Several Duterte fan pages on Facebook have announced how Vice President Leni Robredo has finally been caught and how they have found out the reason why she does not want the vote recount that former Senator and vice presidential candidate Bongbong Marcos wanted. They did it by sharing an article with this title – “Breaking: VP Leni nilaglag ni Andres Bautista tungkol sa Comelec hacking.”
The article was picked up by blogs du30worldwide.com and pinoyspeak.info, which was noted in our list of fake news and satire sites. It was then shared by Facebook pages devoted to Duterte, such as “President Duterte Supporters Worldwide,” “Duterte Parallel Organization – Tagumpay ng Pagbabago,” “Byaheng Duterte,” and more.
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But when we clicked on the content published by blogs like du30worldwide.com and du30info.com, we found a YouTube video that is 12 minutes and 31 seconds long. It contains a news report Comelec chairman Andres Bautista being interviewed by CNN’s Pinky Webb about the case filed against him by the National Privacy Commission (NPC) over “Comeleak.”
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Bautista reasoned how the case should not be filed against him as the Comelec chairman, asking that if the Supreme Court suffers from a data breach, should a case be filed against Supreme Court Chief Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno then? He also cited how a company Chief Information Officer (CIO) resigned after a data breach instead of the Chief Executive Officer (CEO).
Asked what his plan to fight the NPC’s decision, Bautista said that he’ll be filing a motion for reconsideration with the help of the Office of the Solicitor General (OSG).
Webb also asked him whether the case against him can be filed in a regular court or will he have to be impeached first, but Bautista said that there is still a “gray area” where the process in dealing with his charges is concerned. He added that he’s not attached, kapit-tuko, to his position, emphasizing that the Comelec cannot be accused of negligence in the wake of the hacking, knowing that cases of data breach happens all over the world. Bautista also said that so far, no registered voter has complained regarding the hacking.
There is another video in the over 12-minute clip, which was about former Senator Bongbong Marcos’ letter to Bautista, copies of which were also given to the other Comelec commissioners, and the law department. The letter, dated May 10, asked for the Comelec to shed light on the reports regarding the introduction of the special character ñ to the server.
In November last year, the Manila Prosecutor’s Office, however, cleared the Comelec personnel and Smartmatic over the cybercrime charges filed against them by Marcos for insufficiency of evidence.
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Throughout the 12-minute video, Bautista did not mention Vice President Robredo even once, which is why we immediately knew that this is yet another case of misleading title duping readers. We have busted several articles using the wrong, irrelevant title to a content before, yet many readers still get fooled by this trick because they did not read the entire text or watch the entire video.
If you don’t want to be misinformed and spread misinformation in the process, please take the time to read or watch the content of the things you find online. Don’t just take one look at the misleading and don’t react as though you actually understood the whole thing. This is exactly the habit that fake news sites are counting on to help spread their wrong information!
Sources: (philstar.com, gmanetwork.com)
Be Informed. Beat the Trolls, Share the Truth!
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