Memes expose Duterte's dismal pandemic response

In the first week of April 2021, as the Philippines had yet another lockdown due to the B1 variant of the novel coronavirus, a video of a motorcycle rider delivering rice porridge or lugaw went viral. A local official prevented the food delivery because, supposedly, “lugaw” was not “an essential” under current lockdown rules. Thus, sparked a plethora of memes with “#Lugaw is essential” hashtag and forced the government to clarify the issue. The incident was reported in local and international news agencies (Gotinga, 2021; Robles, 2021) to illustrate the Filipinos’ exasperation over a chaotic pandemic response and the flip-flops of the government's lockdown policies.

This review discusses some of the prominent memes during the pandemic in the Philippines to tease out (1) the dynamic interplay between government and citizenry (2) and to show the shift in the nature or theme of the meme, as a “political meme” under Duterte.

The memes chosen here were the ones that attempted to “drown out” Duterte's supporters and the troll machinery as reported by media (Tomacruz, 2020). A thorough study of these memes in their lexical and visual qualities is not possible for our purposes, and instead, the chosen memes are qualified for their subject matter or point of dissent, or to illustrate a shift in public perception. The intent is to make a case for further studies of memes given that it might have been the remaining expression of dissent while the citizenry could not avail of the usual avenues due to the pandemic.

Memes are participatory in nature and in their virality can serve as political tools (Calimbo, 2016 qtd. in De Leon & and Ballesteros-Lintao, 2021, p. 2). Moreno-Almeida suggests that memes as alternative forms of communication can play the role of criticizing power, especially in conditions where media or political actors cannot thoroughly address crucial issues for the citizenry (Moreno-Almeida, 2020, p. 1549). Indeed, under Duterte's authoritarian rule and chilling effect on media, this can ring true. Pulos (2020) points to the “crisis meme” as making social commentary about living under a crisis, and particularly, a “salient” part of the COVID-19 public discourse. There is, thus, a political meme and a crisis meme. Under Duterte, both are contained in one meme. The memes would be deployed to counter what Gideon Lasco calls, Duterte's “medical populism” (Lasco, 2020).

During the Philippines’ first lockdown in March 2020, the memes in the Philippines in terms of themes followed the track in the international scene. Essentially, their themes were similar to those in Pulos's study relaying in humorous ways the experience of lockdown, which in that study were: (1) social distancing crisis memes, (2) N95 respirator crisis memes, (3) stay at home crisis memes, and (4) COVID-19 vaccine crisis memes (Pulos, 2020). Notable was that the PNP (Philippine National Police) itself deployed memes to enforce lockdown rules, deploying South Korean K-drama stars to convince the populace to stay home.

Source: Reposted by the Philippine Daily Inquirer from the PNP Police Community Relations Group on its Facebook page (Gonzales, 2020). https://newsinfo.inquirer.net/1244538/look-pnp-uses-hyun-bin-memes-to-lure-public-to-stay-home#ixzz7CRidKWXE.

Consequently, the tag “pasaway” surfaced as a label (which has class undertones, by the way) for those who violated lockdown rules. It was the government that used this term as it began to frame its COVID response as a war against an “unseen enemy” and subsequently producing “oppositional archetypes” (Hapal, 2021). However, sentiment shifted drastically when Duterte gave a speech on April 1, 2020¹; he ordered police forces “to shoot them dead” with an eye to his critics.² Subsequently, memes with an #OustDuterte hashtag proliferated and Rappler reported in an analysis that it was indeed an organic movement that drowned out Duterte's troll machinery (Tomacruz, 2020).

Infographic on Rappler (Tomacruz, 2020). Of the top trending memes above, the following critique Duterte's pandemic response: No. 1 #OustDuterteNow; no. 3 “Bobo Ka Ba” translated as “Are you stupid?” was directed to the online Duterte troll machinery; no. 8 #BigasHindiRehas, translated literally as “Rice not grills” (grills or bars are commonly used to refer to prison bars) in response to residents from Quezon City arrested for demanding for government help and protesting without a permit; no. 10 SHOOT TO KILL refers to Duterte's orders to the police and military in his April 1 speech, to “shoot them [the protesters] dead.”

De Leon and Ballesteros-Lintao (2021) classify the themes of pro- and anti-Duterte prepandemic memes this way:

Thus, with #OustDuterte memes, the previous themes encapsulated by the “dilawan” label did not have much resonance for use by the troll machinery in a pandemic situation and they could only counter feebly and underwhelmingly with #StandWiththePresident,³ whereas the anti-Duterte demonstrated new boldness in the extreme #OustDuterte, which implied extraconstitutional means of Duterte's removal from office.

Lasco and Curato label authoritarian's response to the pandemic as “medical populism,” which consists of “simplifying the pandemic by downplaying its impacts or touting easy solutions or treatments, spectacularizing their responses to crisis, forging divisions between the ‘people’ and dangerous ‘others,’ and making medical knowledge claims to support the above” (Lasco, 2020). Most notably, Duterte has “othered” critics with the pasaway narrative employing the same house-to-house surveillance that he employed in his drug war against the poor. Countering this pasaway narrative and underlining its prejudicial use, other memes during the same period underlined direct violations of quarantine rules by the privileged that went unpunished.

The other prominent anti-Duterte memes include those that referred to perceived pro-Duterte senator Koko Pimentel Jr.'s quarantine violation, which was the result of leaked reports from a prominent hospital with hashtag #KokoResign and #KokoKulong (March 25, 2020), viral photo of the birthday bash of the then police chief Debold Sinas described only as a “mananita” (May 12, 2020) at the height of the strict lockdown, and Duterte's spokesperson Harry Roque's dolphin adventure getaway (July 2, 2020). On each viral meme, the government had to issue a counter-reply/clarification.

Class differences in pandemic response had a viral meme in Senator Cynthia Villar's statement that the “middle class don't need ayuda (aid) on June 9, 2020. By May 12, 2020, netizens were poking fun at the government's pandemic lockdown classifications with #ECQSeason4 quickly becoming one of the top Twitter trending topics in the Philippines shortly after Duterte's again late-night briefing.

One of the viral photos of Gen. Sinas's Birthday bash under strict lockdown rules. Reposted by ABS-CBN News from National Capital Region Police Information Office on Facebook (May 8, 2020) (Punzalan, 2020). https://news.abs-cbn.com/news/11/09/20/palace-says-maj-gen-sinas-is-new-pnp-chief.

One of the pictures that started the viral memes—Harry Roque with dolphins on his visit to Ocean Adventure. Roque was head of the Strategic Communications Task Group of the National Task Force COVID-19. Photos reposted by Rappler from Ocean Adventure on its social media account (Ranada, 2020). https://www.rappler.com/nation/roque-response-swim-with-dolphins-ocean-adventure-subic-bay.

The growing sense that the Duterte government had misplaced priorities and that he was out of touch and clueless during the pandemic came to the fore, especially when he urged the public “to clean (face) masks with petrol.” While issues of mental health circulate during the pandemic, the government came up with a spin that its Manila Bay beautification project of pouring crushed dolomite rocks to mimic white sand beaches elsewhere was a solution to mental health issues. Incredulous netizens posted #ManilaBayChallenge memes to juxtapose a viral photo of the underprivileged standing on the footbridge to line up to enter the said dolomite beach and mocked the “white beach” (September 31, 2020).

Source: As reposted by Cosmopolitan Philippines (2020): https://www.cosmo.ph/news/manila-bay-challenge-memes-a254-a704-20200921.

These memes were pointing to incompetence in governance. Other memes railed against surveillance/authoritarianism when the police were ordered to monitor social media to discover drinking sessions/quarantine violations.⁴ The viral memes forced the police to issue a clarification.

We can thus see how the political and the crisis meme converged in the Philippines during the pandemic, placing the government on a defensive. As a result, the fabled troll machinery of Duterte was disarmed, as other mainstream newspapers—aside from online news Rappler, media enemy of Duterte—reported on the same memes.

The pandemic memes became even more political when in November 2020, during a destructive Typhoon Ulysses, Duterte had a “melt-down” in one of his public addresses. Trending were the hashtags #DuterteMeltdown after said public address.

From then on, the memes exposed the cracks in the government's pandemic response:

The #Lugawisessential viral meme occurred on April 3, 2021. On April 11, 2021, the photo of Duterte playing golf generated the “Golf muna ako” meme as COVID cases began to spike during the second major lockdown, and as the president missed his public address twice, eliciting speculations on the state of his health (Malasig, 2021a, 2021b).⁵

Source: As reposted by Interaksyon PhilStar from Bong Go's Facebook page https://interaksyon.philstar.com/trends-spotlights/2021/04/12/189391/golf-muna-ako-dutertes-night-golfing-amid-spike-in-covid-19-cases-becomes-a-meme/.

On April 17, 2021, the community pantry, which is an initiative of Ana Patricia Non, not only went viral as a meme with hashtag #CommunityPantryPH but also caused other community pantries all over the country to sprout. With citizens pitching in, community pantries were a protest against the government's insufficient and not thoroughly thought of pandemic response. Non was subsequently tagged a communist, which is akin to being labeled a terrorist in the Philippines, in an attempt to belittle the impact of the initiative and deny the failure in the pandemic response⁶ (Gozum, 2021).

The memes effectively caught the government off guard, and indeed, starting early 2021 to later in September 2021, many news organizations both local and international and political personalities openly wrote or declared the Duterte government's pandemic response a failure.⁷

This review assumes that memes matter as they are participatory, and thus, can be relevant to political activism. For Nayma al Zidjaly, “memes incite change by provoking a shift in discourse, followed by a much larger shift in the collective consciousness and behavior.”⁸ For her, they are important in a “preaction phase.” I argued that given the conditions of lockdown, social media became the primary tool for communication and for criticizing a populist leader like Duterte, who also deployed social media and memes. This review suggests that there is potential for future study of memes and specifically, during the pandemic in the Philippines.