From AFP News Agency.
The investigation won AFP’s Philippines fact-checking team the highest honor at the GlobalFact awards in Rio on June 27, 2025: what was behind a surge in social media posts about the disputed South China Sea in the spring of 2024?
The posts exaggerated confrontations between China and the Philippines, even suggesting the two nations were on the brink of war.
False narratives and images based on real news events often gain traction online – in this case, AFP found the network sharing the posts had a combined following of over 10 million people.
What drives this type of disinformation? In this case, the answer is ad revenue from decoy “news” sites linked in the comments.
One post, originally published on March 22, 2024, reached 35,000 shares after a real skirmish between Philippine and Chinese sailors on June 17, 2024.
The account then published a link in the post’s comments to a fabricated report about US troops being deployed to the Philippines on a site otherwise covered in paid advertisements.
In this video, AFP journalists Jan Cuyco and Ara Eugenio in Manila describe the disinformation they tracked for months.
With their colleague Lucy Sodipe, they sought to identify someone actively involved in the disinformation operation, a search that led them to Thailand.
AFP’s Nattakorn ‘Tii’ Ploddee in Bangkok reached out to an individual who had been interacting regularly with many of the posts AFP had debunked.
Watch the full investigation on our YouTube playlist.
