While many Filipinos celebrated when McCann WorldGroup proclaimed the country as the social media capital of the world in 2008, the title can be better defined. As it stands, the title highlights how Filipinos lead many other countries in activity on a variety of social media platforms, but this can apply to even bad trends. We can presumably be voracious consumers of social media because we lead the world in online bullying and catfishing. Such is not true of course, but the point remains: Being very active on social media as a nation is not necessarily a milestone worth jumping up and down over.

We should instead try to emphasize the good that Filipinos do on social media, rather than our sheer activity. I would thus like to propose a name change. Let’s ditch “social media capital of the world” from public discourse. Instead let’s try to distinguish the Philippines as the “social recruiting capital of the world.”