How Selected Pro-Duterte Facebook Pages Framed the ABS-CBN Shutdown Issue: A Discussion on Epistemic Discrediting in Echo Chambers

What is it about?

This article looks into the discursive frames employed by selected pro-Duterte pages on Facebook that tackled the ABS-CBN shutdown and franchise denial issues in 2020. The legal frames were mostly derived from the findings of the lawmakers’ technical working group (TWG) finding. The political frames, meanwhile, include ABS-CBN’s alleged biased reporting, the victory-over-oligarchs narrative pushed by the Duterte administration and other related pronouncements. The article identifies these frames as reinforcing layers to fortify the echo chamber behavior of pro-Duterte pages through an attack-amplify-attract stratagem. C. Thi Nguyen’s study resembling echo chambers anchored on “epistemic discrediting” was operationalized for this purpose. Data from the selected pro-Duterte pages were mined using the timeline feature of Crowd Tangle as the official social listening tool of Facebook. The article also explored the impact of pro-Duterte pages on ABS-CBN’s stature as a legacy media giant and on the Duterte presidency as a social media-driven administration.

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