Social media and the Ayala #ScrapPork rally

MANILA, Philippines – Much like its predecessor in Luneta, the #ScrapPork rally at Ayala Ave., Makati City, on October 4 was organized mainly through social media. Over 2,400 people attended the protest, according to police estimates.

READ: Over 2000 attend #ScrapPork protest

As of 11pm of October 4, 16,517 social media mentions were made in connection to the rally. The hashtag #MillionPeopleMarch, which was also used in the Luneta protest, remained the most used, peaking at 885 uses by 5pm. The #ScrapPork hashtag, despite being the name of the network that has grown beyond the original #MillionPeopleMarch committee, only peaked at 238 uses by 4pm. 

Overall, the terms “#MillionPeopleMarch” and “pork barrel” were used the most on social media, with the former taking up 35.2% of mentions, and the latter taking up 30.3% of mentions. The #ScrapPork hashtag only managed to pull in 9.8% of mentions during the same period. 

Besides these main topics, other terms that surfaced during the period included “pork,” “PNoy,” “DAP,” “PDAF,” “government,” and “corruption,” among others. 

The numbers, however, are just a fraction of those amassed during the Luneta protest, in which an estimated 80,000 to 100,000 protesters attended. The first rally managed to garner over 140,000 social media mentions, and generated as much as 5 tweets per second at its peak.  

READ: #MillionPeopleMarch: Online and offline success

The Ayala protest offered something novel, however, in the abundance of photos taken from great heights. The venue of the Makati Central Business District (CBD) allowed many office workers, if not to join the crowds in protest, at least to capture the goings-on from the skyscrapers they worked in.

The few bird’s-eye shots from the massive anti-Marcos protest movement of the 1980s, which accorded to Ayala Avenue its historic place in modern Philippine history, were mostly taken by professional photojournalists.  

Below are some of these photos, plus other posts from the viewpoint of the Makati’s CBD’s netizens: 

– Marguerite de Leon/Rappler.com