Apparently misleading videos for weeks are welcome to live on Facebook now. Meta’s Board ruled that the company was right to leave a paid video that made the protest in Serbia look like it happened in Holland and sponsored Rodrigo Duterter, the then President of the Philippines. The user reposted it within days of Duterte’s March 2025 Extradition to the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Netherlands.
The original video received additional audio and subtitles, including “duterte” channels and a song Bayan ko – Accompanying many Filipinos in the 1980s were the martial law protests – performed in Tagalog. About 100,000 users look at the used video, besides “hundreds” of shares.
Default Meta programs flagged the video as potentially inappropriate and reduced its visibility to non-US users. However, despite additions to the fact-checking queue, the “high volume of posts” means it has never been updated. Checker-Checkers in the Philippines have checked similar viral videos and labeled them as fake. It only came to the attention of the Top Board after a different Facebook user reported this video and promoted it when the meta left the content up.
But the Oviely Board has now said it agrees with meta’s decision to leave the inaccurate community entirely. It simply notes that the meta should have given the video a “van” of high risk “because it contained digitally, a video with a high risk of deceiving the public during an important public event.” How something of that description ended up on Facebook is not very clear.
The Board of Supervisors also said that Meta should have posted a video of this type of fact-finding. Going forward, it recommends that Meta creates a line of truth that checks the truth about any content that is the same as what has been checked by facts in that market – and that the evaluation skills should have the most advanced tools that can quickly find viruses that get a virus. It also wants the meta to better explain its labels on the media used so that users understand the process.
Meta carefully stopped its fact-checking program in the US in January, opting instead for public notes. However, it is now looking to expand that program to other countries and ask the Board of Governors for advice on areas.
