Redeeming social media

SOCIAL media has received a lot of bad press, particularly given impetus by communication scholars who capitalized on the hypothesis that political extremism has been largely fueled by fake news on social media. In the run-up to the 2022 presidential elections, the popular narrative espoused by mainstream media, which drew a lot of oxygen from studies conducted by allegedly independent fact-checkers and purportedly unbiased academics, was that fakery and disinformation propelled the rise of President Rodrigo Duterte.