When Franco Mabanta was arrested on May 5 in an entrapment operation for alleged extortion against former speaker Martin Romualdez, his supporters decried the move as an attempt to silence the media. Peanut Gallery Media Network (PGMN), the social media organization Mabanta founded in 2024, framed the arrest as an attack on the free press.
But a look at Mabanta’s own digital footprint, as well as the content pushed out and boosted by PGMN, shows otherwise. Over the years, Mabanta had built a reputation not as a journalist but as a social media operator, with roots tracing back to the 2016 elections. He has used the internet to shape — some say manipulate — public opinion, target and capture audiences, and make himself useful to whoever was in power.
By 2024, Mabanta had scaled and formalized his operations through PGMN. He pulled in other loud voices popular on the internet, called them “anchors” to make them appear more legitimate, and built around them a network that postures as a scrappy, young, anti-mainstream media outlet that answers to no one. It also spent more on political advertising than all but 157 of the more than 40,000 pages Meta has tracked since 2020, with spending concentrated around the 2025 midterm elections and flood control controversies.
