A fake, nine-month-old Facebook (FB) post that claims Vice President Leni Robredo said her three daughters were “all girls” has resurfaced on social media.
In the past 24 hours, Facebook detected the fabricated quote card, published by a netizen on March 7, to have been viewed by over 6.4 million people. It featured a grayscale copy of Robredo’s profile picture on her official FB page, juxtaposed with the statement, “I have three daughters, lahat sila babae (they are all girls).”
The vice president, a lawyer, had made no such remark. The closest Robredo made was in a March 2018 Philippine Daily Inquirer interview, where she said, in reference to her daughters: “They were all daddy’s girls.”
The comments on the FB post show that the fake quote card was an attempt to project Robredo as stupid. Several netizens chimed in with remarks they attributed to her, such as teenage pregnancy “mostly affects the youth” or “4 multiplied by 400 is 1,600.”
The remarks, which are either false or taken out of context, surfaced after Robredo said in a speech in September 2018 that “rape exists because of rapists…not because of beautiful women,” in response to a rape joke earlier made by President Rodrigo Duterte.
The netizen’s fabricated March post received little interaction between November to the first two weeks of December, before gaining traction once again on Dec. 28 when Robredo poked fun at her 18-day stint as an anti-drug official, saying she went from being “drug czar to drug char.” “Char” is swardspeak for “joke.”
The netizen’s fake quote card has been shared over 10,000 times and has received over 110,000 reactions and more than 1,600 comments.
(Editor’s Note: VERA Files has partnered with Facebook to fight the spread of disinformation. Find out more about this partnership and our methodology.)
