At least 62 aspirants vying for national and local positions have so far registered their social media accounts ahead of the 2025 May polls, the Commission on Elections (Comelec) said Monday.
“As of now, we received 62 registrations,” the poll body said during the ceremonial signing of pledge of support of technology companies to the 2025 National and Local Elections (NLE) and Bangsamoro Parliamentary elections.
The Comelec earlier issued a resolution mandating all candidates, party-lists, and their campaign teams to register their official social media accounts, pages, websites, podcasts, blogs, vlogs, and other online and internet-based campaign platforms until December 13 as part of their bid to regulate and prohibit the misuse of social media for next year’s elections.
The Task Force sa Katotohanan, Katapatan, at Katarungan (KKK) sa Halalan election task force will review the applications and will endorse the accounts for approval or denial to the Commission en banc. Approved registration will be published on the poll body’s official website and social media accounts.
On Monday, technology platforms Meta, Google, and TikTok signed a pledge of support for the Comelec for the conduct of the 2025 NLE and Bangsamoro Parliamentary elections.
Tiktok and Google, for their part, said they are prohibiting paid political advertisements on their platforms for the elections but Meta — parent company of Facebook and Instagram— said it is allowing such advertisements to promote transparency and provide equal opportunity to all candidates.
“We allow political advertisement on Facebook and Instagram for two things: we want to promote transparency and we want to [provide] equal opportunity for all,” said Meta Public Policy Manager Genixon David.
“We want to give voice to smaller parties. Paano ‘yung hindi kaya mag-promote on the ground? At least they can use Facebook, Instagram, and other Meta platforms. However, it doesn’t necessarily na wala kaming in place na integrity measures. We have comprehensive policies on social issues, elections and political ads. We have a disclaimer policy, authorization process. You can only do political ads if you are in the same country and the best thing is we have ads library,” he added.
David also said Meta is curbing troll accounts on their platforms by implementing several measures and partnering with various stakeholders. In the second quarter of 2024 alone, he said there were at least 1.2 billion fake accounts globally on their platforms.
“It’s important for us to partner with different stakeholders from the government and selected non-government organizations to report to us these fake accounts and investigate the troll accounts,” said David.
Apart from registering their accounts, the Comelec is likewise requiring all candidates and party-lists to issue disclosure for all election and campaign paraphernalia created using artificial intelligence.
—RF, GMA Integrated News
