Philipino citizens and their understanding of how disinformation works

This article from a few years ago - on how the Philipines ("the petri dish of the global disinformation epidemic") has responded with citizen initiatives. The full report is here [pdf] but the article itself is a good summary.

To be honest, some of the conclusions chime so uncannily close to my own, that I'm a little suspicious. It's interesting just how sophisticated the conclusions of those consulted are on the roots of disinfo.

Mancur Olson's dictum - that “the deliberation about the allocation of public goods should itself be public good” seems to be one that this citizens panel totally understands. They talk about how expensive fake news is to manufacture, how defunded journalism drives it, and how the growing distrust in the media can largely be explained by the fact that the media is allied to some political and economic interests and not others.

I would be interested to see a deep dive into how rigorously this citizens' initiative was managed - did the citizens concerned find themselves steered by the biases of the organisers or not. If this exercise was a valid one, for me (as someone who argues these points repeatedly, treats them as self-evident truths, regarding myself as some kind of voice in the wilderness on this stuff) its conclusions are huge.