Maria hates Mocha because she is a threat to Rappler, says writer and diplomat Rigoberto Tiglao

Maria Ressa loathes Mocha Uson's blog, but its technology is also what Rappler made use of.

This is what writer and diplomat Rigoberto Tiglao said on Thursday, when he wrote an editorial explaining why Rappler CEO Maria Ressa detests Duterte supporter and blogger Mocha Uson.


Uson, who  manages a Facebook page called the "Mocha Uson Blog", has garnered over four million followers in a span of a few months.

Ressa, who manages Rappler, deemed to be the third most trusted news site in the country just years after its release in 2012, is believed to have formed this hatred of Uson because of its success, which is identical, even surpassing that of Rappler's.

Ressa, in an article against Uson published weeks ago, even admitted that the sexy-star-turned-political-blogger has more followers than the four-year-old news site.

Tiglao said Ressa might be thinking,  “How can this sexy-dancer-turned-blogger with little money have a bigger audience than Rappler, funded by a big foreign and local businessman?”

He claimed that Ressa might be threatened by the success of  Uson.

Ressa wrote a piece against Uson which said that Uson only earned her popularity because of a technique in social media, claiming Uson's page made use "trolls" or fake accounts, making use of Facebook's flawed algorithms which leads netizens to a particular page, earning Uson a large following.

After the piece was published, Ressa posted several tweets implying that the blog was headed to ruins.

One of her tweets read: “Time to take back the Internet. Time to take back social media.”

Tiglao questioned if Ressa had anything to do with the petition against Uson.

"Ressa is either being hypocritical, or she just doesn’t know what Rappler really is." Tiglao said, claiming that the accusations of the technology used by Uson, is in fact the same technology used by Rappler to earn its fame.


In an interview in the Nieman Foundation magazine just a few months after Rappler went online in 2012, Ressa boasted that in just a month’s time, the site reached a web traffic that took the Philippine Daily Inquirer’s website a decade to achieve.

Tiglao said she didn't know what she was talking about.

"Rappler grew that fast in a month not because of excellence in its news reportage,  but because of its use of expensive web technology, and techniques most of the biggest commercial websites in the West routinely use to expand their internet presence, which are really of the same type of tech tricks on the web, Ressa alleged Mocha and Duterte operatives were using."

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Tiglao stated that Rappler hired a few tech firms specializing in what’s called search-engine optimization, a discipline that analyzes such algorithms in order to tweak websites so that these will rise to the upper rungs of a Google search, or will result in more Facebook users going to that site.

He said Rappler was never about good journalism, but has been resorting to cheap commercial tricks to increase traffic.

Tiglao said that the  site earned its growth from two executives, Manny Ayala and Nix Nolledo, both knew how to handle internet and a website's traffic well.

"Mocha’s blog though has become Ressa’s nightmare: That a blog with little money and practically no staff could overtake such a huge web enterprise as her Rappler. What if some big businessman bankrolls the website Mocha Uson Blog, as big businessmen finance Rappler?" he said.

He said it was suspicious how Rappler has not posted a single news article or opinion piece pointing out the inefficiencies of our telephone companies, foreigners’ dominance of it, and the corruption in this sector.

"That makes me suspect that one of its hidden owners or at least financiers could be the owners the two telcos" he wrote.

SOURCE: Manila Times

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