First comes the wounded pride. And then,vengeance. That is the Duterte yardstick that their power has been threatened.
The Dutertes are fascist authoritarian leaders. When they respond to criticism with aggressive counterattacks, it is to protect their hold on power. Dissent is unwelcome because it may erode their image of absolute strength. They are infallible – that is their myth. Criticism is an existential threat.
The first order of vendetta is to invert the narrative: they are the true victims of malice. We saw that with our own eyes this week – Mans Carpio filing a case of cyber libel against the journalist Philip Lustre.
Lustre was not afforded the due process of filing a counter affidavit. The warrant for his arrest was served to an address not his own. Yet Judge Retrina Fuentes proceeded anyway under a presumption of normality. Lustre was totally clueless about the whole caper.
The most surprising part of Lustre’s arrest is not the assault on press freedom, but rather that it came from Davao City. It reminded us that the apparatus of Duterte fascism is still well oiled, and the judiciary there is extraneous to the Republic of the Philippines. The place of abnormal political culture did Lustre in.
That apparatus of oppression includes as well one of its most effective arsenals against critics: troll armies. It is an army because it responds to commands to attack. The 2025 attacks against senator Risa Hontiveros is a case in point.
Sometime 2024, the senator was at the forefront of Senate investigations on the controversial Duterte spiritual adviser and preacher Apollo Quiboloy. The issues were multiple: human trafficking, child molestation, sexual abuse, exploitation. A witness that Hontiveros presented was known by his alias “Rene.”
It was Rene who presented himself to the Senate staff of Hontiveros. His testimony was critical. He testified that he was sexually abused and exploited by members of the Quiboloy cult Kingdom of Jesus Christ.
And then in June 2025, a Michael Maurilio came forward to recant his testimony as Rene. He said Hontiveros paid him to lie under oath and to implicate Quiboloy, Rodrigo Duterte and Sara Duterte.
And this is where Maurilio and the Duterte troll armies fail due diligence with all their funding – cyber forensics. There is a science that can identify, collect, preserve, analyze and present digital evidence from electronic devices, networks and storage media to investigate cybercrimes.
When Maurilio’s recantation was being digitally multiplied, cyber forensics went into action. The Nerve was a “data forensics company that enables change makers to navigate real-world trends and issues through narrative and network investigations.”
His recantation was recorded on video and posted on a YouTube account with the handle Pagtanggol Valiente. However, the account was created on the same day it released the Maurilio video. A Facebook account likewise named had fewer than 100 friends. The profile picture it sported was uploaded on the same day it posted the Maurilio video. In short, these were contrived accounts.
Hontiveros intimated that just a few days before the recantation, Maurilio sent her office a distress signal that he needed help. Meaning, there was ongoing pressure against him.
The worse was yet to come. Hontiveros became the target of coordinated attacks.
Following the Maurilio video, “the Nerve scanned public Facebook posts mentioning Hontiveros shared between June 24 to July 2, 2025.”
First, the Nerve found that Maurilio’s claims were amplified by pro-Duterte accounts. That was only the beginning. Let the Nerve relate the story:
The Pagtanggol Valiente Facebook account posted Maurilio’s video past 3 pm on June 24. A few hours later, past 5 pm, the Facebook page Kuys Juan TV and the user Gi Pagurayan reuploaded Maurilio’s videos, boosting its reach.
Kuys Juan TV disguises itself as a news page, but has shared content promoting the Dutertes and their allies in the past. Pagurayan also frequently shared pro-Duterte content on their personal profile.
Then the copy-paste began. Past 6 pm, there was an initial wave of copy-paste posts.
Over the next few days, it was the turn to feed the posts on pro Duterte groups that promoted Rodrigo, Sara and Kitty Duterte. Some of these groups had thousands of followers. In other words, the digital behavior was coordinated.
By this time, the captions were threatening: Yari ka na Hontiveros! Lumabas na ang katotohanan! (You are done Hontiveros! The truth has come out!)
The Nerve relates:
At least 20 different posts containing the same caption and image dubbed Hontiveros “the legend of lies,” due to allegedly “fake evidence, fabricated witnesses, and scripted truth.” These posts earned a total of over 4,400 interactions on the platform.
And then the DDS troll bigwigs entered the picture.
Prominent pro-Duterte vloggers — including Alan Troy Sasot, Krizette Laureta Chu, Jay Sonza, and Joie Cruz — also jumped in and attacked Hontiveros on their respective pages. Some of these were ad hominem attacks that insulted her character or humiliated her, or misogynistic attacks that belittled or sexualized her.
When Hontiveros filed charges of cyber libel against Maurilio and the Pagtanggol Valiente accounts, Sasot and company decried it as “politically motivated to silence dissent.”
The onslaught was the same when DDS trolls attacked Hontiveros and created ths fiction that she had stolen Philhealth funds, later proven wrong by the Commission on Audit.
Why is Risa Hontiveros the pet peeve of DDS attackers? Because she is a fearless Duterte critic – even when face to face with Rodrigo in the Senate. Because she always has what it takes to be a critique – evidence. Sara Duterte fell with her confidential funds charades because of Hontiveros.
In this fight against the Dutertes that many of us are waging, we emulate Risa Hontiveros. She is made of steel against Duterte vengeance.
The views in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of VERA Files.
