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Social media becomes town hall for local politics

Pantabangan children fetch water from anywhere it is available. Water shortage and brownouts are just some of the problems residents discuss via the Pantabangan Freedom Wall on Facebook. Photo by CARLOS D. MARQUEZ JR.

By CARLOS D. MARQUEZ JR.

PANTABANGAN, Nueva Ecija—Will this Central Luzon town not qualify for a unique election laboratory with, among others, a doctor running for mayor singing his campaign lines and locals, including those abroad, trading issues on Facebook?

Even as sometimes some got irked for what they believed as foul personal attacks, which would hastily be refereed by the administrator, “Pantabangan Freedom Wall” on Facebook not only serves now for candidates and their supporters as venue for wooing voters.

It has since its signing up as group account on Facebook in 2012 also effectively reunited the natives, polarized basically by their relocation when the Pantabangan Dam was built in Nueva Ecija in the mid-1970s.

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