Hate Speech Campaigns in the 2016 Philippine Elections on Facebook

Abstract

The paper presents a comprehensive analysis of hate speech and trolling campaigns on Facebook during the 2016 national elections in the Philippines. Employing a vast dataset of hundreds of millions of Facebook comments, we uncover the first empirical evidence of coordinated online hate speech campaigns in this political context. Our findings reveal that over 12% of comments on political pages contained hate speech, predominantly originating from supporters of then-candidate Rodrigo Duterte and his affiliates. We further examine the relationship between offline political events and online hate speech, finding a surge in hateful commenting following the launch of Duterte’s campaign, though similar spikes were not observed after some of his later controversial remarks. Alarmingly, we observe a “spillover effect”: regular social media users, after exposure to orchestrated hate speech by highly active “troll” accounts, began emulating these behaviors. This contagion effect highlights a worrying trend in which hate speech normalizes and spreads within online communities. Overall, our results shed light on the dynamics of digital political campaigns and their implications for democracy and public discourse. Given Facebook’s ubiquity in the Philippines, these findings raise significant concerns about social media’s influence on electoral politics and the health of online civic dialogue.