Several Facebook (FB) groups and pages are spreading an erroneous screenshot of a news update by radio station Bombo Radyo Bacolod, which supposedly reported that over 70 million individuals attended Vice President Leni Robredo’s grand rally in Bacolod, Negros Occidental.
The false screenshot, which first appeared on March 12, contained text in English supposedly published by the station. It read: “LOOK More than 70 million people attended the Robredo-Pangilinan Grand People’s Rally at Paglaum Sports Complex, Bacolod City.”
The same day the untrue post surfaced, Bombo Radyo Bacolod disowned it on its official FB page. The station said FB’s auto-translate feature mistranslated their update and added that it does not publish any news stories or captions in English.
“The term ‘70mil’ was translated to 70 million instead of 70,000, ‘mil’ being thousand in the local dialect. Bombo Radyo Bacolod has nothing to do with this,” the organization further said in Hiligaynon, referring to the circulating screenshot.
Bombo Radyo Bacolod has taken down its original post. However, a screenshot captured by a netizen shows the original post’s text in Hiligaynon which read: “LOOK Kapin 70 mil ka mga tawo ang nagtambong sa Robredo-Pangilinan Grand People’s Rally sa Paglaum Sports Complex, Bacolod City.”
(LOOK More than 70 thousand people attended the Robredo-Pangilinan Grand People’s Rally at Paglaum Sports Complex, Bacolod City)
The screenshot made the rounds online a day after Robredo’s campaign sortie in Bacolod, where the provincial government of Negros Occidental estimated that more than 70,000 Negrenses welcomed Robredo. Negros Occidental is the sixth most vote-rich province in the country.
The false post was shared by at least 116 FB groups and pages and has garnered more than 70,980 interactions, according to social media monitoring tool CrowdTangle. Among the publishers that drew the most traffic were FB pages Luminous by Trixie Cruz-Angeles & Ahmed Paglinawan (created on Jan. 29, 2017), Anti Bobo (Aug. 26, 2018), and the official FB page of singer Richard Poon (June 19, 2009).
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(Editor’s Note: VERA Files has partnered with Facebook to fight the spread of disinformation. Find out more about this partnership and our methodology.)
