Philippines’ worst school shooting puts social media, games in the dock

After two teenagers opened fire at a Philippine high school this week, the first question lawmakers asked was not about gun control, but the internet.
Three pupils were killed and 20 injured at San Jose National High School in Tacloban City, Leyte province, on Monday – the highest total casualty count of any Philippine school shooting.
It has renewed calls to restrict Filipino children’s access to social media and online games, coming months after police said they had disrupted a school shooting plot by teens radicalised online and as neighbouring Indonesia recently enacted its own ban on under-16s accessing “high-risk” platforms.
Philippine National Police confirmed on Monday that one of the students allegedly involved in this week’s school shooting had posted gun-related videos to social media, including footage of himself firing a weapon.
On Wednesday, the Philippine cybercrime agency temporarily banned online game GoreBox – known for its graphic depictions of violence – after police investigations showed one of the suspects was an avid player.
Photographs circulating online also showed one of the pair wearing a shirt bearing the name of German industrial rock band KMFDM, favoured by the perpetrators of the 1999 Columbine massacre, prompting speculation that the attack may have been inspired by that shooting.
Violent content, online threats, dangerous trends and hateful behaviour can plant ideas in young minds
Philippine Senator Juan Miguel Zubiri
“Violent content, online threats, dangerous trends and hateful behaviour can plant ideas in young minds and give them the confidence to act on things they should never even consider,” Senator Juan Miguel Zubiri said in a statement on Tuesday supporting tighter social media regulation.
Fellow Senator Joel Villanueva, who authored a bill in May on platform accountability for under-15s and heads a Senate education committee, said it was time to “take a hard look at the various factors influencing the behaviour and well-being of our youth, including their exposure to harmful content online”.
And Senator Risa Hontiveros, who chairs the committee on women, children and family relations, announced that she would resume a Senate inquiry into online platforms and youth radicalisation – first opened in April – on July 1.

But analysts and child advocates warn that while exposure to violent online content is a genuine concern, blanket bans risk ignoring the isolation, bullying and weak support structures that can also fuel radicalisation.
“Gaming can contribute to radicalisation, but I’d caution against implying it causes it,” said Saddiq Basha, a senior analyst at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies’ International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism Research, who studies far-right extremism and violent online communities across Southeast Asia.
He cited documented cases in the region where gaming had featured in radicalisation pathways, among them a 14-year-old in Singapore who recreated Islamic State-style executions in online games and an Indonesian recruitment operation involving roughly 110 children in which such games served as one of several entry points.
Yet Basha said these cases “remain few against a population of millions of ordinary players”, stressing that while online games and social media “may show up in cases of radicalisation”, correlation was not causation.
“It tends to be the social dimension that counts – the chat, the community, the sense of belonging – rather than the game itself,” he said, noting that most indoctrination occurred off-platform, such as in encrypted messaging apps. “The game is one link in a longer chain, not the point at which someone is turned.”

An anonymous teacher quoted in the Philippine Daily Inquirer described one of the Tacloban suspects as a “quiet [and] socially withdrawn” student who had been held back a year due to poor grades, fitting a profile that extremist movements have long sought to exploit.
Basha said such movements had a history of targeting isolated adolescents who were “negotiating questions of identity and belonging”, offering them a defined sense of identity, community and cause.
A familiar panic
Treating online games as the root cause of radicalisation risks repeating old mistakes, according to Carl Javier, executive director of Data and AI Ethics PH, an NGO and advocacy group focused on the responsible use of data and artificial intelligence.
Society has blamed films, television and video games for youth violence before; the moral panic eventually recedes, but the underlying conditions do not.
“If we already know that the young are vulnerable, how do we share accountability in protecting them while also providing spaces for them to develop their autonomy?” Javier asked
“This does bring us back to the question of platform responsibility … What kind of behaviour should platforms allow? What kind of protections need to be in place?”

Basha said banning gaming platforms missed “the forest for the trees” since the radicalising content still existed elsewhere online and extremist communities could “simply migrate”.
A more durable approach “would direct attention to the extremist communities themselves rather than the platforms they pass through, while investing in upstream prevention”, he said.
Paco Pangalangan, a fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Carr-Ryan Centre for Human Rights whose research encompasses tech regulation, agreed that “a ban mostly relocates the problem”.
“The real work is building safety into the platforms themselves: safety by design, high-privacy defaults for minors, limits on the features built to keep children hooked, real limits on who can message and chat with a child,” he said, arguing against the “reflex to lock kids out”.
“Kids with resources find a VPN or borrow an adult’s account and get in anyway, while the platforms carry on much as before.”
To truly tackle the problem, Basha called for improved mental health and social support systems, digital literacy programmes that teach young people to recognise manipulation and training so that families, schools and teachers can spot early warning signs.
“None of this is as immediately satisfying as a ban,” he said. “But it engages the problem where it actually resides.”
Additional reporting by Bloomberg