How the DDS Contribute to the Ruin of the Philippines—and Why It Still Matters

We didn’t plan this trip.
It was just after eight in the evening when we found out my wife had a seminar in Baguio. By eleven, we were already winding along the curves of Kennon Road, headlights bouncing off rock walls and sleepy trees. No itinerary, no packed bags—just one of those biglaang lakad decisions that you say yes to without overthinking.

We got here around midnight. My wife’s now off to her seminar, my daughter’s still buried under the sheets after the long ride, and I’m at the breakfast buffet, alone with my coffee and a plate of whatever I felt like scooping in half-awake hunger.

The mountains outside are still wrapped in fog. The air smells like pine and cold stone. It should be peaceful—and it is, for a while. Until I check my feed.

And just like that, I’m pulled back into the noise.
Same threads. Same people. Same fury.

Diehard Duterte Supporters. DDS. Loud. Loyal. Unapologetically divisive. The kind of online presence that refuses to fade, even in the most serene corners of the country. Even here, at this table, with Baguio morning air still fresh in my lungs.

I didn’t come here to think about them. But how can I not, when their voice—this unrelenting noise—has helped normalize violence, bury truth, and drag national discourse into a pit of blind devotion?

So here I am, coffee in hand, wondering quietly:

How did we let it come to this?
And what kind of country will my daughter inherit if we keep pretending this is normal?

The Illusion of Peace in a Noisy Republic

There’s something about Baguio mornings that slows everything down. Maybe it’s the air, or the way the fog rolls in like it’s trying to muffle the world for just a little longer. Even the clinking of plates at the buffet feels gentler somehow, like everyone’s still waking up on their own terms.

I wish the internet worked the same way.

But it doesn’t.
And it never sleeps.

I opened my feed just to kill time. A bit of scrolling, maybe a few dad jokes or throwback photos from friends. But no. There they were again—front and center. The DDS. Arguing. Attacking. Justifying. Always justifying.

It’s almost poetic how predictable they’ve become.
Any criticism of Duterte? “Yellowtard ka.”
A story about extrajudicial killings? “Eh kasi, adik.”
Someone asking for accountability? “Bayaran yan ng Dilawan.”

The rhythm of their defense is robotic now—scripted, shallow, cruel. And still, it works. It still dominates the conversation. It still drowns out everything else. The longer I watched the thread unfold, the more I felt that familiar tightness in my chest. Not from outrage—I've moved past that—but from fatigue.

You start wondering:
Is this the new national tone?
Are we really okay with this being the way we talk, the way we think?

I looked out the window again. The fog hadn’t cleared. The silence outside remained untouched. And that contrast—it hit hard. I’m in one of the quietest cities in the country, surrounded by mountains and pine trees, and still, the loudest thing in my life right now is a thread full of strangers shouting into a void.

And for some reason, I kept reading.
Maybe it was cathartic in a twisted way—to watch how bad it’s gotten, to confront just how far we’ve fallen. Or maybe I just needed a reminder that silence, real silence, is now a luxury in the Philippines. A privilege.

Because this isn’t just noise anymore. It’s not just angry posts or misguided loyalty. It’s deliberate. Designed. Sustained. And it’s doing more than annoying people like me trying to enjoy breakfast.

It’s shaping how we think.
How we vote.
What we tolerate.

And maybe it’s time we stop treating it like background noise—because the damage it’s doing is anything but silent.

What DDS Really Means

It always starts the same way.
You question a policy, and they call you bitter.
You bring up human rights, and they say you’re protecting criminals.
You quote the law, and they answer with a meme.

This reflection is nothing new. It’s been said many times.
The DDS aren’t just supporters—they’re a wall. One that’s been built brick by brick with blind loyalty, rage, and repetition.

And let’s not pretend that wall isn’t dangerous.

The term "DDS" was never innocent. It originally stood for Davao Death Squad—the alleged vigilante group tied to Duterte’s years as Davao mayor (Wikipedia). That alone should’ve made people pause. But instead, it became a badge of honor, a sticker on bumpers, a hashtag worn like armor.

We’ve grown so numb to violence, we don’t even flinch at naming a movement after murder.

But this kind of blind loyalty isn’t unique to them.
The Marcos loyalists of the past showed a similar kind of unyielding devotion. Even after the atrocities, the plunder, the exile—they remained fiercely protective of the image of Ferdinand Marcos. The only difference was the scale. There was no internet then. No algorithm to amplify the noise. That kind of loyalty stayed confined to smaller groups, whispers among the faithful.

And yes—if we’re being honest—even some Kakampinks mirrored the same behavior. Not all, but enough to make it noticeable. Maybe it was a reaction. A mirror held up to the DDS—matching the energy, the passion, even the refusal to engage with dissent. But the difference is, it didn’t come first. It was born in response. Like a defense mechanism against years of online aggression.

Still, let’s be real.
Put a Marcos loyalist, a Kakampink, and a DDS side by side—and nothing beats the destructive force of the DDS.
Not in volume.
Not in vitriol.
Not in damage done.

And that’s what scares me.
Because in one of my older blogs, I wrote something I’ve been hesitant to say out loud again: that maybe the DDS character—their behavior, their attitude—isn’t an anomaly. Maybe it’s the dormant, default character of the Filipino. The kind we don’t talk about. The kind we pretend doesn’t exist.

And all it took was the garbage fire of Rodrigo Roa Duterte to drag it out into the open.

That’s the fear.
But the hope? It comes from the same place.

Because in the same blog, I also said this: the Kakampinks proved something else—that there’s still grace, wit, and heart in this country. That not everyone chooses noise. That not everyone sells their voice for a strongman’s shadow.

And that, I hold on to.

Trolls, Trolls, Trolls – How DDS Engineered the Noise

There was a time when online arguments were just that—arguments.
Messy, chaotic, often pointless. But still organic. Still human.

Then came the DDS.
And everything changed.

They didn’t just enter the conversation—they took it over.
They didn’t just reply—they swarmed.
And they didn’t just share their thoughts—they manufactured a reality and made sure it was the loudest thing on your feed.

By the numbers, their reach is staggering.
The DDS digital army was estimated to have 200,000 to 250,000 active profiles, but only 30% were real people. The rest? Paid trolls—fake names, fake photos, real impact (Scimatic).

This wasn’t a movement. This was an operation.

At first, it was easy to laugh off. Their posts were clumsy, often full of typos and ALL CAPS RAGE. But like everything else in the Philippines, they learned. They adapted. They evolved.
By the time the 2019 elections came around, their strategy had shifted. No more just shouting in the comments—they were microtargeting users with personalized content, launching multi-platform campaigns, and inserting themselves in every political conversation that mattered (New Mandala).

And their platform of choice?
Facebook.

They didn’t bother with the noise of Twitter. They didn’t need the vanity of Instagram. Facebook gave them what they needed most: reach, reaction, and algorithmic reward. The more people engaged—out of anger, agreement, or disbelief—the more Facebook pushed the content. And DDS knew how to game that system better than anyone (Bloomberg).

They created echo chambers. Turned communities into warzones.
And every time you tried to speak sense into a thread, you weren’t just debating someone—you were stepping into a machine that existed to wear you down, not hear you out.

But it wasn’t just about pushing Duterte.
They rewrote events. They twisted facts. They branded activists, journalists, and even grieving mothers as enemies of the state.
They didn’t just push propaganda. They performed mass memory manipulation.

And slowly, it worked.

People began to doubt what they knew.
To question the very idea of truth.
To accept the idea that anger is stronger than evidence, and loyalty more important than law.

This isn’t noise anymore.
This is war—fought with memes instead of bullets, with emojis instead of ballots.

And like all wars, it has casualties.

When the trolls win, the nation loses.

Manufacturing Consent for Murder

The DDS didn’t just defend Duterte online.
They prepared the stage for murder.

Long before the first body hit the pavement, the groundwork had already been laid—through hashtags, through angry posts, through the slow, deliberate erosion of empathy.
They didn’t kill with guns. They killed with words. And those words made it easier for others to pull the trigger.

The propaganda was simple:
Drug addicts are monsters. Criminals don’t deserve rights. If you want peace, you need to break a few skulls.
It was repeated so many times, so loudly, so aggressively, that people stopped questioning it. They started sharing it. Quoting it. Believing it.

And then the killings began.

Thousands dead.
Many of them poor. Many of them unnamed.
Some of them teenagers. Some of them already on their knees.

Official numbers tried to downplay it. But organizations on the ground knew better—half of those deaths were carried out by vigilantes, and many of those vigilantes operated with clear police coordination (ACLED, Human Rights Watch).

It wasn’t chaos. It was policy.

And what did the DDS do while this was happening?
They cheered.

Their pages lit up with justifications:
“Eh kasi, adik.”
“Tama lang yan.”
“Ganyan ang disiplina.”

But it didn’t stop at justifications. They celebrated it.
They posted memes with kill counts. Laughed at grieving families. Flooded timelines with photos of bloodied corpses—mocking them, dehumanizing them, turning death into a form of entertainment (Scimatic).

That’s when I realized something had shifted.

It wasn’t just about politics anymore. This was a cultural collapse.
We stopped flinching.
Stopped asking questions.
Started believing that violence equals order. That fear equals progress. That if you’re not doing anything wrong, you’ve got nothing to worry about.

Due process became a luxury.
Empathy became weakness.
And the body count became background noise.

And we let it happen.

We watched it unfold—on our feeds, in the news, on street corners. We saw the blood, read the names, heard the mothers scream. And we kept scrolling. Kept arguing. Kept pretending that all of this was just part of the plan.

And the scariest part?

We didn’t even realize it was happening.
Until it already had.

The Silencing of Civil Society

In a healthy democracy, critics keep the system honest.
Under Duterte, critics became enemies.

And the DDS? They made sure of it.

It wasn’t enough to justify killings. They needed to silence those who dared to speak.
Journalists, human rights defenders, students, lawyers, church groups—anyone who asked questions was painted as dangerous. Or ungrateful. Or worse, part of a conspiracy.

Discredit. Delegitimize. Destroy.
That was the playbook.
And it worked.

Online, DDS pages regularly branded critics as “bayaran,” “pabibo,” or “NPA sympathizers.” It wasn’t debate. It was demolition.
They didn’t argue points. They attacked reputations.

Red-tagging became the new national sport.
And the DDS amplified it, turning government press conferences and tabloid headlines into viral memes—complete with Photoshop edits and comment threads dripping with threats.

It wasn’t just rhetoric.
It turned into real-life danger.

Activists were followed. Professors were harassed. Student organizations were surveilled. And all it took was one Facebook post to put someone on the radar. The line between online rumor and state suspicion disappeared completely (SAGE Journals).

The media, too, became fair game.
Duterte himself said, “Just because you’re a journalist, you’re not exempted from assassination.”
And the DDS took that line and ran with it.

Maria Ressa was branded a foreign agent. Fact-checkers were accused of sabotage. Every attempt to correct a lie was met with a swarm of insults, threats, and organized smear campaigns (Democratic Erosion).

Civil society—once vibrant, once fearless—started to pull back.

NGOs were painted as destabilizers.
Religious leaders were told to “mind their own pulpits.”
Student councils were red-tagged for holding forums.
And slowly, the silence spread—not out of apathy, but out of survival.

The DDS didn’t just promote a president. They policed the nation’s conscience.
They created a false binary: you’re either with the President, or you’re against the country.
There was no space for nuance. No room for honest dissent.

And that’s what frightened me the most.

Because they didn’t just silence critics—they made the whole country afraid to care.

From Debate to Division – How DDS Cemented the Moral Chasm

There’s a quiet kind of damage that doesn’t leave blood on the streets.
It doesn’t trend. It doesn’t scream.
But it seeps into how we talk, how we relate, how we decide who to trust.

That’s the kind of damage the DDS continues to inflict.
Not just loyalty to Duterte.
But division as a lifestyle.

It started slowly.
Supporters began to say things like “DDS kami. Hindi kami duwag. Hindi kami elitista. Kami ang masa.”
And if you weren’t DDS? You were immediately labeled as something else—“yellowtard,” “dilawan,” “elitista,” or worse, “kalaban ng bayan.”

There was no middle ground.
No space for nuance.
You were either for Duterte, or anti-Filipino.

That’s how they did it.
They didn’t just defend a president. They reshaped identity itself.
They made politics personal—deeply personal—and in doing so, they created a moral chasm so wide, it swallowed entire communities whole (Democratic Erosion).

By 2022, the election wasn’t just the most contested in recent memory. It became the most polarizing political event in modern Philippine history (UP CIDS).
People cut off friendships. Families stopped speaking to each other. Facts were no longer shared—they were chosen, depending on whose side you were on.

And even now, in 2025, long after Duterte stepped down, the aftershocks are still being felt.
His arrest didn’t close the divide. It deepened it.

Because those who were loyal to him aren’t retreating.
They’re doubling down.
And those who’ve been on the receiving end of DDS aggression? They’re tired. Angry. In no mood to forgive or explain.

And maybe that’s the real legacy of the DDS.

Not Duterte himself.
Not the drug war.
Not even the troll farms.

But the space they continue to shatter between truth and lies.
Between reason and rage.
Between Filipinos—and each other.

Legacy and Reckoning – What We’ve Inherited, and What We’re Still Allowing

Duterte may be out of office.
But the machine he built? It's still running.

The language of cruelty.
The weaponization of loyalty.
The deep suspicion toward facts, journalists, institutions—even each other.

That didn’t end with his presidency. It didn’t end with his silence.
And it didn’t end when he was finally arrested.

In March 2025, the International Criminal Court issued a warrant for Rodrigo Duterte’s arrest, charging him with crimes against humanity linked to the War on Drugs (BBC).
It was a moment that should have marked closure.
But instead, it reignited the noise.

The DDS returned in full force—louder, more furious, more defiant. They flooded threads with claims of persecution, injustice, Western conspiracy. They recycled the same talking points, revived the same hashtags, and clung even tighter to the idea that their man was a victim—not of justice, but of politics (Inquirer).

And though the alliance that once held Duterte and Marcos together has quietly fractured, the culture they emboldened hasn’t crumbled with it.
The DDS pages are still up.
The troll farms are still operational.
The distrust, still deep.
And the division, still raw.

But there’s another side, too.

Some former DDS are waking up.
Not with noise, but with silence. With reflection.
They’ve started to speak—not all at once, not always publicly, but it’s there: disillusionment. A quiet reckoning. A slow admission that something went very, very wrong (PhilArchive).

Some say it was the broken promises.
Others say it was Duterte’s contradictions.
Maybe it was watching neighbors disappear. Or seeing how easily compassion became weakness in the eyes of the crowd they once stood with.

Whatever the reason, a few are stepping back.

But is that enough?

Is regret enough to rebuild what was broken?

Because we didn’t just lose truth.
We didn’t just weaken institutions.
We lost the ability to hear each other without hate in our throats.
We allowed cruelty to masquerade as leadership, and we let fanatics rewrite what it means to love this country.

And the worst part?

We’re still allowing it.

The DDS has held this country hostage for years—choking reason, silencing compassion, and framing violence as virtue. And now, once again, we are at risk of falling back into the grip of another Duterte. This time, one even more unhinged, even less restrained—a vice president whose presence in office is already a threat, and whose ambition to become president is no longer a quiet rumor, but an open campaign.

They’ve already started.

They’re ensuring pro-Duterte senatoriables are seated—packing the upper house with loyalists, not lawmakers. Turning the halls of the Senate into a comedic clubhouse where spectacle replaces service, and legislation is treated like a joke.

More damage.
More ruin.
More erosion of whatever dignity remains in our democracy.

It would be easy to say, we need to do something.
But what is that something?

What is that action—urgent, collective, deliberate—that doesn’t just resist the noise but begins to heal the silence it left behind?

Because reckoning isn’t just about punishing the powerful.
It’s about what we do now.
How we remember.
What we teach.
What we tolerate.

Duterte may be in custody.
But the noise he unleashed still lives in our culture, our platforms, our conversations.

And here’s the hard truth:
The reckoning of the DDS is terrifying—not because they don’t deserve it, but because we’re all in the blast radius.

They held the country hostage. And when karma finally arrives, it won’t just land on them.

The nation suffers with them.

Maybe we can’t undo the past.
But we can stop lying to ourselves about what it meant.
And if we’re brave enough—maybe we can start choosing something better.

Conclusion: Back to the Table, Back to the Question

My coffee’s gone cold.

I hadn’t realized how long I’ve been sitting here, eyes bouncing between the mountain fog and the noise on my phone. The buffet table is mostly cleared now, and the quiet hum of the morning has given way to clinking plates and new guests filling the space. My daughter will be waking up soon. We’ll be heading out—to explore, to eat, to take pictures and pretend, at least for a few hours, that the country outside these pine-covered hills isn’t falling apart.

But the weight of this morning lingers.
Not in my chest. In my gut.
Because once again, I’m left with the same question:

What kind of country will my daughter inherit?

It’s not just about Duterte anymore. It’s not even just about the DDS.
It’s about what we’ve accepted. What we’ve normalized. What we continue to scroll past.

And here, in this strange stillness—this in-between space where the air is fresh but the news is toxic—I realize the most heartbreaking part isn’t the noise. It’s that we’ve learned to live with it. We’ve adjusted the volume, not our values.

I want to believe there’s still hope.
That there’s still time.
That the Philippines she’ll grow up in won’t be defined by the worst of who we’ve become, but by the quiet, stubborn refusal of a few to stop caring.

And maybe, that’s the start.
Not a rally. Not a speech. Not a thread that goes viral.

Just one father, finishing his coffee, deciding that silence isn’t safety—and that truth, no matter how inconvenient, is still worth writing down.