EXPLAINER | Why going viral isn’t the same as getting justice

In the Philippines, dying isn’t enough to get attention. You must die and trend — otherwise, the system doesn’t bother asking how or why you disappeared.

In June 2025, the disappearance and eventual discovery of Anthony Granada — a 25-year-old law student from De La Salle University whose body was found in a vacant lot in Naic, Cavite —  sparked an outpouring of public mourning across the internet. Law students, classmates, institutions, and strangers collectively grieved.

But as the story spread, Anthony’s family, navigating an unspeakable loss, asked for privacy and declined public statements. For some social media users, the silence was frustrating — a few even felt the family owed them answers for helping the story go viral. 

Yet many others honored the family’s request, choosing instead to redirect their grief and outrage toward the broken systems that made such a death possible.

This tragedy didn’t start with a hashtag, and it won’t end with one either. It began with a system that doesn’t know how to respond until it’s too late — a system where universities lack crisis protocols, mental health support is treated as optional, and state institutions deflect responsibility the moment grief becomes inconvenient. 

Respecting his family’s silence means asking harder questions. How many more students need to disappear before “missing” stops meaning “unimportant”? How many more wake hashtags before grief forces change?

The rapid spread of Anthony’s story reflected the connective power of digital media. For many, especially in a country where institutional trust is low, platforms serve as tools for community-led alerts, emotional processing, and public mourning.

With over 90 million social media identities — roughly 78% of the population — Filipinos spend an average of 4 to 5 hours daily online, making them among the most active netizens in the world. In this landscape, where viral topics peak and fade within days and TikTok trends shape daily discourse, stories like Anthony’s can ignite national conversations almost overnight only to risk being buried just as quickly.

Emotion surged — outrage at the delay, sorrow at his fate, fear for other students — but these responses were largely contained to digital spaces. Posts about grief received far more traction than calls for structural reform. A multinational study on digital grief confirms this trend: while platforms enable peer support and emotional adjustment, they are not designed to trigger institutional reform.

This is the paradox of digital mourning in the Philippines: social media amplifies the pain, but cannot pursue justice.

The internet is built for reaction, not resolution. In its hunger for speed, grief was sliced into soundbites, transformed into reposts, reduced to rhythm and trend. The questions that mattered — about safety nets, protocols, and accountability — were drowned out by the next viral distraction.

The same algorithm that pushed Anthony’s face onto our screens just as quickly swept it aside. Visibility was instant, but staying power was never part of the bargain. Noise surged, but it scattered.

When the family asked for space — as they rightfully should — the digital vigil dimmed. Not because justice was served, but because attention had already shifted.

Still, the rupture remains: a system that retreats when it should respond, a scroll that never stops long enough to care, a country where disappearance is met with clicks, not consequences.

Virality promises volume but not permanence. It shouts a name into the void, but rarely echoes long enough to change anything. It can turn mourning into momentum but without institutions forced to listen, even the loudest grief will scroll into oblivion.

Universities issued condolences. Friends mourned in private and in posts. But outside of symbolic gestures, the response from state institutions was procedural at best, muted at worst. The Department of the Interior and Local Government ruled out foul play, citing no visible injuries and the presence of personal belongings.

However, some advocates and members of the public expressed unease over this swift conclusion, calling for a more thorough and transparent investigation — especially given the presence of a chemical drain cleaner near his remains and the limited details released so far. 

This is not the first time a state agency has moved too quickly to resolve a death before fully accounting for the facts. In 2017, the killing of 17-year-old Kian delos Santos during a police anti-drug operation followed a similar arc of early dismissal. 

Police initially claimed that Kian tried to flee and fired a gun at officers, prompting them to shoot back in self-defense. Only later — after CCTV footage and autopsy reports disproved their account — did the truth emerge: that Kian had been dragged and shot in the back of the head. Public pressure forced a deeper inquiry and, eventually, the conviction of three police officers. But the state’s first reaction was denial.

Though the contexts differ, the state’s impulse to close the case swiftly and quietly remains consistent. While the public grieves together online, the state grieves through conclusions made too quickly. It responds just enough to appear responsive, and then it disengages.

This quiet abandonment exists alongside decades of institutional indifference. As of June 2023, Families of Victims of Involuntary Disappearance (FIND) recorded 2,078 unresolved cases of enforced disappearances since the Marcos dictatorship. Karapatan counted 1,908 over that same period, including 12 under the current Marcos Jr. administration. 

Without media coverage, political influence, or sustained public pressure, most cases are absorbed into the abyss of bureaucracy. The threshold for urgency remains heartbreakingly high. The standard for institutional accountability — lower than ever.

Anthony’s death is, first and foremost, a family’s private grief. But its aftermath unearths a collective wound: in the Philippines, a life can end in the margins with no institution rushing to the center. No department is scrambling to fill in the blanks. No system rising to prevent another.

When a young law student dies under mysterious circumstances, and even that can’t rattle the system, it exposes a harsh reality: public grief alone is not enough. It must evolve into policy advocacy, institutional audits, community safety reforms, and support systems for students and families navigating trauma and uncertainty.

The internet can serve as a catalyst. But it cannot be the only arena where grief is felt and voiced. For deaths like Anthony’s to mean more than memory, communities must demand more than mourning, they must demand accountability.

Until grief becomes more than a trending topic — until mourning is matched by structural scrutiny — these stories will keep repeating. And justice, once again, will remain the one thing not going viral.