By Nikko A. Balbedina III & Cristina Chi
PressOne.PH & Philstar.com
Pro-Duterte Facebook networks have unleashed a smear campaign against a Roman Catholic priest, weaponizing social media to discredit his long-standing advocacy for the victims of the bloody war on drugs.
While online harassment against Fr. Flaviano “Flavie” Villanueva has been documented since late 2024, the attacks grew more coordinated after he joined a group of complainants that filed a plunder charge against Vice President Sara Duterte in December, daughter of former president Rodrigo Duterte, in 2025.
Why it matters: Such attacks seek to drown out calls for justice while flooding the digital space with noise to obscure the reality of the drug war.
Left unchecked, this synchronized noise erodes public trust in institutions and replaces evidence-based discourse with orchestrated propaganda.
Why Fr. Flavie?: Villanueva has been a long-time critic of the war on drugs carried out by President Rodrigo Duterte, who was in power from 2016 to 2022 and detained at the International Criminal Court at the Hague since 2025 over charges of crimes against humanity. Villanueva has been consistently calling for accountability despite death threats and legal challenges, including sedition.
- In 2025, he was honored with the Ramon Magsaysay Award, Asia’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize, for his ministry for the poor and victims of injustice.
- Through his “Project Paghilom,” he facilitated the exhumation and dignified reburial of drug war victims while providing holistic support to their grieving families.
- During a Senate hearing, he candidly admitted to surviving past drug use to demonstrate that redemption is possible and to advocate for restorative justice.
- He is one of the lead complainants in a plunder case filed against the vice president regarding the alleged misuse of over ₱600 million in confidential funds.
The narratives: The attacks against Villanueva hinge on a two-pronged strategy designed to discredit both his past and his moral character.
- Smear accounts exploited his candid admission of past substance use to falsely label him a criminal or claim that he remains an active user.
- A second narrative targets his priestly identity by circulating claims that he had followed a social media page featuring sexually explicit content, in a bid to erode his credibility and moral authority.
Pro-Duterte accounts mount smear campaign vs priest who criticized drug war
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Repetitive, synchronized comments make Duterte-related content most engaged across all ICC Facebook posts
Eight of the top 10 most engaged ICC content were related to the former president.
What we found: The allegations against Villanueva appeared across Facebook, TikTok and YouTube from late December 2025 to January 2026.
- Those that amplified the claims — several using hyperpartisan or exaggerated language — included established pro-Duterte channels, low-reach hyperpartisan vloggers, self-claimed news pages, and personal accounts posting political content.
- 25 of 34 posts analyzed by Philstar.com and PressOne.PH — a tiny sample of the overall dataset — were flooded by comments that echoed and agreed with the allegations.
- Five of 34 posts used copypasta, the practice of widely and repeatedly copying and pasting across social media platforms and online forums.
- One post drew over 4,000 comments across six days. An analysis of 1,918 comments (nearly half of the total) show that activity spiked sharply on Jan. 4, when comments arrived at an average rate of 59 per hour — 1,414 comments in a single day.
- The sudden surge and drop of activity by Jan. 5, 6, 7 and 8, suggested coordinated engagement rather than sustained organic interest, especially as several accounts appeared to have the same characteristics: locked from public view, with little personal details and Facebook friends numbering less than 500.
- At least one post showed evidence of AI manipulation: a Facebook reel posted by “Bagong Bukas PH” appeared to use deepfake or morphing technology to create a fabricated video of Villanueva holding a trophy that parodies the controversy.
Why it works: Past reports by Philstar.com and PressOne.PH and other studies on influence operations showed that campaigns rarely fabricated from nothing. They tended to amplify existing divisions or twist real information into fodder for smear campaigns.
- Villanueva’s testimony about his past drug use, a story he openly shares as part of his ministry to those recovering from substance abuse, gave operators something plausible to distort.
- Broadsheet Daily Tribune’s decision to publish on its website an opinion piece on the narrative as an “allegation” moved the claims from hyperpartisan spaces into a format that casual news readers might trust.
- This progression from fringe accounts to mainstream media is what researchers identify as one of the most effective amplification mechanisms in influence operations: once legitimate outlets pick up the story, the allegations gain credibility regardless of how they are labelled or how carefully they’re hedged.
Villanueva declined to directly address the coordinated campaign targeting him, saying he would not “give oxygen to disinformation” or engage with what he described as “troll-manufactured smears” as reacting would only amplify the content.
- Villanueva said he and his co-missionaries remained focused on their mission of “recreating and empowering lives” and “seeking to restore human dignity for those society has forgotten,” adding that their work centered on “justice, transparency, and service” speaks for itself.
The bottom line: The exhaustive effort to scour Villanueva’s digital footprint and the repetitive twisting of his previous statements reveal a systematic intent to discredit and silence high-profile government critics. Amid the deepening Marcos-Duterte rift and mounting legal pressures from the ICC trial, these coordinated smears will likely persist as a primary weapon to weaponize personal histories and derail the pursuit of accountability. (With reports from Leigh San Diego and Hurt Allauigan)
This report was made possible by an Internews project to build the capacity of news organizations in understanding disinformation and influence operations in the Philippines.
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