28 year-old Georgina is a transgender digital marketer with a computer engineering degree from one of the leading national universities. She remembers getting her start in digital marketing work after being rejected many times over when interviewing for jobs directly related to her degree. With her long black hair, short-sleeved shirts, and soft-spoken tone, she felt she was never given a fair shot by interviewers in a male-dominated field, who were quick to assume she’s too maarte [fussy] to build or maintain computer hardware. She told us how she had to be especially resourceful in finding work and trying out specialized digital boutiques to find a stable source of income that could support her family, as well as her save up for her own transition and reassignment procedures.
One digital marketing boutique she worked for specialized in search engine optimization, helping clients improve their Google Page Rank. During the interview, she narrated how their marketing portfolio included nefarious techniques of using fake and clickbait headlines and websites to drive web traffic to their corporate clients. The nonchalance with which she narrated this seemed to suggest that such practices are never regarded with shame or regret in her workplace, but are viewed instead as enterprising or innovative.
An early adopter of new technology, she claimed she has always been fascinated by new financial opportunities offered by digital platforms. When she grew in understanding of the influencer industry a few years ago, she created what is popularly called a “quote account” on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram and steadily grew its followers seeking daily inspiration from its feed of bland feel-good positivity quotes and memes. Eventually, she was hired to promote campaigns for local telcos, then celebrities and their movies, then political clients. She volunteers her powers of noise creation and “signal scrambling” for people and causes she believes in, such as promoting her favorite celebrity crushes or making sure Miss Philippines dominates social media conversations in the lead-up to the annual Miss Universe pageant. The key task of anonymous influencer accounts, as with regular influencer accounts, is to achieve authenticity: “Sometimes clients insist on being explicit with branding or hashtags, but that’s how you lose followers–when you become labeled as bayaran [paid stooge]”.
Georgina enjoys relative privilege as the right-hand woman of a chief disinformation architect. This means that after a campaign briefing, it becomes her responsibility to assemble and manage the team of anonymous influencers–people with whom she maintains relationships of “competitive collegialities” (to be explained in a later section). Georgina introduced us during fieldwork to other “trans trolls” who use lifelong skills of gender code-switching to deploy the right personas and hit the right notes when broadcasting deceptive messages in, quite paradoxically, the most authentic way possible.
Click here for the full paper Architects of Networked Disinformation.