Philippines
Efforts to regulate online disinformation have intensified in the Philippines, with lawmakers proposing new penalties and authorities launching initiatives with major news organisations. These moves come as the news media industry is being reshaped by shifts in distribution, platform use, and audience behaviour, alongside persistent press freedom concerns.
Lawmakers in the 20th Congress are proposing criminal penalties, regulatory oversight, and takedown mechanisms for allegedly false or misleading online content. Although not yet implemented, this package of bills would allow authorities to order the removal of disinformation and impose fines or prison terms on publishers, platforms, or individuals who fail to comply.
Some proposals include safeguards for legitimate journalism. However, a number of proposals look set to treat journalists as aggravating offenders, triggering maximum penalties if they are found liable for spreading disinformation. Press freedom advocates warn that vague definitions and broad takedown powers could expand state authority over freedom of speech.
The government has also stepped up other anti-disinformation initiatives. In March, the Presidential Communications Office (PCO) launched 'Oplan Kontra Fake News,' bringing together major newspapers to counter false narratives, and later set up an Anti-Fake-News Desk and reporting platform where the public can flag suspicious content for assessment and possible referral to agencies. By May, the initiative had moved into enforcement, with the PCO saying it had referred several cases to the Justice department after the arrest of a former broadcaster over a cyber-libel case involving allegedly fabricated medical records of President Marcos.
ABS-CBN has continued running without a broadcast franchise since 2020 by shifting to a platform-distribution strategy and expanding partnerships with other networks and platforms. The company has also faced internal tensions tied to a family dispute among its owners, including a rejected proposal to shut down the network. Over the past year ABS-CBN has revived well-known news brands across multiple channels. The network relaunched its streaming service iWant, which now carries news programming such as ANC and DZMM TeleRadyo, and revived the DZMM Radyo Patrol 630 brand and its iconic call sign through a joint venture with Prime Media, now operating across radio, television, and streaming platforms.
DZMM Radyo Patrol 630 has resumed 24-hour programming and brought back veteran broadcasters. Data from this year’s Digital News Report suggest that the brand restoration and multi-platform strategy has helped rebuild its reach. Offline DZMM climbed back to reach 15% of Filipinos, though still below the 20% reach it enjoyed in 2020 before the franchise loss.
New entrant and digital-native Bilyonaryo has expanded into broadcast. Its Bilyonaryo News Channel reaches audiences through cable and smart-TV platforms such as Samsung TV Plus and TCLtv+, and it has also entered the North American market. Sister outlets, including Politiko, Abante, DWAR/Abante Radyo, and Mellow 94.7 BFM, reinforce its cross-platform reach. Included for the first time in this year’s Digital News Report, Bilyonaryo recorded 15% online reach and 8% offline reach, partly reflecting the growing importance of connected-TV consumption, with 53% of Filipinos accessing news via smart TVs.
Content creators are also playing a growing role. About one-third of people (36%) report consuming content from creators or influencers mainly focused on the news. A larger proportion (46%) get some content from creators who mostly cover other topics but sometimes discuss current events. Many of the most popular journalist-creators are affiliated with established media organisations, though they often focus on softer or personality-driven content.
Industry groups have also experimented with collaborative models to support local journalism. The Philippine Press Institute’s (PPI) News Commons initiative, launched during the pandemic to aggregate content from member newspapers, began distributing advertising revenues in mid-2025 to participating community publications. PPI and two community outlets also partnered with Rappler to create public chat rooms for shared storytelling and audience engagement.
Newsrooms are also experimenting with artificial intelligence tools. Fact-checking organisation VERA Files launched SEEK, an AI tool trained on its fact-checks archive, while smaller regional outlets are testing AI-assisted production. Palawan News now uses generative tools to produce daily video news with limited staff. Some organisations have begun publishing AI policies, though industry standards are still uneven.
Press freedom remains a prominent issue. Journalists have had some success using legal remedies to challenge harassment and intimidation. In November, a local court voided the National Telecommunications Commission’s 2022 order to block alternative news site Bulatlat and 25 other websites. An anti-disinformation group has also secured identifying information from Meta linked to accounts involved in the red-tagging of a Mindanao journalist through arbitration facilitated by the National Privacy Commission.
But concerns nonetheless persist. Four radio broadcasters were killed after the May 2025 mid-term elections, bringing the number of journalists killed under the Marcos administration to ten. In January, community journalist Frenchie Mae Cumpio was convicted of financing terrorism after nearly six years in detention and has since become a global press freedom icon.
Yvonne T. Chua
University of the Philippines
In the online survey we ask respondents which news brands they have used to access news in the last week. These figures are based on respondents’ recall of the news sources they have used, and should be understood as survey-based measures of weekly brand reach for news.
They are not the same as web analytics, audience ratings, or other audience measurement systems (such as BARB for television in the UK). Those approaches use different methods and may measure different things. Our figures are based on what respondents tell us in an online survey about which brands they have used for news in the past week.
It is also important to note that we ask specifically about use for news. Some multi-genre broadcasters, newspapers, or other providers offer content beyond news, and the figures in our report should not be interpreted as measuring the overall audience reach for these media organisations. They refer only to respondents who say they used that brand to access news.
How do you ask about offline and online news reach?
We ask about offline and online reach separately. First, we ask respondents which brands they have used to access news offline in the last week, via TV, radio, print, and other traditional media. Then we ask which brands they have used to access news online in the last week, via websites, apps, social media, and other forms of internet access.
The questions as asked in the survey are:
Which of the following brands have you used to access news offline in the last week (via TV, radio, print, and other traditional media)? Please select all that apply.
Which of the following brands have you used to access news online in the last week (via websites, apps, social media, and other forms of Internet access)? Please select all that apply.
Respondents can select more than one brand in each question. For that reason, the figures do not add up to 100%. They show the proportion of respondents who say they used each brand for news in the last week.
How do you present the weekly news reach data in the report?
On each country or market page, we present the most widely used brands in two charts: one for offline news reach and one for online news reach. The offline chart covers use via TV, radio, print, and other traditional media. The online chart covers use via websites, apps, social media, and other internet-based forms of access.
The figures shown are weekly news reach: the percentage of respondents who say they used that brand for news at least once in the last week.
These figures are useful for comparing the relative news reach of different brands within each market, and for understanding how news use is distributed across offline and online sources. However, they should not be treated as market shares or measures of total time spent with a brand.
How do you choose which brands to ask about?
The brand selection is a strategic sample and not a comprehensive list of all news providers in each market. We consult with country or market experts, review prior years’ Digital News Report data, and draw on other data sources to identify the most widely used brands for news across traditional and online channels.
In some cases, where a news provider operates a number of related news brands, we aggregate these under a single heading. For example, in the UK, reach for the BBC may include use of several BBC news services across different platforms. This is done to give a clearer sense of the overall reach of major news providers, but it means that figures may not always refer to a single programme, website, app, newspaper, or channel.
Because of survey length limitations, we can only ask about a limited number of brands in each market. The charts should not be treated as exhaustive lists of every brand used for news in that market. Due to space limitations, reach charts show up to 16 of the most used brands, though we ask about more in each survey.
How should the offline and online figures be interpreted?
A respondent may use the same brand both offline and online, and may also use several different brands in the same week. For this reason, the offline and online figures should not be added together to calculate a total audience. They are best read as separate indicators of how far particular brands reach people through different forms of access.
As with other survey-based findings, small differences should be interpreted with caution. We are careful not to claim that one brand reaches more people than another, or that a brand’s reach has changed, unless the differences are large enough to be meaningful. Any year on year change of 2 percentage points or lower is not considered statistically significant.
Changing media
Social media remain the dominant source of news in the Philippines, while television and print continue their long-term decline and online news use has plateaued.
Pay for online news
13%
(-2)
Avoid the news sometimes/often
51%
(+3)
Trust in news overall
28%
(-10)
Global average: 37%
Overall trust in news fell by 10pp this year, even as trust in major brands held steady. Fewer Filipinos now access news directly via TV, radio, or websites, while social media use remains stable, suggesting that more people encounter journalism through platform feeds shaped by polarisation, political messaging, and disinformation.
We ask each respondent to rate a number of popular brands (usually 15 in each country) according to how trustworthy they think each brand’s news output is. We do this on a 0-10 scale, where a score of 0 means that the respondent does not see the brand as trustworthy at all and 10 means that they see the brand as completely trustworthy – with 5 meaning ‘neither trustworthy or untrustworthy’. There is an option for those who have not heard of any particular brand to ensure that scores are based only on responses from people who are familiar with each brand.
When we come to report these scores, we add up the proportion of respondents that give a score between 6-10 and mark this as ‘trust’. We also add up the proportion that give a brand a score between 0-4 and mark this as ‘don’t trust’.
The question as asked in the survey is…
How trustworthy would you say news from the following brands is? Please use the scale below, where 0 is ‘not at all trustworthy’ and 10 is ‘completely trustworthy’.
As we make explicit throughout the report, including next to tables presenting brand-level trust findings, whether respondents consider a brand trustworthy or not is their subjective judgement. The percentage figures shown are aggregates of people’s personal opinions, they are not an objective assessment of underlying trustworthiness. We leave it to each respondent to form an opinion on whether they trust someone or something, and we field the question because we consider the resulting data to be important.
How do you present the trust data in the report?
We present the data in an alphabetised table. In the past, we presented this data as a stacked bar chart, but this led some to treat the chart as a list of the most and least trusted news brands in a given market, despite our explicit explanation this was not what the tables showed.
We present the data in a way that avoids giving small differences the appearance of great importance. In cases where there is around two percentage points difference or less between the brands, we cannot say for sure that one brand is more trusted than another. We are careful not to try to claim that one brand is more trusted than another or that trust scores have changed unless those changes are statistically significant.
Due to survey length limitations, it is important to note that we only ask about 15 of the most widely used brands. It is very likely that there are brands with lower (and higher) trust scores that we do not ask about. For that reason, we cannot say that any brand is the least (or most) trusted overall. Next to each chart we are careful to say: “Only the below brands were included in the survey. It should not be treated as a list of the most or least trusted brands as it is not exhaustive.”
How do you choose which brands to ask about?
We consult with country or market experts, draw on prior years’ Digital News Report data and other data sources to determine the most widely used brands (across traditional and online channels) when it comes to news. We also try to include ‘local newspapers’ or ‘local television’ as catch-all titles as we recognise their impact is considerable in most markets.
How representative is this 48-market survey?
The Digital News Report survey is based on an online poll but the methodology selects participants to be as representative of national populations as possible. Samples are assembled using representative quotas for age, gender, and region in every market and data is weighted to targets based on census/industry accepted data. The full methodology can be found here.
How do you try to contextualise the findings to ensure that trust scores are not taken out of context or misinterpreted?
Trust is one of a number of measures we track, including consumption of different sources, device usage, social media use, and much more. We aim to maintain consistency in our measurements year-on-year so that ratings of trust, levels of news consumption, and more, can be contextualised.
Country data is accompanied by an 800-word commentary from a media expert that aims to set the data in a wider context. We write a short commentary on the trust scores where appropriate, noting any statistically relevant changes.
RSF World Press Freedom Index
114/180
Score 46.79
Measure of press freedom from NGO Reporters Without Borders based on expert assessment. More at rsf.org
