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Public anger over a spiralling flood control scandal involving Philippine officials and lawmakers was reflected in the huge crowds that attended an anti-corruption rally in Manila in mid-November, but a video that social media posts claimed showed the protest was in fact filmed in Nepal months earlier. The user who originally posted the video told AFP it was filmed near his office in Kathmandu during a deadly uprising that toppled the country’s government in September.<\/p>\n
“Here are millions, November 16, 2025,” reads overlaid Tagalog-language text on a Facebook reel<\/a> shared on the same day and viewed more than 779,000 times.<\/p>\n The video shows a top-down view of a crowd-filled street.<\/p>\n It circulated on the first day of back-to-back anti-corruption rallies<\/a> in Manila called by the Iglesia ni Cristo, a religious group that has historically been a powerful voting bloc in the Philippines, with police estimating a crowd in the hundreds of thousands \u00a0(archived link<\/a>).<\/p>\n The protest called for accountability over a spiralling flood control scandal, with scores of construction firm owners, government officials and parliament members — including President Ferdinand Marcos’s congressman cousin — accused of pocketing funds for substandard or so-called ghost infrastructure projects.<\/p>\n A day after the demonstrations, Philippine prosecutors filed the first criminal charges<\/a> in the case, promising “many” more indictments (archived link<\/a>).<\/p>\n