Our Story
Fostering Convivial Collaborations for a Healthier, Democratic Public Sphere
Sigla Research Center is a third space at the intersection of academe, civil society, and activism, where creative minds, seasoned educators, and community leaders collaborate on whole-of-society solutions for a more resilient public sphere. We build capacity and translation strategies for sociologically grounded research about the information environment to have a more meaningful impact in teaching, policymaking, advocacy work, and creative practice.
While disinformation is not a new concept, the issue as Filipinos know it started taking shape during the leadup to the 2016 Philippine general elections. Since then, the country has been dubbed by Meta as “patient zero” in the fight against disinformation and saw an exponential spike and diversification of social media influence operations, powerful enough to intensify political polarization online and offline. This issue is not lost to the public, as a 2022 Pulse Asia survey revealed that around 86% of Filipinos believe fake news to be a problem in the country.
The attention around disinformation has led to a vibrant response by Filipinos that made the country a source of inspiration and learning for its neighbors.
However, we still lack strategic interventions grounded by a critical understanding of disinformation. Most efforts tend to still be overly technical (“how to spot fake news”, “check your sources”) or merely assert the authority of legacy news media, while others even carry disempowering frames suggesting that masses have become “brainwashed” or “dumb voters”. Opportunistic politicians, tech entrepreneurs, and even the government’s own presidential commission have taken on anti-disinformation as a core advocacy and potentially risk diluting the critical and independent perspective of truly meaningful interventions.
We seek to blast open the disinformation space by influencing it to go beyond established frames of understanding the issue and its solutions. Guided by reflexivity and criticality, we seek to advocate for bespoke efforts departing from interventions that are top-down, Global North-facing, platform-centric, and induce moral panic.
We want to break the stereotype of academics lacking public engagement by building an organization that serves as a “third space” that gathers academics, policymakers, media practitioners, and human rights advocates in the spirit of collaboration and conviviality by supporting public-facing projects, mentoring programs, writing fellowships, and creative co-productions like podcasts and educational materials.
