Those Facebook Pages Sharing Election Posts Weren't Run by Your Tito
PRC-linked accounts flooded timelines last election. They're still here, still posting, and their follower counts keep climbing.
Remember those Facebook pages that suddenly went hard on election content last cycle? The ones sharing memes about candidates, posting "news" with no bylines, running comment sections that felt weirdly coordinated? A lot of them weren't operated by enthusiastic volunteers or random political junkies. They were tied to networks linked to the People's Republic of China.
And here's the thing: most of them are still active. Still posting. Still growing their follower counts.
These pages didn't announce themselves as foreign influence operations. They looked local. They used Tagalog. They shared relatable content—celebrity gossip, feel-good stories, viral videos—to build audiences. Then, when election season hit, the posts shifted. Candidate endorsements. Attack content. Talking points that appeared across multiple pages within hours of each other.
Researchers flagged the coordination. Some pages got taken down. But enforcement was patchy, and many accounts survived. Today, they're back to posting entertainment content and lifestyle listicles, rebuilding trust and reach. The infrastructure is intact.
This isn't about whether you agreed with the politics they pushed. It's about who was pushing it and why. Foreign-linked pages don't care about our electoral outcomes the way voters do. They care about influence, about shaping how we see candidates, issues, and each other. They care about testing what works.
And what worked was blending in. These pages didn't look like propaganda. They looked like the dozens of other pages you already follow. That's the design. Build the audience during off-season. Activate it when it matters.
The problem isn't just that this happened. It's that the conditions haven't changed. Facebook's enforcement is reactive and inconsistent. There's no systematic transparency about who runs pages with large followings. The 2025 election cycle is already being prepped, and the playbook that worked before is still available.
Most people scrolling their feeds won't know they're seeing coordinated content. Why would they? The page has 200k followers. The post has thousands of likes. It shares the same memes your groupmates share. It feels organic because it's designed to.
Elections here are already messy enough without foreign networks running influence ops through our timelines. The pages are still live. The follower counts keep going up. And unless something changes in how platforms handle this, next election will look a lot like the last one.
