Trigger warning: Mention of rape, sexual harassment, violence.
MANILA – When Filipino women human rights defenders (HRDs) step forward to demand accountability, they are met with a new kind of violence. Technology is now weaponized to silence, shame, and intimidate.
“The more we speak, the more they target us,” Sheerah Escudero, sister of drug war victim Ephraim Escudero, told Bulatlat in Filipino. “Even the dead were not spared. They tell me, ‘How about the victims of drug addicts like your brother?’”
Before and during the confirmation of charges hearing of former President Rodrigo Duterte before the International Criminal Court (ICC), there were social media posts stating that Escudero’s brother deserved to die. Other posts made personal attacks, claiming that she was paid to present herself to the media.
A fabricated picture of Escudero and drug war mother Llore Pasco was posted by pro-Duterte vlogger Cathy Binag, flaunting expensive handbags at The Hague, together with Rise Up for Life and for Rights coordinator Rubilyn Litao. One News flagged the post, issuing an advisory that it is fake. Even if it is no longer available, Binag’s post reached more than 100,000 engagements.
Read: AI-assisted disinformation used vs drug war families
“Whoever experiences these kinds of threats and harassment fear for their welfare,” Escudero said. “If not for this kind of environment, I think many families would have surfaced to join our call for justice.”
She is not the sole victim of these online threats. Many women whose relatives were killed by the war on drugs experienced the same disturbing content about them and their loved ones.
“My husband Michael was not even included in the drug watchlist,” drug war widow Jane Lee said in Filipino. “But they keep on telling me that my husband was a drug addict and that he deserved to be extra-judicially killed.”
Dahlia Cuartero, mother of drug war victim Jesus Cuartero, explained, “They said I neglected my child. […] It was heavy on me. I raised my son properly even if we were poor.” Her son was also not part of the drug watchlist but he was killed while on a motorcycle.
The women HRDs said that the messages are repetitive, coming from user profiles whose accounts are locked, newly created, or propaganda personalities doing political content. The number increases whenever they accommodate media interviews.
Online threats and harassment are part of the broader pattern of technology-facilitated gender-based violence, which haunts women and young people in the country, based on a 2026 report by the Foundation for Media Alternatives (FMA). It also includes non-consensual sharing of intimate images, sextortion, and deepfakes, among others.
Beyond public attacks and fabricated narratives, Escudero said that the worst part is being confronted with sexual assault threats flooding her private inbox and posts related to her—an escalation that exposes how digital spaces are used to instill fear at the most personal level.
“Some incidents included manipulated videos, causing defamation, reputational harm, and public scrutiny,” the study noted. “Women and girls were often targeted with sexualized insults and gendered disinformation.”
FMA’s study found that online sexual harassment and public shaming occured in 37 percent of documented cases which involved humiliating messages, sexualized threats, and harassment campaigns.
Further victimized
The Duterte Panagutin Campaign Network documented “coordinated inauthentic behavior (CIB)” against the victims’ families, mocking grieving families, distorting their testimonies, bullying, and spreading lies that their stories are not real.
“This is exactly what the families of drug war victims have faced for years, a machinery of fake news, harassment, and organized online attacks meant to discredit them and protect those responsible,” the network said in a statement. “These tactics are meant to intimidate survivors, discourage witnesses, and bury the truth.”
Series of posts attacking France Castro
Even women progressive lawmakers were also not spared from the attacks. Former ACT Teachers Party-list Rep. France Castro said that she received online threats, including rape threats. “In social media, I received violent threats and some messages threatening me: sana ma-rape kita.”
She helped rescue the indigenous Lumad students in Talaingod in 2018 from the violence of paramilitary elements. Despite this, the courts convicted her and the rest of the national solidarity team that joined her of “child abuse.” This conviction would later be exploited by disinformation networks to harass her.
Platform accountability
Escudero has been persistent in reporting the fake pages and accounts pretending to be her. As of this writing, there are two fake accounts using her name that uploaded disinformation and misleading posts. While many of her friends reported the accounts, including her, the pages remain operational. “We’ve taken a look and found that the profile doesn’t go against our Community Standards,” the Meta’s notification to Escudero stated.
Meta’s community standards have been flagged by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on human rights defenders Mary Lawlor in her report, stressing that it fails to recognize many types of online abuse going against their policies, especially when the harmful content is framed as part of freedom of expression.
The report also noted that HRDs received more abuse on Facebook than any other social media platform, followed by X and Instagram.
“In all regions of the world, HRDs, especially women and LGBTIQ+ defenders, are facing disinformation, smear campaigns, visual defamation, deepfakes, blackmail, threats, harassment, doxxing and impersonation, which are often ignored or inadequately addressed by platforms,” Lawlor wrote. “Such attacks are aimed at delegitimising, intimidating, discrediting and ridiculing the defenders and their work.”
Statista’s recent data states that Facebook has been the most used social media platform in the Philippines. In November 2024, it was also found that Filipinos spent the most amount of time on TikTok, followed by Youtube.
Series of posts attacking Sheerah Escudero
A quick search on TikTok shows that some of Escudero and Castro’s images were manipulated to attack and harass them. These cases reinforce the findings of Lawlor in her report that direct threats against human rights defenders involved the unauthorized use of defenders’ images. She noted that occasionally, the platforms remove or take down the offending profiles but such interventions are “rare and inconsistent.”
Gabriela Women’s Party (GWP) Rep. Sarah Elago has also been a subject of disinformation campaigns and technology-facilitated gender-based violence. She served as one of the resource speakers for the ASEAN Parliamentarian for Human Rights’ panel on digital realities and human rights in the region, focusing on technology-facilitated gender-based violence.
“Our technology is fast developing, but the mechanisms for accountability are not keeping up,” she told Bulatlat.
A transnational crime
GWP is pushing for the expansion of anti-violence against women. “Technology-facilitated gender-based violence is a transnational crime. This is not only happening in the Philippines,” Elago said. “It requires strong cooperation and collaboration from various organizations and governments to hold the big social media platforms accountable and demand them to exhaust all means to ensure that the internet and technology are not used to enable violence.”
Gabriela Women’s Party Rep. Sarah Elago as a resource speaker on ASEAN Parliamentarian for Human Rights’ panel on digital realities and human rights in the region. Photo by Sarah Elago/Facebook.
“Meta, X, and Youtube have all weakened privacy protections for users to allow for the training of their AI tools,” Lawlor’s report noted. “Meta has scaled back on third-party factchecking in favour of “community-based” or automated moderation, which raises concerns regarding the spread of misinformation. X and Youtube have also rolled back election-misinformation policies.”
It is not the first time that these social media platforms have been flagged for its failure to uphold due diligence under the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights.
In 2024, Amnesty International found that Meta failed to enforce its community guidelines to remove red-tagging content that targets young human rights defenders. According to the report, online attacks often lead to physical harm and worse, state violence.
Read: Online red-tagging leads to threats, state violence – report
Exacerbating biases
In an interview with Bulatlat, IT professional Kim Cantillas said that generative artificial intelligence (AI) exacerbates the spread of disinformation in the online media due to its accessibility and the absence of regulation. “Anyone can generate deepfakes and false information which often targets certain groups of people.”
Cantillas said that since social media is profiting through the data it gathered from its users, with or without consent.
“Digital platforms abstract the participation of users. It is relatively easier to commit violence towards a certain people if you are seeing them as a mere user profile. You see them not as a real person. You don’t feel any hesitation to commit violence because you are facing the screen,” Cantillas said. “Definitely, it is hand-in-hand in real-life violence.”
Countering lies
“If we stop speaking up, we are letting them win. Of course, I worry about my safety. But I won’t let them break me. I’ll keep standing up,” Escudero said. “If something happens to me, if the online threats translate to physical harm they’re telling what they do, it reflects on them.”
“Duterte’s conviction won’t bring back our loved ones and pain will still be there but I am also hoping that having justice will help us heal,” Escudero said.
She stressed that her primary source of strength is her immediate community, including the drug war mothers, orphans, and fellow human rights defenders who continue to search for justice for their loved ones. “If fear is contagious and so is courage,” she said.
Read: Collective action of drug war families marks Duterte’s first year in ICC
“We are prepared for anything. We already lost everything, our loved ones were dead. We will continue to stand together and fight for their memory,” Lee said. Her husband, Michael Lee, was killed vigilante-style in 2017. He was a jeepney driver and a musician, and he was not involved in the illegal drug trade. Last March 20 was Michael’s ninth death anniversary.
Left to right: France Castro, Satur Ocampo, Angelika Moral. Photo by Dominic Gutoman/Bulatlat.
Castro, who is also currently appealing the Court of Appeals decision that reaffirmed her conviction, said that the attacks will not deter her work on human rights.
“The continuing struggle of the Lumad for their ancestral lands and self determination is a source of strength,” Castro said in Filipino, “I will not hesitate to help them again if the circumstances call for it.”
The United Nations Declaration on Human Rights Defenders was adopted by consensus of state-parties in 1998. However, there is still no law that protects human rights defenders in the Philippines, despite numerous findings that the Philippines is a dangerous place for human rights defenders. There are currently five pending bills in Congress. (DAA)
The post Women human rights defenders face rising tech-assisted violence appeared first on Bulatlat.
From Bulatlat via This RSS Feed.