The Presidential Communications Office (PCO) is working with other government agencies to come up with an "operational system" to take down social media posts that spread fake news that aims to divide the Filipino people.

During the House Committee hearing on public order and safety, information and communications technology and public information, PCO Chief Secretary Jay Ruiz said the operational system will be created with the Department of Information and Communication Technology (DICT) and Department of Justice.

"There's no regulation, there's no punishment. So on the part of PCO, we're trying to come up with an operation, operational system. We're in the DICT, the Department of Justice, and PCO should come up together to take down all these posts we consider national security concerns and posts that divide Filipinos and spread fake news and also the fight against illegal online gambling on the internet," he said.

Ruiz said combating fake news is also important to properly communicate the West Philippine Sea issue to the Filipino people so that the Philippines will not again lose any part of the country like what happened in Sabah.

"About communicating the West Philippine Sea issue to our countrymen. I said, Never again, never again that the Philippines will lose any part of our country, just like what happened in Saba in the Sabah issue in the 1960s. If you look at it, Sabah was owned by the Royal Sultanate of Sulu for a long time," he said.

"But what did the Malaysians do to us? They pitted Filipinos against Filipinos. They supported a Muslim secessionist movement in the south, using religion and race or against each other. Filipino Christians, Filipino Muslims fighting each other. So eventually, because they divided us and eventually conquered part of our territory. We lost Sabah," he added.

Ruiz said the same thing is happening again in the West Philippine Sea where "foreign actors are using fake news (for Filipinos) to destroy each other".

The PCO chief noted that "the issue of fake news, illegal gambling, deep fakes, pornography, hate speech, is the biggest fight right now of our generation."

"It destroys the very fabric of our society, and we have to protect our children, not only from fake news, but all these bad things that we see in this technology platform we have but more on the bloggers. We should concentrate on regulations on the platforms," he said.

"The platforms like Meta, Tiktok, YouTube, are foreign platforms. They do not have a base here. When you complain about these posts that we can take down, it takes a long time. So we have to focus on the platforms," he added. Robina Asido/DMS