BAGUIO CITY — Reflecting on a potentially grim future, Supreme Court Associate Justice Marvic Leonen on Thursday advised Filipinos to be more critical of information they get from tweets and Facebook posts.

“Today I sense impatience. False news and false truths become powerful because people no longer pay the cost of being critical,” Leonen told a student forum at the University of the Cordilleras here.

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“Being critical requires understanding more than the depths of a 140-character tweet or a hastily written Facebook post. It requires understanding what truth means, what the evidence is, the credibility and degree of knowledge of the author—in fact, identifying the real author—[and] examining the logic of all the statements that are made.”

He said Filipinos should be wary of how information, coursed through mainstream and social media, can manipulate them into supporting or objecting to political decisions.

He said disinformation convinced the public to legitimize a dictatorship in 1973 when citizens’ assemblies organized by newly-created barangay ratified the 1973 Constitution.

“With every bone in my entire body, I refuse to accept our people should forever be manacled to the maintenance of a political economy [through] ignorance,” Leonen said.

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