[DECODED] Tacloban shooting and the lies that undermine protective measures

A week ago, on June 22, a school shooting in Tacloban City, Leyte, killed three students and injured 20 others. Those arrested are both minors: a 15-year-old was slapped with multiple criminal complaints, while a 14-year-old will reportedly undergo an intervention program.

The tragic incident has prompted many discussions online, especially since initial police reports said that the two minors appeared to have planned the attack and that they were “heavily influenced” by extremist online content.

Rappler has reported extensively about how the internet, limited parental guidance, and the kids’ lack of sense of belonging play a role in all of this, pointing to a string of similar incidents in recent months where Filipino students from different schools were found to be influenced by bad foreign actors on the internet. There are also reports on how extremist networks exploit gaming spaces to radicalize young people, as well as discussions about whether or not game developers should be held responsible for what players of their games commit.

For our part, The Nerve sought to understand how the discussions on social media have unfolded, particularly how bad actors online moved to hijack the conversations.

[READ: [DECODED] Kiko Barzaga strikes again as Tacloban shooting triggers disinfo, muddles chats on juvenile justice law]

Using Probe, our content and narrative analysis solution, we found that the discussions of the shooting quickly shifted to blame a 20-year-old law called the Juvenile Justice and Welfare Act of 2006, authored by Senator Kiko Pangilinan. The law was later amended in 2013, mandating child offenders aged 12 to 15 years old to be detained in youth centers for serious crimes.

Despite this, malign online actors were quick to suggest that the two minors would be scot-free, thanks to Pangilinan’s law. Posts blaming Pangilinan ramped up as early as June 23, a day after the shooting. Among the false and misleading posts we spotted were AI-generated photos of Pangilinan and Senator Risa Hontiveros, making them appear to be supporting the arrested minors.

The juvenile justice law was already subjected to a lot of criticism and disinformation in the past. In 2017, former president Rodrigo Duterte himself spouted false claims that the law allows child offenders to just “go home” after committing crimes. He even made a bold statement that Pangilinan is the “one single person” who “promoted criminality in this country,” all because he failed to acknowledge that an amendment to the law had been made.

It’s also not the first time that legislation has been put under scrutiny, and later on derailed, because of disinformation.

[READ: [DECODED] The ‘smear campaign’ against CSE, anti-adolescent pregnancy bil]

In March 2025, The Nerve found a coordinated, inauthentic effort to spread disinformation narratives, including false claims that the anti-adolescent pregnancy bill, which covers proposed comprehensive sexual education, would teach young Filipinos about masturbation. Some posts also called Hontiveros, the principal author of the bill, a “pedophile.”

Such false claims were funneled into different online communities, including religious, buy-and-sell, job-hiring, and other local groups — a known tactic by disinformation peddlers to maximize their reach and break online boundaries.

[READ: Disinformation on SOGIE bill spreads as Filipino queers face real-world discrimination]

The sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, and sex characteristics (SOGIESC) bill, a much older measure that has yet to pass despite being filed in Congress for over two decades, has also faced its own wave of disinformation: that the bill will “undercut” parental authority, religious freedom, freedom of conscience, and freedom of expression. None of these were in the proposed bills, yet they were shared thousands of times on Facebook.

These things happen because social media fosters an outrage economy that fuels real-world violence, as we have noted in our study on the US information ecosystem. The more outrageous, inflammatory, and provocative a lie is, the more likely it is to spread.

It’s something worth remembering the next time we find ourselves in conversations that distort well-intentioned measures through dubious and incendiary claims, rather than honest debate about their merits. – Rappler.com