A video that allegedly shows the sister of controversial Bamban, Tarlac Mayor Alice Guo admitting to espionage committed on behalf of the Chinese government has been reshared by multiple netizens and on several pages.
“Two years din kaming nag-training. Ang hirap maging espiya, pero ang pinaka challenge namin ay ang mag-aral ng Tagalog (We trained for two years. It’s hard to be a spy, but our biggest challenge was learning how to speak Tagalog),” part of the video claimed.
These posts are misleading. The original video is a fantasy skit created by Steve and Nyx of Book of Bad Ideas, which has 651,000 followers on TikTok. The content creators asked to be identified by their first names only.
“It has come to our attention that several content creators on TikTok, Facebook, actually YouTube, are using our content about Alice Guo which, you know, is a fiction story,” Nyx said in a May 28 statement.
“They were using our content without our permission, and splicing it to make it sound like it was true, like a breaking news, na nagsalita na ‘yung ate ni Alice Guo (that Alice Guo’s sibling finally spoke),” she added.
“We already disclosed in the caption that this is a fiction story. And in our bio, it says we write bad ideas. But many still believe otherwise, those who don’t read captions,” she said in Filipino.
According to Steve, who emailed VERA Files Fact Check, the video was originally published on May 27 and carried the following caption:
“A Spy Story, our first spy fiction story. Di namin mapigilan gawan ng storya ito haha kung kami sana nahire ni Alice Guo, masa maganda ang backstory nya at walang butas hahaha”
(A Spy Story, our first spy fiction story. We couldn’t stop ourselves from creating this story, haha. If only Alice Guo hired us, she would’ve had a better backstory without inconsistencies.)
The misleading videos garnered a total of 806,500 interactions across Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube. A member of VERA Files’ Viber Community asked us to debunk this claim.
These appeared amid the ongoing Senate investigation into Guo’s identity, and alleged involvement in the operation of a Philippine Offshore Gaming Operator hub.
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