The block page arrives without a trial. Type in one of the sites on PLDT’s new blacklist and you get a red triangle, the PLDT and Smart logos, and a notice that the website is in violation of Philippine laws and regulations. No court order, no published list, and now a very public fight over who gets to decide.
PLDT COO Butch Jimenez says there is “no debate to be had here.” Former solicitor general Florin Hilbay answers that the supreme courts of the US and the Philippines never dared ban “content that glorifies violence,” so what exactly makes a telco wiser? Between those two positions sits a question every PLDT, Smart, and Globe subscriber should be asking.
What PLDT and Smart are actually blocking
On Friday, August 21, PLDT and Smart announced they are blocking more than 100 websites found streaming or hosting videos of school shootings and other extreme violence. The blocking happens at the network level, so the sites go dark for every PLDT and Smart subscriber, and the company says the list will keep growing as it monitors the web and takes referrals from government agencies, child protection groups, and parenting communities.
Jimenez framed it as non-negotiable: “There is no debate to be had here,” he said, adding that content turning “real-world violence into entertainment” has no place on the network. PLDT is not new at this. It reported 83,000 blocked attempts to open child abuse links in January 2026 alone, and it is a member of the UK-based Internet Watch Foundation.
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Who | PLDT and Smart, with Globe running a parallel block |
| What | 100+ sites streaming school shootings or extreme violence; Globe adds “hundreds” of gore sites |
| How | Network-level blocking; a PLDT-Smart block page replaces the site |
| Announced | Friday, August 21, 2026 |
| List growth | Company monitoring plus referrals from agencies and child protection groups |
| Known workaround | VPNs, per critics; PLDT has not disputed this |
The school shooting that set this off
The timing is not subtle. Three days before the announcement, a 14-year-old student shot and killed a classmate at Ateneo de Zamboanga University before fatally shooting himself, and Interior Secretary Jonvic Remulla said the attack was livestreamed through the shooter’s Facebook account and another website. We covered the incident and the DILG investigation here.
It was the second fatal school shooting in under two months, after a June attack at San Jose National High School in Tacloban left three students dead and at least 20 wounded. Remulla has been pulling every lever since: he pushed to review the loose-firearms law, the government suspended the GoreBox game after Tacloban, and he floated a Roblox angle in the Zamboanga case that the DICT has not confirmed.
Globe is doing the same, on a bigger scale
Globe confirmed it is blocking hundreds of additional sites that host gore or extreme violence, including sites covered by government orders. General counsel Froilan Castelo called the Zamboanga incident “one opportunity where the industry can work together,” saying Globe is “ready to do our part and protect children online.”
Globe also brought receipts. It says it blocked 438,446 domains and URLs carrying child sexual abuse material in 2025, backed by more than $2.7 million in filtering systems, with coverage extending to AI-generated abuse imagery. That CSAM program drew little argument. The new violence list is what lit the fuse.
“Knee jerk and overbroad”: the pushback
Florin Hilbay, solicitor general from 2016 to 2018, called the move “simultaneously knee jerk and overbroad.” His core argument: PLDT is assuming “legislative discretion (that it doesn’t have),” because deciding what information a country may access is not a power Congress can delegate to a franchise holder in the first place. “What makes PLDT wiser than these fallible institutions?” he asked.
He also pointed at the practical hole: a VPN defeats the block, so the effect is “simply to put a price tag on blocked sites.” And he saved his sharpest line for Jimenez’s “no debate” framing, invoking Justice Louis Brandeis: “the greatest dangers to liberty lurk in the insidious encroachments by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding.”
Cyber activist Tonyo Cruz went further, arguing that unilateral blocking “preempts and violates due process” and that such safeguards exist against “overreach and abuse by government and big corporations such as PLDT-Smart.”
| The telco case | The critics’ case |
|---|---|
| Real-world violence as entertainment should not be one tap away for kids | No court order or published criteria decides what gets blocked |
| Network-level blocking is preemptive, so it actually works | VPNs defeat it; the block mostly inconveniences everyone else |
| It is the same playbook as the CSAM blocks few objected to | CSAM is criminalized by law; “content that glorifies violence” is not a legal category |
| Government agencies and child groups feed the list | A private franchise holder is doing a regulator’s job without a regulator’s mandate |
Why this fight is just starting
The uncomfortable truth is that both sides are right about something. The Zamboanga livestream was real, the grief in two cities is real, and telco networks genuinely are the last pipe into Filipino homes. But the precedent is real too: three companies just demonstrated they can vanish information for their tens of millions of subscribers over a single weekend, on their own definition of what “glorifies violence,” and the only recourse is a VPN subscription.
What to watch next: whether the DICT or NTC formalizes the list, which would turn corporate policy into state regulation; whether anyone publishes the blocked domains and the criteria; and whether Hilbay’s franchise argument becomes an actual legal challenge. The CICC is already lobbying for jurisdiction over social media and streaming platforms, so the telcos may soon have company in the business of deciding what Pinoys can see.
PLDT promised to keep acting decisively “every time we find it.” Hilbay’s answer, in effect, is that this will not stay uncontested. Somewhere between those two promises is the line every Filipino internet user should be watching.
