The Campaign

The Fakeblok Chrome plug-in is a desktop-based way to report and vet fake news sites that people see and share on Facebook, the country’s biggest social network. The website takes submissions to be vetted by journalists, and potentially added to the Fakeblok master list of fake news sites. The constantly-updated list then feeds into the Chrome plug-in, which blocks fake news posts on desktop users’ newsfeeds with a stop-and-think message from the NUJP.

Creative Execution

Fakeblok was made available on the Chrome Store in early 2017. The NUJP then launched Fakeblok with one post on Facebook – which became the most-shared post in the union’s history. And while the tool was initially intended for the use of journalists, it resonated with the Filipino public.

Results

Filipinos started talking about fake news online. Citizens, journalists, and government officials started promoting Fakeblok on Facebook – including Mocha Uson, the NUJP’s leading critic, who has 5,200,000+ followers on Facebook. The powerful Catholic Church got involved, coming out strongly in support of the campaign against fake news, to the country’s 76,000,000+ Catholics. There have been 5,636 site visits. Users have reported 409 fake news sites. 13,368 articles have been flagged. And 8,822,880 people have been prevented from seeing fake news. We continue to look for ways to expand the reach and coverage of Fakeblok for the benefit of journalists, citizens, and the Philippines. So far, with zero media spend, Fakeblok has already been able to rally millions of Filipinos around the truth. ?

The whole world is trying to contain fake news, with solutions that range from fact-checking websites to jail time. But these measures come after the fact. Fake news is already out there, being shared. Fakeblok’s approach is to break the fake news cycle. The National Union of Journalists of the Philippines believes that when people stop sharing, they reduce the credibility of fake news – because their friends and followers don’t see it. That’s why the media that Fakeblok uses matters. It uses fake news posts to send a message against fake news, and stop it from spreading.

The National Union of Journalists of the Philippines believes that when people stop sharing fake news, they reduce its credibility – because their names aren’t attached to it, and their friends and followers don’t see it. But first, the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines needed to go where people were getting their fake news. They found that 92% of Filipinos who get their news from Facebook, and spend an average of 5.2 hours a day on desktop computers. They recognized that Google Chrome is the country’s most widely-used browser. And they used fake news posts to turn the very medium of fake against itself, and stop it from spreading.