FALSE: Gov’t to give P10,000 pandemic aid to every Filipino

At a glance:

• Claim: The Philippine government is giving a P10,000-financial aid to every Filipino affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.
• Rating: FALSE
• The facts: The government has not announced such a program. There is a bill pending in Congress that seeks to provide additional pandemic aid but it’s P10,000 per household, not per person.
• Why we fact-checked this: The video that made this claim had 91,334 views and 501 comments on YouTube as of writing. Facebook’s monitoring tool also flagged for verification a link to a blog post that made the same claim.

Complete details:

YouTube channel DDS NEWSINFO falsely claimed in a video uploaded on Saturday, February 27, that the government is distributing P10,000 in financial aid to every Filipino affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The channel titled its video, “BREAKING NEWS TODAY FEBRUARY 27, 2021 PRES DUTERTE GOOD NEWS 10K AYUDA SA BAWAT PILIPINO (P10,000 aid to every Filipino).” It ran for 13 minutes and 59 seconds and contained clips of lawmakers Alan Peter Cayetano and Mike Defensor.

The video by DDS NEWSINFO had 91,334 views and 501 comments on YouTube as of writing.

This is false. As of Thursday, March 4, the government has not announced that it will distribute P10,000 to every Filipino citizen. The lawmakers in the video also did not say that President Rodrigo Duterte or his government would hand out P10,000 as pandemic aid.

Instead, Cayetano and Defensor talked about House Bill No. 8597, which they wrote as principal authors. The bill seeks to provide families a one-time pandemic aid of P1,500 per family member or P10,000 per household – whichever is higher.

Among the priority beneficiaries listed in the bill are the poorest of the poor, senior citizens, persons with disabilities, solo parents, displaced workers, medical frontliners, families of overseas Filipino workers, and other members of vulnerable sectors.

As of Thursday, the bill is pending with the House committee on social services.

Website tv5s.com embedded the false video by DDS NEWSINFO in a blog post dated Friday, February 26. The headline of the post made the same false claim as the video. The rest of the blog post, however, was about an entirely different topic.

Claim Check, Facebook’s monitoring tool, flagged the link to the post for fact checkers to verify.

The website tv5s.com also used the logo of News5, but it is not the official website of the Philippine free-to-air television network TV5. The network’s official websites are tv5.com.ph and news.tv5.com.ph. – Pauline Macaraeg/Rappler.com

Keep us aware of suspicious Facebook pages, groups, accounts, websites, articles, or photos in your network by contacting us at factcheck@rappler.com. Let us battle disinformation one Fact Check at a time.