Turning prodigal daughters to pariahs: state-sponsored morally motivated networked harassment in the Philippines

How does the state perform and maintain citizenship boundary work using platformed moral othering? Building on morally motivated networked harassment, I argue that the state can nudge supporters toward online incivility against activists by signaling norm violations. I further argue that the state can signal such violations using social media affordances obliquely, justifying dehumanization of activists without consequence. By examining the Philippines’ National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC), I show how the state can perform citizenship boundary work through false victimhood, simultaneously legitimizing itself and delegitimizing its critics. As state social media slyly avoids regulation, there is a need to reimagine affordance constraints, government uses of social media, and a reiteration of the value of legacy media over social media as channels of official government communication.