The Philippines' Commission on Elections (Comelec) entered the May 2025 midterms armed with a new regulatory instrument: Resolution No. 11064, issued in late 2024, which required candidates and political parties to formally register their official social media accounts with the commission and authorised Comelec to order platforms to take down unregistered campaign accounts and content judged to violate the rules. Framed as an answer to disinformation and undisclosed political advertising, the resolution instead built a sprawling prior-restraint regime over the country's most important channel for political conversation — and digital rights groups, led by the Foundation for Media Alternatives (FMA), were right to push back.
The instinct behind the resolution is understandable. The Philippines is one of the most online electorates on earth, and its 2016 and 2022 cycles were defined as much by Facebook pages, TikTok edits and YouTube influencers as by traditional broadcast. Coordinated inauthentic behaviour, vote-buying ads disguised as lifestyle content, and unattributed attack pages were and remain real problems. But the policy question is not whether elections need rules — they do — but whether handing a single state body the power to order platforms to disappear political speech, with limited judicial oversight and broad discretion, is the proportionate response. It is not.
Registration As a Speech License
The core mechanism of Resolution No. 11064 is mandatory registration of "official" campaign accounts. On paper this looks like a disclosure rule — voters should know which Facebook page actually belongs to a senatorial candidate, and which is a fan page or a parody. In practice, registration becomes a license to speak. An unregistered account that posts campaign-adjacent content can be classified as a violation and ordered off the platform. The line between "campaign material" and ordinary political commentary by a supporter, a journalist, a civil-society group or a citizen meme-maker is precisely where the chilling effect bites.
The Philippine Constitution's Bill of Rights, Article III Section 4, is unambiguous: "No law shall be passed abridging the freedom of speech, of expression, or of the press." The Supreme Court has repeatedly read this provision broadly in the election context — most notably in Diocese of Bacolod v. Comelec (G.R. No. 205728, 2015), where the Court struck down a Comelec order requiring the removal of a tarpaulin posted by a private group expressing political views, holding that the commission's regulatory power over candidates does not extend to private speech about candidates. Resolution No. 11064's reach into platform-hosted speech sits uneasily with that precedent.
Takedown Power Without Adequate Due Process
The more serious flaw is procedural. The resolution empowers Comelec to direct platforms to remove content and disable accounts the commission deems in violation. Independent legal observers and FMA have flagged the absence of clear, fast, and meaningful avenues for affected speakers to contest a takedown before their content disappears — a textbook prior-restraint concern. Election speech is uniquely time-sensitive: a post removed in the final 72 hours of a campaign is, for practical purposes, censored forever, even if a tribunal later vindicates the speaker.
This is the same defect that has dogged comparable regimes elsewhere. India's 2021 IT Rules empower government bodies to demand rapid takedowns of "unlawful" political content; that framework is now subject to multiple constitutional challenges before the Bombay and Madras High Courts precisely because the speed-versus-due-process balance was struck too far in the state's favour. Brazil's TSE used analogous powers in 2022 to order removals of campaign content within hours, generating its own backlash. The Philippines should learn from these examples rather than replicate them.
What a Proportionate Framework Would Look Like
None of this means the status quo before Resolution No. 11064 was satisfactory. A pro-innovation, speech-respecting framework can do real work on the problems Comelec identified without the constitutional cost. Three principles should guide a redesign:
- Disclosure over registration. Require paid political advertisements to carry standardised "paid for by" disclosures and require platforms to maintain searchable political ad libraries — the model already operationalised by Meta and Google in major democracies. Disclosure informs voters without converting Comelec into a gatekeeper of who may speak.
- Judicial check on takedowns. Any order to remove non-commercial political speech should require expedited judicial authorisation, with notice to the speaker and a fast appellate track. The Supreme Court's e-court infrastructure can plausibly support 24-hour review windows during election periods.
- Platform transparency, not platform deputisation. Mandate that platforms publish granular transparency reports on government takedown requests during campaign periods, as several signatories to the Santa Clara Principles already do voluntarily. Sunlight on state demands is a more durable safeguard than trusting any single regulator's good faith.
The Bigger Picture
The Philippines sits at the heart of an Asia-Pacific debate about who governs online political speech. Indonesia's 2024 election saw extensive use of Ministry of Communication takedown orders; Thailand has used its Computer Crime Act to chill electoral commentary; Malaysia's Communications and Multimedia Act remains a perennial source of speech complaints. Comelec's Resolution No. 11064 risks adding the region's longest-standing democracy to a list it should be leading away from, not joining.
The May 2025 midterms have come and gone, but the resolution remains on the books and will frame the 2028 presidential race unless revisited. Comelec deserves credit for taking the integrity of digital campaigning seriously. It now needs to take the integrity of digital speech equally seriously — and that means trading broad takedown authority for the harder, slower, but constitutionally sound work of disclosure, transparency, and judicial oversight. The internet has made Philippine politics noisier, messier, and more democratic. Quieting it by regulatory fiat is the wrong fix for the right problem.