“What if she’s really innocent?”
To online supporters of disgraced former Bamban mayor Alice Guo, the criminal accusations against their beloved leader are unbelievable.
After all, how could a simple, people-loving and pretty-looking public servant who ushered her small municipality into a progressive one commit such crimes, they said.
On TikTok, posts from fan accounts of Guo followed a curious pattern: identical captions and hashtags, similar video editing styles, uploaded within hours of each other, spreading the same messages. Guo, they claimed, was the best mayor Bamban ever had, yet she was the target of ruthless politicking.
Guo has every reason to feel angry, they said. She is being publicly shamed in the Congress and labeled as a Chinese spy, despite all she did for her constituents.
Detained in Pasig City jail, Guo is facing non-bailable qualified human trafficking charges, material misrepresentation, graft, 62 counts of money laundering, and three counts of falsification of deeds of sale documents, as of April 2025.
Viral narratives about her on TikTok, however, either omitted or questioned these charges. It turns out, there is more to the story than meets the eye.
A VERA Files investigation uncovered a network of 45 TikTok accounts that exhibited signs of a coordinated campaign from May to December 2024 to boost Guo’s reputation as a progressive leader and defend her innocence, amid the probe on her alleged links to illegal Philippine Offshore Gaming Operators (POGO) during this period.
The network inundated TikTok with playful and trendy edits of Guo’s videos and photos in Bamban, reposting each other’s content and mimicking the behavior of K-pop fans in stan culture. They focused on her looks, mannerisms or antics, all while she was being grilled by lawmakers. In others, they reacted to news about Guo, bolstered her reputation as an “approachable” mayor, and curated “evidence” of her innocence.
Most of the profiles appeared authentic, engaging with non-political content and posting selfies; but some carried foreign digital footprints typical of influence operations (IO).
IO are orchestrated efforts to spread information – such as disinformation, propaganda and other harmful content in different formats – by various actors like governments, private groups or foreign interests to coerce or manipulate behavior and polarize society.
Besides Guo, some of the accounts uploaded content idolizing other public figures like former president Rodrigo Duterte, his daughters Vice President Sara Duterte and Veronica “Kitty” Duterte (11), POGO-linked individuals Cassandra Ong and Shiela Guo (4) — even members of the Spanish royalty.
A closer inspection of 19 accounts also revealed links to two Facebook (FB) groups run by Guo’s followers, including those who are not from Bamban, Tarlac.
Gian Libot, a digital engagement specialist, said IO often uses multiple low-quality accounts (probably botted or bought) to reshare the same content, raising their visibility in the algorithm and creating an “artificial sense of widespread support.”
“Reposting per se is not inherently wrong, it’s a typical marketing technique, but it becomes problematic because of the deception that happens when they use inauthentic accounts,” said Libot, who has worked on information integrity programs for international organizations.
TikTok, a platform owned by the Beijing-based technology company ByteDance, defines covert IO as “coordinated, inauthentic behavior, where networks of accounts strategically work together to mislead people or […] influence public discussion.” This includes spreading the same narrative, using fake personas to pose as someone they’re not or attempting to shape public debate of social issues.
Cute, pretty, innocent mayor
The surge of TikTok posts about Guo came in June when the former mayor was suspended by the Ombudsman and was charged with qualified human trafficking by the Department of Justice. That same month, the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) confirmed that Alice Guo’s fingerprints matched those of a Chinese national named Guo Hua Ping.
During this period, the accounts mostly reposted Guo’s photos and videos from her FB page and YouTube channel, with glossy editing styles and captions gushing over her “cute” and “pretty” face. Others would go as far as to post fan cams — zoomed-in videos of an idol’s visuals, staple in K-pop stan culture. They would insert Filipino love songs like Maki’s Dilaw and TJ Monterde’s Palagi in videos from her appearances in the House or Senate hearings on illegal POGOs.
They carved out Guo’s image as a do-gooder mayor, highlighting her achievements in Bamban such as providing financial assistance to students and granting the permit for the first-ever Jollibee branch in the municipality.
Samuel Cabbuag, a digital sociologist and assistant professor at the University of the Philippines Diliman, said these types of content are designed to “hack the attention” of TikTok users and distract them from the real issues surrounding Guo. Cabbuag authored several research studies on digital influence cultures, including one on the political economy of covert influence operations in the 2022 Philippine elections.
Although these are not necessarily disinformation posts, Cabbuag stressed that they help create the myth of Alice Guo as a “more humane person, emotionally complex and fighting for the truth.” Once that story has been laid out, he said, what all people are going to talk about is that, not the issues.
Libot echoed this and said such content on TikTok can be persuasive that it may “easily make its way into average users and misinform them about nuances regarding Alice Guo’s case, and the credibility of the POGO operations.”
For instance, the accounts went on a posting spree from late August to September, after Guo escaped to Malaysia and Singapore, and her subsequent arrest in Indonesia.
VERA Files detected 12 accounts on Sept. 9 and 10 sharing similar videos of Alice hugging Shiela Guo before leaving the Senate, supposedly to display their close sibling relations. Two accounts reached significantly higher engagement than others and were posted within seconds of each other:
- @vxyxyz with 26,329 followers posted on Sept. 9, 2024 at 10:01 p.m. It gained 1.57 million views (archived post).
- @baddielooks_aliceguo with 7,095 followers posted on Sept. 9, 2024 at 10:02 p.m. It gained 2.18 million views (archived post).
But these videos omit an important context. On Aug. 27, Shiela admitted to having accompanied Alice to illegally depart the Philippines for Sabah by boarding several boats. In the same Senate subcommittee hearing, Shiela said she was not Alice’s biological sister.
Not just Alice Guo fans
In a March 2024 report for the ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute, digital media researcher Fatima Gaw and political scientist Aries Arugay pointed out two types of political influencers on TikTok: “Stan” accounts, who portray politicians as “idols” and their supporters as “fans,” and “Trending” influencers, who stylize the politicians along with the vernacular taste on the platform.
Guo seemed to benefit from both kinds, based on VERA Files’ analysis.
All 45 TikTok accounts published fan edits and videos almost exclusively about the dismissed mayor, hiding their posts before 2024.
More than half (24) of the accounts were created only last year, while 21 have been around as early as 2020, VERA Files found. Twelve of them were created from March to June, which coincided with the POGO hub raid in Bamban that led to a Senate resolution investigating Guo for alleged human trafficking and serious illegal detention.
Twelve of the 45 TikTok accounts were created after the POGO hub raid in Bamban in March 2024.
They bore Guo’s photos in their profile pictures from her 2022 campaign, her stint as mayor, and her appearances in committee hearings, even her casual selfies. Some of the photos have undergone minimal editing to change the background, add filters or other designs. Meanwhile, three-fourths (29) of the accounts played around with Guo’s name, such as her full name, last name or initials, in their usernames.
Interestingly, VERA Files saw at least 40 usernames crop up on foreign websites as of January 2025: 20 were on Fansly, a pornographic content subscription service, and 13 were on Steemit, a United States-based blogging and social media website where users can earn cryptocurrency. But a visit to these links leads to non-existent pages.
Disinformation experts say this likely indicates the use of a commercial service to generate multiple accounts – a strategy in affiliate marketing – suggesting that the motivations behind the accounts go beyond politics.
One account @cyliceraxz stood out for posting fan content featuring Infanta Sofia of Spain and Leonor, Princess of Asturias, daughters of King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia of Spain. Created Oct. 24, 2022, it currently has 23,870 followers on TikTok.
The Madrid-based news outlet El País previously reported about dozens of TikTok accounts impersonating Princess Leonor to promise financial aid in exchange for an initial payment of up to US$200. The scammer then pressures victims to pay additional fees until they run out of money.
Using the open-source intelligence tool WhatsMyName.app, VERA Files found an account with the same username as @cyliceraxz on the Russian dating website dating.ru. The link directed to the application form of a user named Sergey, aged 58 and based in Chelyabinsk, Russia.
WhatsMyName.app scours the internet to enumerate where a specific account username appears across a wide array of websites.
In an email to VERA Files, El País reporter Pablo Canto Martinez said the account may be riding on the popular hashtags about the Spanish royal family “to gain visibility and engagement,” but it did not show signs of the same modus operandi he found.
The first posts about the scam, Martinez said, appeared in October and peaked in November and December — the same months that @cyliceraxz posted about the Spanish princesses. As of April 29, @cyliceraxz has changed its default picture with Infanta Sofia’s photo holding a glass, originally taken from Getty Images in 2018.
For Libot, this indicates that the TikTok accounts may be “part of a bigger operation, and not necessarily just focused on one candidate or personality.” He added, “In a more practical sense, it could also be that that’s the trendiest issue right now, so they are including themselves in the conversation to increase their visibility.”
Four months after the POGO investigations ended, most of the TikTok accounts noticeably slowed down content creation with some shifting their attention to another political issue.
An account, @alicia_guo2, has since renamed itself as @kittyduterte_guo and began posting content about Duterte’s youngest daughter on March 12, a day after the former president was arrested through a warrant issued by the International Criminal Court. The account is no longer accessible as of writing.
‘Asenso Garantisado’
Still, there are a few dedicated accounts that continue to cross-post content about Guo on TikTok and FB. Of the 45 accounts VERA Files monitored, 19 are part of FB groups called AeGis and Team ALG, whose names were derived from Alice Guo’s initials.
AeGis has 15 members, boasting a total of 50 million engagements and 115,000 followers. They share similarly edited profile photos on TikTok — a group logo with each of their nicknames. Their FB group has been taken down as of this writing.
Meanwhile, Team ALG, whose TikTok page was created on Oct. 23, 2024, claims to have about 65 members and has 4.20 million engagements on the platform.
A number of the groups’ members claimed to be fans of Guo from other parts of the Philippines — not Bamban.
Cabbuag explained that in any fandom, “you don’t have to be closely related or geographically located to support someone.” “As with any public figure, people can find some sort of relatability and some sort of connection to that person,” he said.
AeGis’ and TeamALG’s content, however, do not end with innocuous posts “fangirling” over the former mayor.
When Guo was ordered to transfer to the Pasig City jail along with eight other co-accused, at least 10 accounts bombarded TikTok from Sept. 20 and 25 with posts urging the Philippine National Police to return Guo to Camp Crame.
Some of them jumped on the hashtag #NoToPasigCityJail, including five accounts linked with AeGis and TeamALG: @mayi.alg, @ihnahaliciaguo, @jen_00111, @jencfightforag, and @licia.there.
While the posts were limited to 800 to 100,000 views, they amplified the same narrative: A “high-profile” personality like Guo did not deserve to be in the same cell as other persons deprived of liberty.
In October, AeGis accounts tried to cast doubt on the authenticity of documents presented in the Senate probe, baselessly claiming that Guo’s fingerprint on her NBI clearance was “falsified.”
The group also called out an article by The Straits Times in a Jan. 19 post, for supposedly using Guo as clickbait when it mentioned her links to Zhang Jie and Wu Duanren, who were under investigation in Singapore for a money laundering case. In Manila, Zhang is wanted by anti-organized crime and corruption authorities, while Wu is described as the “big boss” of illegal POGOs.
With campaigning for the May 2025 local elections in its final stretch, some of Alice Guo’s TikTok fan accounts turned to being sentimental — reminiscing about her successful mayoral campaign in 2022 and regretting how her leadership was cut short after her supposed involvement in criminal activities surfaced.
On April 14, one of the accounts posted clips of her giving away gifts to Bamban residents. “Relapse malala. Kung hindi lang nangyari ‘to, siguro ikaw ulit ang magiging Mayor ng Bamban at siguradong wala kang kalaban,” its caption read.
(Having an extreme relapse. If only this didn’t happen, you would probably be the mayor of Bamban again and no one will challenge you [in the elections]).
Despite being tucked away in prison miles from her town, Alice Guo remains present in Bamban. Her campaign slogan “Asenso Garantisado” (translated: “progress is guaranteed”), which was used over 3,000 times by this network of TikTok accounts, is mounted on top of the municipal hall.
Across town, the same slogan is plastered on campaign posters of two rival mayoral bets — “Ang Tunay Na Asenso Garantisado” for a former mayor who supported Guo in 2022, and “Kalmado Asenso Garantisado” for a candidate whom she defeated last election.
Residents believe it is a form of endorsement from Guo herself, who supposedly anointed these candidates to continue her promise of bringing progress and development into Bamban.
And for some voters, this is exactly the kind of leader they are looking for.
This story was published with the support of the Internews Indo-Pacific Media Resilience Program or IPMR. Watch the video explainer on Influence Operations and Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference here.
