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Alan Robles

The Philippines is no stranger to politically weaponised memes and internet trolls. What has changed is the way information warfare is waged, now requiring nothing more than a smartphone and a well-crafted prompt.
Supporters of former president Rodrigo Duterte helped pioneer the industrialised use of social media to spread disinformation, rewarding loyalists and destroying opponents through the ruthless deployment of memes, viral videos, paid amplifiers and manufactured trending topics.
Analysts say generative AI tools are supercharging this online arena – handing ordinary social media users faster, more visually arresting ways to mock the powerful, while also allowing established propaganda networks to scale up content production at unprecedented speeds.
“What I see,” said Dominic Ligot, founder of advocacy group Data and AI Ethics PH, “is an ever-rising arms race to put out AI-generated content, which will further confuse and overwhelm the public.”
That dynamic exploded into view earlier this month. The target was Senator Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa, a fierce Duterte ally and the most recognisable enforcer of the former president’s bloody drug war.


Dela Rosa slipped into the Philippine Senate on the morning of May 11, pursued by government agents and wanted by the International Criminal Court. Within hours, he had cast the deciding vote in a chamber leadership coup that handed control to a Duterte ally – and then he simply stayed, as his allies declared him under “protective custody”.
Three days later, Senator Robin Padilla, a former action star who had once played heroes on screen, helped Dela Rosa slip out again. By nightfall, the memes had already begun.
Dela Rosa and Padilla were recast as “Batoman and Robin”, comic-book fugitives of the Philippine state. Their exit from the Senate was reimagined as an action-film trailer “The Great Escape: Senate Has Fallen”.
Meanwhile, Jonvic Remulla, the secretary of the interior and local government who had publicly boasted of mobilising 10,000 men to arrest Dela Rosa yet returned empty-handed, was rebranded as “JonWeak” in a poster nodding to the blockbuster Hollywood franchise John Wick.

Pehaps the most elaborate response was a series of one-minute videos recasting the whole affair as a Mission Impossible-style action series.
The AI-generated cutscenes were the work of a 30-year-old graphic designer and IT engineer who goes by “Chadherald”. He made them simply because Dela Rosa had become a trending topic, he told This Week in Asia.
“To be clear, I’m not pro-Duterte or part of any group,” he said. “I’m simply a storyteller.”
Working alone, Chadherald used ChatGPT to script the action and a suite of AI video tools including VEO 3, Seedance and Google Nano Banana to generate the visuals. Each clip took between three to five hours to make.
For analysts, such videos illustrate how AI is transforming political satire. Images and videos that once required professional designers, editors and production teams can now be created quickly by individuals with little more than a well-crafted prompt.
Software engineer Scott Chua warned that the real danger lies in “the speed with which images can be generated” and “the speed with which ‘trending content’ can be artificially seeded and then laundered via social media algorithms to become actual content”.
A meme made as satire by one person, in other words, can quickly be picked up, amplified and weaponised by networks with entirely different motivations.

Ligot has a name for the content this produces: “slopaganda” – a flood of AI-generated, attention-grabbing visuals that can quickly overwhelm the information space.
“The important shift is that in 2026, these images are no longer niche experiments; they are part of normal Philippine online political combat,” he said.
However, the variety of memes produced suggests a more diffuse field of combatants than the organised Duterte-aligned networks that shaped previous online political battles.
Jean Franco, a political-science professor at the University of the Philippines, said she did not find the memes surrounding the Senate events “inauthentic”, as they were “not uniform in terms of messaging, content and focus”.
Indeed, Rossine Fallorina, managing director of disinformation-focused Sigla Research Centre, said access to AI was likely to have “a complicated effect” on public discourse.
“On the one hand, it lowers the barrier to entry for people, and we’ve seen how it has allowed individuals to create high-engagement posts that they likely would not have been able to do pre-GenAI,” he said.
“On the other hand, the Duterte disinformation machine is harnessing AI as well – and they are doing so to an extent that far surpasses the individual user.”
Fallorina’s centre monitored last year’s Philippine midterm election and found the Duterte camp operating what amounted to AI content farms.
“Pro-Duterte accounts served as content farms dedicated to churning out AI songs and videos,” he said. “And AI disinformation was spread throughout their extensive network of paid amplifiers and genuine supporters.”

Dela Rosa himself had previously shared an AI-generated video of two supposed “students” claiming they opposed the impeachment of Vice-President Sara Duterte-Carpio, Ligot said – a small, telling example of how the technology can be turned to more straightforwardly manipulative ends.
The threat that AI poses was “not only fake content itself”, Ligot said, “but the erosion of trust, where people start treating everything as manipulated and stop believing genuine evidence”.
Fallorina, meanwhile, sees AI content as more of a “force multiplier”.
“Rather than totally upending the current information ecosystem, it will likely reproduce the same inequalities,” he said. “While it does to some extent democratise public participation, it also supercharges existing disinformation networks.”


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The Philippines

AI ‘slopaganda’ and the battle for Philippine political reality

An AI-generated meme satirising Senator Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa’s escape from the Senate with Senator Robin Padilla. Photo: Instagram

AI-generated memes of key political figures in Philippine politics, including Senators Ronald dela Rosa and Robinhood Padilla. Photo: X

An AI-generated meme satirising Senator Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa’s escape from the Philippine Senate with Senator Robin Padilla. Photo: Instagram

Philippine government secretary Jonvic Remulla was mocked as JonWeak in an AI-generated poster that referenced the action hero John Wick. Photo: X

An AI-generated meme circulating on social media of Philippine Senator Ronald dela Rosa and Senator Robinhood Padilla in “The Great Escape: Senate Has Fallen”. Photo: X

Ronald dela Rosa, a fugitive senator wanted by the International Criminal Court over his role in the Philippines’ deadly drug war, attends a Senate session in Manila on May 13. Photo: AFP

Gunfire, farce and fugitive Philippine Senator Bato dela Rosa

A protester holds a placard of Philippine Senator Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa during a rally calling for his arrest outside the Senate on Wednesday. Photo: EPA

Armed Swat team members board a vehicle en route to the Philippine Senate on Wednesday. Photo: Reuters

Philippine Senator Ronald dela Rosa stumbles on the stairs as he runs from law enforcement agents inside the Senate building in Manila on Monday, in this still image taken from a video of CCTV footage. Photo: Reuters

Philippines Senate President Alan Peter Cayetano gestures while talking to the media at the Senate on Thursday. Photo: EPA

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A Filipino call centre worker speaks to a member of the BPO Industry Employees’ Network on a break from a night shift. Photo: Handout

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Disinformation and AI-generated content drive growing partisan divide in the Philippines

A photo illustration taken in Hong Kong on June 20 shows a person holding two mobile phones with two viral AI-generated videos of students and an old woman voicing their opinions on the impeachment of Philippine Vice-President Sara Duterte. Days after the Philippine Senate declined to launch the impeachment trial of the country’s vice-president, two interviews with Filipinos arguing for and against the move went viral. Neither were real. Photo: AFP

Liza Araneta-Marcos (right), wife of Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jnr, during his proclamation at the House of Representatives in Quezon City on May 25, 2022. Photo: AFP

Former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte attends a Senate hearing on his administration’s drug war in Manila on October 28, 2024. Photo: AFP

People attend the election campaign rally of senatorial candidates under the party of former president Rodrigo Duterte in Manila on May 8, ahead of the Philippines midterm election. Photo: AFP

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Generative AI lets Filipinos mock the powerful with cinematic flair, but it’s also handing new tools to the country’s disinformation machine


Generative AI lets Filipinos mock the powerful with cinematic flair, but it’s also handing new tools to the country’s disinformation machine.


AI ‘slopaganda’ and the battle for Philippine political reality

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Generative AI lets Filipinos mock the powerful with cinematic flair, but it’s also handing new tools to the country’s disinformation machine

Generative AI lets Filipinos mock the powerful with cinematic flair, but it’s also handing new tools to the country’s disinformation machine