Human Rights in Survival Mode: Rebuilding Trust and Supporting Digital Workers in the Philippines
This report by NYSEAN member Jonathan Corpus Ong, Jeremy Tintiangko, and Rossine Fallorina summarizes powerful research on the Philippines’ human rights sector in “survival mode” under Rodrigo Duterte’s violent regime. Historically known as the most active civil society in Asia, the Philippines human rights movement has faced an unprecedented crisis of legitimacy while burdened with the responsibility to advocate for the many victims of abuses. Drawing on interviews with human rights workers and their allies in journalism and the academe, this study captures diverse interpretations as to how human rights has become “broken,” “tarnished,” and “a bad word” within a short span of four years. It also describes sectoral, organizational, and generational conflicts in how seasoned veterans and younger activists have been strategizing differently in their efforts to win back public trust.
This study identifies the long- and short-term trade-offs behind organizational strategies of frontlining and speaking out on the human rights abuses of the Duterte regime versus more under-the-radar backchanneling work focused on service delivery and grassroots organization. Taking a strategic communication perspective and worker-centered approach, our study specifically places the voices of the communication and technology workers in the human rights sector at the heart of our analysis. What our research uncovers is that despite their many creative experiments to connect with diverse constituencies, human rights organizations have still failed to invest material resources in sustainable communication infrastructures and empower their communication personnel. Almost half of the organizations we interviewed still had no staff member dedicated to communication or branding; communication workers continued to play peripheral roles in their organizations.
As a contribution to the broader TaSC project “True Costs of Disinformation,” this study analyzes how digital disinformation, online trolling, and conspiracy theories have been added to state elites’ arsenal of “dirty tricks,” such as enforced disappearances, imprisonment, and censorship in a global South context with weak democratic institutions. Because of the violent and insecure political contexts in which they work, and the cultures of political patronage and everyday corruption they must navigate—heightened by intra-sectoral conflict and dependencies on foreign donors seeking to influence local politics—human rights organizations are traditionally vulnerable to conspiratorial accusations of foreign control, local oligarchic elite capture, or alliances with alternative power centers. Investment in strategic and creative communication that can address conspiracies across digital and mainstream media is therefore paramount, just as there should be deepened commitment to listening to local communities and rebuilding public trust.
Meant as a helpful audit of human rights organizations’ communication capacities, our analysis suggests that careful strategy and material investments should follow organizations’ decision-making between frontlining versus backchanneling in a repressive global South context. Calling out the state’s human rights abuses exposes an organization to new forms of targeted harassment and requires protecting the communication workers directly responding to troll attacks. Organizations avoiding publicity and seeking efficiency in their service delivery to grassroots communities still bear the brunt of reputational damage when the sector at large comes under attack.
