MANILA: American technology firm Meta Platforms Inc., which owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, has made a commitment to the Philippine government to remove harmful artificial intelligence (AI)-generated deepfakes from its platforms and cooperate with investigations on cybercrime and other online threats.
A Philippine delegation met with Meta policy officials handling the Asia-Pacific region on Thursday (Aug 27) in Singapore to discuss details of the company’s commitment in the wake of violent incidents that local officials suspect stemmed from social media content.
Among those who attended the meeting were Secretary Henry Aguda of the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT), Director Melvin Matibag of the National Bureau of Investigation, Laguna Rep. Ann Matibag who chairs the House committee on women, and representatives from the office of Sen. Risa Hontiveros.
“We were able to convince Meta to commit to providing our authorities with subscriber information and traffic data once they identify a threat to the safety of our children, even before an actual attack takes place,” Hontiveros said in a video message on Friday.
Hontiveros chairs the Senate committee on women, children, family relations, and gender equality.
She said the “parallel development” will further gain traction for Senate Bill No. 2424, or the proposed Child Online Safety and Protection Act, which seeks to regulate children’s access to social media platforms. The bill sets 16 years as the minimum age for social media use.
SB 2424, which was sponsored in plenary on Wednesday, will also obligate social media companies to protect minors from various online risks.
In a Viber message to the Inquirer, Aguda outlined Meta’s commitment, including the establishment of a technical working group with the Philippine government to improve coordination, response times, and action on harmful content; the designation of a point of contact to facilitate faster response time; and the sharing of crucial data when necessary.
Aguda said Meta also pledged continued cooperation with Philippine investigations, “particularly (on) cases involving imminent harm to children or risk of death or serious physical injury.”
A team from Meta is expected to visit Manila in mid-September to formalize the framework and commitments made.
Senate President Sherwin “Win” Gatchalian welcomed the development as a “good step.”
But it doesn’t mean that the Senate will no longer push for SB 2424, which also proposes that Meta set up a Philippine office, he told the Inquirer in a phone interview.
“So if there’s a problem, we can easily coordinate with them and we can prevent future problems,” he said.
Gatchalian added that a bill will make it easier to penalize social media companies for violations, citing the case in the United States where Meta was slapped with a multistate lawsuit accusing it of intentionally designing addictive social media platforms that harm children’s mental health.
The company entered into a landmark $18-billion settlement this month to resolve the cases.
But because there is no law in the Philippines yet, he said, it would be difficult to make social media companies accountable for harmful content.
“For example, what happened in Zamboanga, the was uploaded and they did not stop it. They could be penalized [if a law exists],” Gatchalian said. The senator was referring to the video of the Ateneo de Zamboanga University shooting earlier this month that was uploaded on Facebook but was not immediately taken down.
The livestream of the deadly incident remained online for about 14 minutes, according to reports. It stayed for five minutes before the Cybercrime Investigation and Coordinating Center (CICC) flagged it and notified Meta, which took approximately four minutes to take it off the platform’s video feed.
Agreeing with Gatchalian, Sen Erwin Tulfo said “we still have to craft a law for all social media apps—to penalize them. We penalize all of them if they fail to follow their community standards.”
According to the CICC, which was also represented at the Singapore meeting, Meta will “readily provide the credentials and relevant data of users behind online sexual abuse and exploitation of children, child sexual abuse and exploitation material, obscene content and other forms of online abuse.”
The CICC said the requested data will be provided once the NBI issues a subpoena, subject to legal requirements and applicable laws. This is intended to help investigators identify perpetrators behind online offenses and build up cases against them more quickly.
The CICC noted that one of the critical results of the talks was the establishment of a stronger mechanism for addressing AI-generated content, specifically deepfakes.
“This is an important step forward because it gives us a more preemptive layer of protection. We look forward to working with Meta so that individuals who are targeted by deepfakes can receive assistance before the content causes further damage,” CICC Executive Director Renato Paraiso said.
Under the proposed mechanism, individuals may apply for protection, allowing Meta to identify and remove deepfake content targeting them.
Harmful online content involving minors, including videos of the fatal school shootings in Zamboanga and Tacloban cities, has led to calls to ban Meta in the Philippines.
But with the social media giant now agreeing to cooperate, Paraiso said in a statement, “For now, banning is the last option.”
“We now have concrete areas of cooperation, and we are looking forward to seeing these turn into actual improvements in online safety for Filipinos, especially for our children,” he added.
Meta’s Facebook remains the top social media platform in the country, with 95.8 million users as of late 2025. This represents an 81.9-per cent reach of the total population and 97.7 per cent of the country’s internet users. - Philippine Daily Inquirer/ANN
