WE BELIEVE THE House of Representatives should fast track the bill that will regulate the operation of the various social media platforms in the country.
We all know that the various platforms are owned by foreigners and are headquartered in foreign land mostly the United States. While these platforms may have offices in the Philippines run by Filipinos, it is clear that their operations are sanctioned only by the government through their acquisition of business permits and are hardly paying taxes. In fact the Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR) has no qualms in admitting that it has a hard time collecting the appropriate taxes from the firms representing the social media platforms in the country.
While it is admitted that the social media allow coverage or reporting of incidents and activities on real time, it cannot also be denied that these days unscrupulous individuals and organizations are using the social media to further their personal or group interest. In fact social media has become the political battlegrounds starting in the May 2016 elections
Its many platforms are being used to launch disinformation and misinformation drives. And it has become the most effective purveyor of fake news intended to destroy one’s enemies or build up an individual or organizations.
So it is now time to pass a law that will require the social media establishments to acquire a franchise to operate in the Philippines so its many platforms can be regulated. The franchise should of course carry the many conditions that require to be adhered to by the applicant firms.
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One of the reasons given by many Filipinos now showing their support to former President Rodrigo Duterte now detained by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, Nertherlands is the former leader’s “love of country” that he has to cleanse the Philippines with addictive drugs merchants.
These supporters of the former President believe that twenty to thirty thousand who died as consequence of his war on drugs are a minuscule percentage to the millions of Filipinos saved from perdition with the huge decrease in the people peddling the mentally and physically destructive drugs.
Unfortunately for the former leader there are also those who believe that his bloody war on drugs was not the right approach as this had infringed the human rights of many. Those who abhorred Duterte’s way of dealing with the illegal drugs problem in the country also did not agree to the appropriateness of the claim of the drug war implementers that some of those who were killed are considered as collateral damage when such could have been avoided had the approached been thoroughly studied as to its effectiveness in curtailing the drug problem in the country.
It was a long and even dangerous journey for the insignificant few who worked to bring justice to those who died as collateral damage and to those who were killed even as they were still suspects – “they who were ‘sentenced’ without being given the chance to defend themselves in the courts,” according to a human rights advocate lawyer.
Of course we believe that perhaps the strongest defense that the former President can use for himself in his trial is that the loss of the lives of the relatively “few” victims of his drug war cannot be a “crime against humanity” when their deaths were meant to protect the multitude of Filipinos – some 115 million of them – the rightful number of people to be called humanity.
Again, if we may recall, the former Philippine leader had always said he takes “full responsibility” of the deaths of the thousands of victims of extra-judicial killing. He, for several times, even expressed that he is willing to die if only to exonerate those policemen who carried out his “war on drugs.”
We have no doubt the former President will make a refrain of the same pronouncements at the ICC trial. Perhaps, with his age, and with his desire to prove that he undertook his “war on drugs” during his term as Mayor of Davao City and then as President of the Philippines to “save the majority of Filipinos from the effects of illegal drugs” he may even goad the judges of the ICC to sentence him to death for his alleged crime against humanity.
Duterte will possibly present a comparison in percentage of the alleged victims ass not even a little finger to the more than 115 million Filipinos desiring to have a drug-free and peaceful Philippines.
And should such scenario in the trial happen, what will that make of the Davaoeno former President? What else but a Rizal incarnate, an execution re-live – and a hero he might have long desired to become.
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