Our Team
We are a collective of scholars and community organizers in the Global North and South, with our members in the Philippines having a proven record of collaborating with partners in the grassroots. As a whole, our work sits at the intersection of political communication, deliberative democracy, tech ethics, and worker justice.
Rossine Fallorina
Managing Director
Ross is a graduate student at the Department of Sociology, University of the Philippines Diliman. He has co-authored a number of reports on disinformation, including Human Rights in Survival Mode: Rebuilding Trust and Supporting Digital Workers in the Philippines (2021), Understudied Digital Platforms in the Philippines (2021), and Parallel Public Spheres: Influence Operations in the 2022 Philippine Elections (2022) and From Disinformation to Influence Operations: The Evolution of Disinformation in Three Electoral Cycles (2023).
Dr Jonathan Corpus Ong
Founder and Executive Director
Jonathan is Professor of Global Digital Media at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. In 2020-2023, he was Research Fellow at Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center for the Technology and Social Change Project. He was selected as one of 28 Andrew Carnegie Fellowship Awardees (2022-2024).
Jonathan has published 3 books and over 25 journal articles in his research areas of global media ethics, digital politics, and the anthropology of humanitarianism. In his disinformation studies research, Jonathan uses ethnography to understand the social identities, work arrangements and moral justifications of “paid trolls” and political public relations strategists. An engaged researcher, Jonathan has a long record of working closely with humanitarian and human rights organizations. A popular media analyst, his “disinformation whistleblowers podcast” Catch Me If You Can, now in its second season, was ranked in Top 5% Most Followed Podcasts globally by Spotify in the year 2022.
His research has been funded by the Luminate Group, the Gates Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council, among others.
Jose Mari Hall Lanuza
Head of Research
JM is a PhD student and Research Enhancement and Leadership (REAL) fellow studying political communication and disinformation at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He is Assistant Professor in the University of the Philippines Manila Political Science Program. His work on media systems and disinformation in Southeast Asia was published in the volume Disinformation in the Global South (2022, Wiley). His research focuses on disinformation in electoral campaigns, political communication in the Philippines, media systems, and the politics of mass media.
Dr Nicole Curato
Research Lead for Citizen Engagement
Nicole’s research demonstrates the transformative power of deliberative governance in fragile and conflict-affected settings. Her work examines the enabling conditions for marginalized communities to assert their voices in policymaking and implementation to secure better outcomes. Recently, her research started focusing on how we can build a ‘global deliberative democracy’ inspired by decolonial theory and practice, critical historiography, and ambitious democratic experiments such as the Global Assembly on the Climate and Ecological Crisis.
She is the founder of the Global Citizens’ Assembly Network (GloCAN), former editor of the Journal of Deliberative Democracy, founding editor of the Deliberative Democracy Digest, and founder of the Deliberative Democracy Summer School. She has published three books on deliberative democracy, numerous journal articles, public reports, and op-eds for outlets like The New York Times, The Guardian, and Australian Foreign Affairs.
Juan Felix
Head of Public Engagement
Juan is a human rights worker and researcher whose work informed Philippine organizations’ campaigns combating online anti-LGBT+ rhetoric, and network-strengthening for activists and women environmental defenders. His interests center on social media affordances and disinformation. He co-authored From Disinformation to Influence Operations: The Evolution of Disinformation in Three Electoral Cycles (2023).
Ferdinand Sanchez II
Researcher
Ferds is a research assistant at the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance at the University of Canberra. He co-authored a number of publications including Parallel Public Spheres: Influence Operations in the 2022 Philippine Elections (2022) and From Disinformation to Influence Operations: The Evolution of Disinformation in Three Electoral Cycles (2023). His work focuses on disinformation, deliberative democracy, and Filipino masculinities. He serves as the President of Tara Kabataan (Manila-based youth organization), a member of DAKILA, and the Youth Coordinator for Partido Manggagawa.
Rowella Marri Berizo
Researcher
Owe is a digital rights youth advocate and researcher. Her grassroots experience in community organizing revolves around her advocacy against online gender-based violence and internet governance.
Neen Sapalo
Research Fellow
Neen is a Filipina anthropologist whose research focuses on death, disaster, and digital cultures. She is Assistant Professor at the University of the Philippines Diliman, where she is also taking her PhD in Anthropology. Concurrently, she is Affiliate Faculty of the Folklore Studies Program of her college and President of Ugnayang Pang-Aghamtao or the Anthropological Association of the Philippines. When taking a break from teaching or doing fieldwork, she does capoeira, an Afro-Brazilian martial art.