CONSTRUCTION OF DRUGS IN SOCIAL MEDIA: REVISITING THE ‘TECHNOLOGICAL PERFORMANCE OF POPULISM’ IN RODRIGO DUTERTE’S EARLY PRESIDENCY IN THE PHILIPPINES
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.14456/acsr.2024.15Keywords:
Drugs, Rodrigo Duterte, Penal Populism, Social Media, InfluencersAbstract
It has been two years since Rodrigo Duterte’s tenure as president of the Philippines ended. His presidency, however, left an indelible mark in the country’s political history especially his violent war on drugs. This paper revisits his campaign and early presidency, joining the conversations that present the 2016 elections as the first social media election in the Philippines premised on changing the landscape of political communication not just in the Philippines but all over the world. By conducting an analysis of the posts of the Mocha Uson Blog (MUB), one of the many social media pages that supported Duterte, this paper presents the ways in which drugs and drug use had been constructed in social media. Analyzing posts from the late 2015 (the period when Duterte began figuring as a viable presidential candidate) to 2016 (the campaign period and his early presidency to December 2016 which marks the end of the first six months of his term and his promise of ridding the Philippines of illegal drugs), this article makes a case for the importance of looking at populist influencers in social media to further nuance our understanding of the interplay of technology and populist politics in the Philippines. Using Baldwin-Philippi’s notion of the technological performance of populism, the posts in MUB are seen to have remained consistent with Duterte’s rhetoric of constructing and securitizing drugs as a threat to Philippine society, a moral issue, and a pervasive and lingering problem for the Filipino people.
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