. Here, evil does not even bother to hide. It’s not just a dark corner of the web anymore—the Philippines’ child sexual exploitation crisis is right at your doorstep.

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These issues are encroaching ever closer to our everyday lives as social media becomes more and more prevalent, but sex trade and sexual exploitation have long been issues here in the Philippines. One might immediately recall the case of Peter Scully, the Australian child sex abuser who, with his Filipino accomplice Liezyl Margallo (who herself grew up a child prostitute), produced notoriously gruesome child pornography in the Philippines, including a video that reportedly involved the torture and rape of 18-month-old girl. Scully and Margallo were apprehended in 2015 after a global manhunt was ordered, and in a landmark victory, both were convicted and sentenced to life in June 2018 for their many unspeakable crimes.

But the problem still looms large. A 2017 study by the Center for Women’s Resources found that there were over 7,000 reported cases of rape in the Philippines in 2016; and that of over 52,000 rape cases recorded over the span of a decade, roughly 75 percent of victims were children. A separate study by the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) in 2013 estimated that most victims of rape cases in the Philippines are between 14 to 18 years old; while the Philippine National Police, for its part, reported a 48 percent increase in reported cases of child rape from 2008 to 2014. And if this data isn’t appalling enough, consider that these figures are only based on the reported cases of an underreported crime.

Meanwhile, the international non-government organization End Child Prostitution and Trafficking (ECPAT) estimates that in the Philippines, roughly 100,000 children are entered into prostitution each year. Findings from a prevalence study by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in 2016 also echoes the urgency: the Philippines “has been a top global source of child sexual abuse materials, also known as child pornography; and is now seeing more and more cases of live stream child sexual abuse.” UNICEF also estimates that one in five Filipino children suffers from sexual violence.

Poster from End Child Prostitution and Trafficking (ECPAT)

PHOTO: plan-international.org

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“Perfect storm tayo,” says Anthony Pangilinan, a media personality and board member of Called to Rescue, a non-profit that aims to save children from sex trafficking, violence and abuse. Speaking at an issue symposium by Plan International, Pangilinan cited poverty, our archipelagic geography, government corruption, high internet penetration, migration mentality, and widespread displacement as among the factors that have made our country a hotbed for these types of crimes. And as a young population (our median age is about 24 years old) with ludicrously high internet and social media usage, the Philippines remains especially at risk of internet-mediated sexual exploitation.

So the question, of course, becomes: What can we do to fight this? Speakers at Plan International’s symposium tackled the many fronts on which the battle is being fought, including legislation and systemic prevention.

“We have a lot of laws already,” said Atty. Stephanie Tan of the Children’s Legal Bureau, regarding ways to address the crime as it happens online. “The Anti-Cybercrime Law, [includes] the responsibility of Internet Service Providers and the website hosts to report incidents to the Cybercrime Prevention office. The government has the power to shut [content] down if they are found out. What we really need is the implementation.”

Dr. Elizabeth Protacio-De Castro of the Psychosocial Support and Children’s Rights Resource Center reiterates the call for regulation, both from the top and from the bottom. “We need telecom regulations and social media regulations coming from government,” she said. “But more than that, we have to regulate ourselves, regulate our children, and really be sensitive to what they’re doing on the internet.”

On our part as internet users at large, there are ways to rally behind the cause. Again, Twitter's official policy is against content that promotes child sexual exploitation, and it provides a means for you to report violations. But of course, mass-reporting and account suspension are only a band-aid solution. It must go hand-in-hand with law enforcement for real-life apprehension, and more importantly, systemic prevention efforts. Raising awareness of the issue is one such effort, to make sure that parents and kids alike know about the dangers of the internet and can take appropriate ground-up measures against them. That’s something we can all do on social media. “It’s just a tool,” Pangilinan says. “And if we have more people using this tool for good, then we can win this fight.”

If you encounter content that involves or fosters the commercial sexual exploitation of children, report to Plan International Philippines here, and/or Called to Rescue Philippines here.

Inter-agency Council Against Trafficking
Call: 1343 (in Manila); 02 1343 (outside Metro Manila)
Report online: www.1343actionline.ph
Email: [email protected]

Philippine National Police (PNP) Hotline Patrol, Anti-Cybercrime Group
Call: 911, (02) 722-0650
Text: 0917-847 5757

Philippine National Police, Anti-Cybercrime Group
Report online: angelnet.ph
Email: [email protected]

National Bureau of Investigation, Cybercrime Division
Call: (02) 523 8231 to38 (local 3454, 3455)
Email: [email protected]

Department of Justice, Office of Cybercrime
Call: (02) 523 0628, (02) 521 8345, (02) 524 2230
Email: [email protected]

Inter-agency Council Against Child Pornography
Report Online: http://www.iacacp.gov.ph/report-to-us-2/

Filipino Twitter Shows Our Children Being Sexualized and Sold