By Christopher Balagtas
Co-founder, Center for Information Resilience and Integrity Studies (CIRIS)
Part 1: How a Tragedy Becomes a Disinformation Field Test
The deaths of Rene Baterbonia and Divine Adili are tragic. Their families deserve answers, their friends deserve space to grieve, and the public deserves facts. What they do not deserve is to see this tragedy turned into content by trolls, partisan influencers, anonymous pages, or political actors chasing clicks, clout, or power.
Over the past weeks, a growing number of hyperpartisan vloggers, anonymous profiles, and suspicious pages have latched onto the case. Many have no evident connection to the victims, the school, or their communities, yet they push the story aggressively. Some have even inserted divisive narratives like “Mindanao versus Manila” into what should remain a fact driven search for truth and accountability.
When personalities, profiles, and pages that normally focus on unrelated political fights suddenly pivot to this case and post about little else, we should pay attention. When their language, timing, and targets start to look synchronized, we should be more concerned. One working hypothesis is uncomfortable but necessary: we may be watching a disinformation field test in real time.
Before soldiers are sent into battle, commanders conduct exercises to test equipment, communications, and tactics. They observe what works, identify weaknesses, and refine the playbook before larger operations. Information operations can work the same way. Malign actors do not always begin with elections, geopolitics, or the West Philippine Sea. Sometimes, they look for a story emotional enough to guarantee engagement but local enough to avoid sustained scrutiny.
They then watch what individuals and networks do with that story. Which posts travel, and which die quietly? Which personalities gain the most views, followers, or donations? Which messages trigger anger, fear, or distrust? How quickly can a narrative jump from one community to another? How much coordination is needed to dominate feeds? Who will push the harshest claim, and who will retreat when challenged?
In this phase, the primary goal is often not to persuade people of one specific claim. The goal is data: testing tactics, techniques, and procedures, mapping vulnerabilities, and measuring how resilient or fragile an information ecosystem is. For operators, every post, comment, share, deletion, and backlash becomes feedback. The tragedy becomes an instrument panel.
The DISARM Framework, a global model used to study manipulation campaigns, describes this kind of behavior as “Trial Content.” Operators seed content, monitor performance, adjust messaging, and learn what works before applying those lessons to bigger campaigns. A nonpolitical or local controversy can be perfect because fewer institutions are watching closely in the first hours.
That is why the sudden interest of some influencers and political pages in Rene and Divine’s deaths matters. The issue is not that citizens are grieving or demanding answers. They should. The issue is when actors with established partisan audiences appear to treat grief as raw material, converting pain into outrage, outrage into traffic, and traffic into influence.
This tactic is not new. In 2014, a sophisticated hoax falsely claimed that a chemical plant in Louisiana had exploded. The campaign reportedly used bots, doctored screenshots, cloned news sites, and fake text alerts to simulate panic and test whether online manipulation could generate real world fear. In 2015, Russian linked actors reportedly pushed a fake story about contaminated Thanksgiving turkeys, another rehearsal before larger election operations.
East Asia offers another warning. During Typhoon Jebi in Japan, false and misleading claims about stranded Taiwanese travelers were weaponized to portray Chinese officials as competent and Taiwanese officials as negligent. The online pressure became so intense that a Taiwanese diplomat later died by suicide. The lesson is painful: narratives can kill reputations, destroy trust, and deepen grief.
The Philippines should understand this danger better than most. It has been described in global debates as “patient zero” and a “petri dish” for digital disinformation, partly because of its highly online population and polarized politics. In 2020, Facebook removed a Chinese linked network later analyzed as Operation Naval Gazing. It mixed South China Sea content, pro-China and pro-Duterte messaging, and experiments with fake foreign personas.
Across these cases, the story changes, but the objective remains: find what works, measure reactions, improve the system, then redeploy the lessons when the stakes are higher. That is why personalities matter. They are not only megaphones. They are sensors. Their audiences reveal which frames resonate, which emotions escalate, and which claims can survive correction or moderation.
An influencer with loyal followers can test outrage quickly. A small anonymous page can try more extreme accusations. A troll cluster can probe the limits of harassment. Together, they help build a bench of repeat amplifiers. If that bench learns how to weaponize a campus tragedy today, it can be mobilized tomorrow around elections, national security crises, or the West Philippine Sea.
The infrastructure remains. Only the topic changes. That is why we must look closer now, together.
Part 2: Spotting the Test Before It Becomes the Next Campaign
If Part 1 argued that the deaths of Rene and Divine risk becoming a disinformation field test, this second part asks a practical question: how do we spot the testing without silencing grief or legitimate demands for justice?
The answer lies not only in what posts say, but in how personalities, profiles, pages, and actors behave when an issue becomes emotionally charged. Disinformation analysis must look beyond the single false claim. It must study patterns of convergence, timing, repetition, amplification, and profit.
No single sign proves a campaign is coordinated. But a cluster of signals should make citizens, journalists, platforms, and institutions look more closely. First is sudden convergence: multiple hyperpartisan or anonymous accounts with no prior link to the campus or community begin posting intensively within a short window.
Second is abrupt pivoting. Personalities, profiles, and pages that normally focus on unrelated politics or partisan fights suddenly rebrand their feeds around the case, often posting about little else for days. Third are coordination clues: near identical captions, hashtags, images, or talking points appearing across accounts within minutes or hours.
Fourth is narrative hijacking. The story is repeatedly pulled away from facts, due process, and care for families, then reframed as region versus region, elite versus people, or proof of a sweeping conspiracy. Fifth are engagement anomalies: obscure accounts suddenly generate unusual shares, reactions, or comments after being boosted by partisan pages.
Sixth is content recycling. The same actors later reuse the tone, memes, emotional hooks, and harassment tactics tested here on elections, national security scares, or West Philippine Sea incidents. These patterns do not automatically prove foreign control. They do show that the public conversation may no longer be purely organic.
This is where the role of influencers becomes complicated. Not everyone speaking about Rene and Divine is malicious. Many are sincerely angry and want answers. But sincere outrage and strategic manipulation often use the same emotional language. That is why public figures need clearer ethical lines when covering tragedies.
The first line is verification. Are they sharing checked facts, official timelines, and responsible questions, or unverified screenshots, anonymous allegations, and names that can never be fully repaired once smeared? The second line is accountability. Are they demanding institutional answers, or encouraging dogpiling, doxxing, threats, and personal ruin?
The third line is transparency. Are they open about affiliations, funding, or coordination with other pages, or are they part of hidden cross promotion chains that make manipulation look like spontaneous public anger? When personalities ignore these lines, they become useful conduits, whether or not they intend to be.
At CIRIS, we frame protection of the information space around three pillars: Awareness, Resilience, and Motivation. Awareness means recognizing behavior, not only content. Citizens can ask: why is this personality or page suddenly invested? Why are unrelated profiles, pages, and personalities using the same words? Why is a call for justice being turned into a campaign of hatred?
Resilience means building systems that slow manipulation before it becomes consensus. Platforms should detect coordinated amplification around local tragedies, not only elections. Schools, campuses, and local institutions should issue timely factual updates, correct rumors quickly, and keep communication human. Silence creates gaps. Gaps are where manipulators insert themselves.
Motivation means giving people safe ways to act. Citizens can pause before sharing, refuse to amplify speculation, report impersonation or harassment, and support credible journalism. Influencers can label unverified information, correct earlier posts, reject harassment by their followers, and stop treating every grief filled case as a chance to grow reach.
This response must never become an excuse to silence anger. Grief is not disinformation. Demanding justice is not manipulation. Communities have every right to ask what happened, who failed, and how institutions will respond. The danger begins when organized actors exploit those emotions as raw material for influence operations.
The deaths of Rene and Divine should lead us toward truth, accountability, and care for those left behind. Instead, some actors may be trying to test how grief becomes anger, how anger becomes traffic, and how traffic becomes influence. That influence can later be redirected during elections, crises, or moments of communal fear.
If we miss the pattern now, we may wake up to a future where our feeds, emotions, and sense of reality have already been mapped by people who see Filipinos not as citizens, but as data points in someone else’s operation. The answer is not paranoia. The answer is disciplined civic vigilance.
We can care about Rene and Divine while refusing to let their deaths become training material. We can demand answers while rejecting rumors. We can hold institutions accountable while denying manipulators the chaos they seek. Awareness, resilience, and motivation are not abstract slogans. They are how a society protects grief from being weaponized, and truth from being outpaced by outrage during the next test we face. CIRIS
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