Sen. Richard Gordon. PRIB Photo
MANILA, Philippines — Sen. Richard Gordon on Sunday cried foul after being targeted by what he described as an online demolition job by proadministration social media pages in the wake of President Rodrigo Duterte’s repeated attacks against the chair of the Senate blue ribbon committee.
The senator said the sudden flurry of “fake news and fake clickbait headlines” against him were designed to muddle and deflect the national attention from the corruption issues plaguing the Duterte administration, including the scandal involving Pharmally Pharmaceutical Corp. and former presidential economic adviser Michael Yang.
“Some unscrupulous people and groups are really out to discredit and demolish us,” Gordon said in a statement.
“These kinds of online stories will continue to bombard us as the election campaign will be highly partisan and will rely heavily on social media for information,” he added.
Gordon’s committee has angered Mr. Duterte for its long-running inquiry into alleged irregularities in the government’s spending of pandemic response funds, including the P42 billion transferred by the Department of Health to the Procurement Service of the Department of Budget and Management to buy medical supplies.
Damaging testimonies
The lion’s share of the funds eventually went to procurement contracts bagged by Pharmally, whose executives pointed to Yang as a guarantor and lender to their company. Despite its starting capital of only P625,000 in 2019, Pharmally bagged P11.5 billion in medical supply deals in 2020 and 2021.
The Senate committee also extracted damaging testimonies that Pharmally “swindled” the government by supplying substandard items with bogus production dates and made advance deliveries to warehouses even before getting awarded the contract.
Gordon said he was now the target of “disinformation and patently false stories masquerading as news.”
He cited proadministration social media accounts on Facebook and YouTube where Gordon was falsely reported to have “folded and apologized to the President.”
Another fake report said the Philippine Red Cross, which Gordon chairs, has turned its blood donation program into a “moneymaking business” to discourage people from donating blood, according to the senator.
Some of the social media accounts flagged by local fact-checking organizations included Trending Viral TH2, PH Breaking News, Inday Sara Para sa Masa, Unofficial Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa Solid Supporters and Eagle Eyes of the Philippines citizen-report.
“We are seriously investigating the barrage of disinformation, fake news, and patently false or rehashed stories being spread online to attack us, especially those among pro-administration pages,” he said.
“This includes clickbait headlines that deliberately and unscrupulously poison our minds with misleading and inaccurate information in order to muddle and deflect our attention from the corruption issues under this administration,” Gordon added.