BBDO Guerrero

Client: National Union of Journalists of the Philippines
Product: National Union of Journalists of the Philippines
Title: Stop the Spread
Media: Digital, Social
Country: Philippines
Date Of Campaign: November 26, 2019

Background: 99% of Filipino internet users are found on Facebook, but most lack the data to check what they read. Facebook has referred to the Philippines as “patient zero” when it comes to weaponization of digital platforms. The National Union of Journalists of the Philippines needed to stop disinformation from spreading among social media-active Filipinos.

Idea: #StopTheSpread is a chatbot developed over 18 months as an educational tool against disinformation. It can be accessed on Facebook Messenger without using data.The chatbot checks articles automatically using a sophisticated algorithm. Just paste a link and the chatbot will run it against six universal criteria, like contact information, author, image credits, date of publish, an About Us page, and if it’s an imitation site. It also runs it against an existing database of legitimate sources to check whether the article is likely reliable, suspicious, or needs further review.The chatbot also contains a course on disinformation, where users can learn the signs of a suspicious news article. They can also report articles for manual review by a team of journalists to improve the database.

Results: Since going live the chatbot has reached 446,093 Facebook users. 10% go onto the chatbot, making our click-through rate 5x higher than industry standard. Of all users who visit, 25% take the course and another 25% use the chatbot to check links, more compared to the 10% industry standard. Every day we equip more and more users with the information to stop the spread of disinformation.