As impeached Vice President Sara Duterte and her onetime ally President Ferdinand Marcos shore up support for their candidates in the Philippine mid-term vote on May 12, social media posts shared a video in April falsely claiming the crowd shouted Marcos’s name during her campaign speech in Manila. The clip — watched tens of thousands of times — in fact shows a crowd chanting the name of a local candidate backed by Duterte.
“Sara Duterte humiliated by the people of Manila. They thumbed down Sara, and shouted ‘Marcos! Marcos! Marcos!’,” reads part of the Tagalog-language caption to the video shared on April 26.
The clip — which has been viewed over 470,000 times — shows Vice President Sara Duterte on a stage campaigning for several local candidates in Manila on April 25.
She can be heard saying, “I need to mention your congressman here in this district. He is an example of how we vote automatically for those who are popular, endorsed by someone popular, came from a family of politicians or [as I said earlier] ‘that’s a Duterte, let’s vote for that person’.”
“You know that congressman of yours? That Joel Chua?”
The crowd reacts and shouts a name repeatedly.
Chua led the House of Representatives committee that scrutinised Duterte’s alleged misuse of millions of dollars in public funds, one of the accusations that led to her impeachment in February (archived link).
He is also a member of the prosecution in the vice president’s forthcoming Senate trial that could remove her from office and bar her from future government posts (archived link).
Chua will run against two other candidates — Ramon Morales and Johanna Nieto — in Manila’s third district in the mid-term elections.
The relationship between Duterte and President Ferdinand Marcos is at a nadir, their former alliance giving way to a months-long public battle that has seen wild accusations traded, including an alleged plot to assassinate Marcos, the first lady, and House Speaker Martin Romualdez (archived link).
The video also spread widely alongside the same claim on TikTok and on Instagram.
But the crowd did not chant Marcos’s name.
Read the full story on AFP Fact Check.