Internet trolls attack The Filipino Scribe over INC endorsement story
The Filipino Scribe was inaccessible for most users from Wednesday afternoon until late night because of a sudden surge in website visits and what appears to be a denial-of-service (DDoS) attack from Internet trolls.
It came several hours after this news blog published a story about the candidates the leadership of Iglesia ni Cristo (INC) endorsed for national positions including Davao City Mayor Rodrigo Duterte for president, Senator Bongbong Marcos for vice president as well as twelve senatorial candidates.
This website decided to run the story because of the reliability of its sources and also because the government-run People’s Television (PTV4) Network posted a picture of a sample ballot distributed to INC members on its official Twitter page.
The post quickly became viral on social media, with thousands of Internet users sharing the article. Nevertheless, a number of netizens challenged the accuracy of the reports, with some of them saying that the website has no credibility and that the Church has not officially announced anything (which, to be fair, is right).
This double standard is very disgusting. When a blog publishes something ahead of others, its credibility is doubted, but when a mainstream media outlet reports on the exact same thing, then people regard it as 100% accurate right there and then. For example, Rappler.com’s story of INC endorsing the Marcos-Duterte tandem was published twelve hours behind The Filipino Scribe.
On a personal note, I can’t help but feel offended by those people who described this website as not credible just because it was able to report on something way ahead of its competitors. For their information, I dedicated five years of my life for it to become what it is now, a nationally-recognized blog with an international readership. I’m not going to put my credibility at stake for nothing.
PS: To resolve the problem, a technical specialist from BlueHost (TFS’s web hosting provider) suggested that the site needs to be hosted on a VPS (virtual private server) instead of a shared server because the huge traffic it generates slows down the performance of other websites using the same server. I took that offer because it was provided for a reasonable price compared.
Yesterday, the website received over 77,000 in page hits – just 1,000 views short of the all-time record made three years ago at the height of Marjorie Barretto’s photo scandal.
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