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Playing with the devil: Philippines and Thailand seek social media account registration

  • Writer: Manushya Foundation
    Manushya Foundation
  • 13 hours ago
  • 7 min read

Manushya Foundation’s Digital Rights Advisor Jean Linis-Dinco warns that social media account verification pushes in the Philippines and Thailand risk turning “online safety” into a gateway for expanded surveillance and repression.



“Civil societies that play with the idea of breaking anonymity in order to solve the problem of misinformation are rehearsing a dangerous illusion. Once the doors have opened, no amount of ‘guardrails’ will stop the expansion of surveillance.”

In an ironic twist last year, what should have been a celebration of Human Rights Day in Australia turned into a moment defined by surveillance. The government imposed a sweeping ban on social media access for everyone under the age of 16, targeting platforms including but not limited to Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. The social media crackdown in the land down under set off a domino effect globally, as states with varying levels of democratic accountability saw an opportunity to follow suit. “If Australia can do it, why can’t we?” was probably the question that lingered in the heads of these lawmakers. The Philippines and Thailand became the latest ones to adopt similar measures using the very same pretext of paternalism to tighten control.


In a move that shadows the growing international trend toward digital surveillance, the Philippines’ Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) issued a draft circular proposing a mandatory account verification system. Section 5 of the circular boasts what Secretary Aguda calls the ‘Right to Pseudonymity’1, which is meant to guarantee free expression by not requiring public display of one's legal name. Yet, every account remains tied to a legally verified identity through SIM card registration. This policy branched out of the legal precedence provided by the Republic Act No. 11934, signed into law in 2022, that requires registration of SIMs before activation. Whilst the Philippines is not the first country to pass a SIM registration law, the passage has been met with concerns from human rights organisations due to the country’s current socio-political climate. A report from Privacy International revealed that as of 2020, 155 countries have mandatory SIM registration laws, often citing national security or cybercrime prevention as justification.


Not far from Manila, Bangkok is moving in the same direction. In August 2025, Thailand’s National Broadcasting and Telecommunications Commission (NBTC) issued a new directive that requires all mobile operators (i.e. True and AIS) to implement biometric liveness detection for SIM card registration. This means operators are now legally obliged to verify users in real time using photo and video-based authentication. This measure paved the way for the introduction of sweeping verification reforms targeting both telcos and online platforms in November last year. Tighter SIM registration protocols were also on the table through the ‘Survival SIM’ policy that seek to restrict access for accounts identified as mule accounts (accounts often knowingly but sometimes unknowingly used to move or launder illicit finances). Just last month, Thailand escalated its push for tighter digital controls following the release of the Electronic Transactions Committee's draft notification that would oblige all social media platforms operating in the country to implement mandatory identity verification for both user accounts and advertisers.

 

Implications on human rights


Everything laid out in the policies of both the Philippines and Thailand looks good on paper. Who would not want protection from scams, identity theft, and the omnipresence of online disinformation networks? Except this consensus around safety is the very reason why the dangers of these policies remain invisible on the surface. In legal environments with weak judicial oversight, non-existent governmental accountability and fragile enforcement of human rights laws, it is difficult not to tie mechanisms such as account verification to extension of surveillance.


In the Philippines, for instance, red-tagging has been a constant threat for activists dating back to the Cold War era. American imperialism helped push McCarthyism to Filipinos' every day, which was later institutionalised by the dictatorship of the father of the current sitting president. It reached new heights under the administration of Rodrigo Duterte which organised a whole-of-nation approach to attain ‘inclusive and sustainable peace’ through the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC). The architecture, nonetheless, did not collapse with the end of Duterte’s regime as Human Rights Watch found that Marcos Jr’s administration harassed and threatened labour union leaders by accusing them of being part of communist insurgencies.  In much the same way, Thailand has a parallel trajectory in terms of surveillance and suppression of dissent, shaped by the long history of military intervention in civilian life especially since the 2014 coup. The country has been moving back and forth between fragile democracy and military junta. And laws such as the Computer Crimes Act have been wielded not just against cybercriminals, but against opposition figures, journalists and even student protesters.


It is within these contexts that the proposed mandatory identity verification systems must be understood. Account verification does not exist in a socio-political vacuum, divorced from the reality on the ground. Given the conditions in both countries, account verification ceases from being a simple object used to deter crimes. Rather, it becomes a mechanism of state control whose function is to silence dissent. See, when a state holds the monopoly on setting the legal definitions on what constitute criminality, public order and national security, and when those definitions encompass voices of resistance, every extension of surveillance must be treated as a deliberate, brutal attack on political freedoms.


In August 2024, we at Manushya Foundation released an explainer on how the UN Cybercrime Treaty may offer international approval for authoritarian practices. Both Thailand and the Philippines signed the treaty in 2025, and now we are seeing a pattern emerge in which the language of the treaty itself is reinforced through national policies to expand surveillance and mandate identity verification under the pretext of security and cooperation. The United Nations has turned into a theatre for authoritarian powers to get an international stamp of legitimacy.


Anonymity in the face of fascism


For so long, anonymity has been the refuge of many activists from different societies in every given time. From those who wrote anonymous leaflets and underground newspapers, anonymity has enabled people to question and challenge authority and power without immediate risk of jail time or execution. Arguments that call to weaken online anonymity in the name of public order utilises the same carceral logic used to justify mass incarceration. The promise of safety falters in the face of a system that requires control as a precondition without touching the base upon which the superstructure of oppression is built and fortified.


Account verification takes our society a step closer to total surveillance that not only watches, but also preemptively disciplines. This is why it is disappointing, though not entirely surprising, to see increasing calls from civil societies2 to allow account verification under the conditions that it can only be used to identify the identities of fake news propagators. Not only does this premise miss the political nature of misinformation itself, it also misunderstands how power operates once identification infrastructures are put in place. Let me explain what I meant by this. First, misinformation is not an anomaly produced by anonymity. It is a symptom of a larger problem produced by political systems that reward manipulation on top of unequal access to information and the concentrated ownership of platforms. Second, we should stop treating misinformation as a technical problem that can be solved by identity verification. It is either full anonymity or no anonymity at all. Civil societies that play with the idea of breaking anonymity in order to solve the problem of misinformation are rehearsing a dangerous illusion. Because once the doors have opened, no amount of ‘guardrails’ will stop the expansion of surveillance. Civil societies should stop legitimising the very reasoning that it should be resisting.


Anonymity is only a response to a world where speaking freely can cost you your job, your freedom or worse, your life. Surrendering anonymity based on the conception of fighting crimes or misinformation does not yield a safer society. What it creates is a healthy environment where repression and fascism no longer need to justify itself. It only needs to call itself protection. And when that happens, it will be the working class who will pay the price. And that price is not written in data, but in blood. 

1 The right to pseudonymity is not the same as the right to anonymity. Pseudonymity means the person uses an alias, pseudonym, pen names but real identity can be technically recoverable. Anonymity can reliably identify the speaker, even in principle, because no identifying data exists or is retained.
2 See Jeffrey, Staeheli and Marshall (2018) for further discussion on the duality of civil societies.

  


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