Fanfic and “Vibes”: A Quick Look into the #AliceGuo TikTok Fandom
Key Points:
Content about Mayor Alice Guo on TikTok tends to be positive, created by fans who depict her as attractive, funny, and warm.
Senator Risa Hontiveros is a key character among a subgroup of Alice Guo fans, but is depicted as a romantic figure rather than a villain.
There was a slight shift in the fandom around the last week of June, when Senator Hontiveros shared documents from the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) showing another person named “Alice Leal Guo” with the same birthday, while the NBI confirmed that Mayor Guo’s fingerprints match those of a “Guo Hua Ping”.
UPDATE on September 5, 2024: As of end August, 18.5% of Alice Guo fan accounts on TikTok had either been changed or deleted. See the “Updates” section below for more details.
If ever there were Senate hearings made for the TikTok era, it’s definitely the series of hearings on Bamban Mayor Alice Guo. Anyone following them so far has likely been captivated by the “gotcha” moments caught on camera, the mystery behind Guo’s identity, hints of alleged espionage, shady business connections, and her family drama. The hearings also have a compelling cast of characters – some real, others possibly imaginary – such as Senators Risa Hontiveros and Sherwin Gatchalian, Teacher Rubilyn, and Guo’s allegedly estranged mother.
It’s likely due to these factors that the character of Guo herself has grown beyond the realm of governance and national security into entertainment. In fact, references to Guo have become so mainstream that there are remixes of her oft-repeated statement “hindi ko po alam” and students have uploaded videos showing classmates who bear a resemblance to Guo [1,2,3]. Even Vice Ganda made multiple references to her on the popular noontime show It’s Showtime.
If you’ve spent any time on TikTok, maybe the algorithm fed you some of these memes and references. But these are just a small fraction of the content around Guo, which is mostly composed of fan videos, with some going as far as creating fanfiction of her (more on this later).
To understand the TikTok fandom around Guo, we analyzed hundreds of videos that use the hashtag #aliceguo.
Issue-based attacks vs. “vibes”
Majority of the TikTok videos we studied appear to be supportive of Mayor Alice Guo, with 68% of videos positive towards her while only 20% were negative.
Most TikTok videos about Alice Guo presented her favorably.
Slant Definitions
Positive. Content that presents the subject in a favorable light.
Negative. Content that presents the adverse or harmful aspects of a subject.
Neutral. Content that is more balanced in slant, where the subject looks neither good nor bad in the content piece, or there are elements of both positive and negative slant in the content.
Undetermined. Content where slant is difficult to determine. In the case of #aliceguo videos, this includes memes that don’t necessarily present her favorably or adversely, including via the captions, superimposed text, or in the content creator’s other videos.
Negative videos were mostly attacks on her credibility. These included Senate hearing clips that show her incomplete or inconsistent answers, photos and videos of identity documents contradicting Guo’s statements, or media coverage about investigations into her identity and wealth. There were also a few memes such as audio of Guo stating “lumaki po ako sa farm” accompanied by photos or videos depicting luxury.
Negative videos attacked Mayor Alice Guo’s credibility, especially when it came to her identity and her ties to POGOs.
While negative videos were mostly attacking her on issues, positive videos did not directly defend her. 93% of positive videos were “fan videos” – TikTok videos that don’t really have a specific point to make about allegations against Guo, they’re more “vibes” videos depicting her as attractive, funny, and warm. Even fan-made videos using Senate hearing clips were not really about any points of defense she raised in the hearings, they showed how funny or calm she was despite the interrogation.
Positive videos about Mayor Alice Guo typically did not address the controversies surrounding her, and instead depicted her as attractive, funny, and warm.
Less than 5% of positive videos were issue-based defenses of Guo, usually including photos illustrating that she was in the Philippines when she was slightly younger and showing her service to the people of Bamban.
It makes sense then that the posting of positive videos were driven almost exclusively by Alice Guo fan accounts (89.2%) – accounts that only post fan videos about Guo and nothing else. Only 5.4% of videos were posted by personal accounts, which are defined as accounts of users who are personally identifiable, whether the account shows their face, name, and other personal information.
Negative videos, on the other hand, had more diverse sources. Negative videos were posted by a mix of personal accounts (44%), media accounts (13% alternative, 7.4% mainstream), and public officials (11.1%).
Types of accounts that posted positively about Alice Guo.
Positive Posts About Alice Guo (TikTok)
The Content:
Short, fan-made videos depicting Alice Guo as attractive, funny, and warm.
Source material was typically from Guo’s now-deactivated Facebook account, featuring Guo’s personal photos and videos.
These videos often used soft filters and love songs such as “Dilaw” by Maki, “Filipina Girl” by Billy Crawford, or the Meteor Garden theme song “Qing Fei De Yi”.
Only a very small fraction of positive posts (4.4%) were issue-based defenses of Alice Guo, often showing younger photos of her in the Philippines to prove that she has been in the country for years before running for office, or depicting her good work as the Mayor of Bamban.
The Users Who Posted:
Nearly all were from fan accounts — user accounts that exclusively posted positive videos about Guo.
Only a small fraction (5.4%) were from personal accounts which showed a TikTok user’s face, name, or other identifying information.
Types of accounts that posted negatively about Alice Guo.
Negative Posts About Alice Guo (TikTok)
The Content:
Most were issue-based content that were mostly Senate hearing clips and documents that were incriminating to Guo’s claims about her identity.
Some were clips uploaded or reshared from mainstream media that were investigations into Guo’s identity and wealth.
These videos were typically straightforward, often only with added superimposed text that gave a title or summary of the video content.
The Users Who Posted:
The most common source of these posts were personal user accounts, which showed a TikTok user’s face, name, or other identifying information.
This was followed by media accounts, typically from alternative media (13%, consisting of vlogs or other non-traditional sources) and mainstream media (7.4%).
Public official TikTok accounts (11.1%), such as the accounts of Senator Risa Hontiveros and Senator Win Gatchalian also uploaded negative posts about Guo.
This begs the question that we typically get asked: How do we know if these posts are from real accounts or fake accounts?
Proving that a large group social media accounts are “real people” can be challenging, especially on a platform like TikTok where users are not as encouraged to use their real names as they are on platforms like Facebook or LinkedIn. This makes TikTok more similar to platforms like Tumblr or LiveJournal, where a large part of the user base, if not the majority, used accounts that were not personally identifiable. Fandoms thrived on those platforms, too.
We have seen some signs that at least some of the fan activity is authentic. A few of the fan accounts have links to their personal Facebook accounts containing identifying details. There are behavioral signs as well. A few fan accounts have announced a hiatus or slowdown in posting since the schoolyear is about to start. Some of the fan accounts have also shifted away from posting positive content as the issue became more serious, such as shifting instead to posting negative or neutral content once NBI documents of another “Alice Leal Guo” were revealed. Additionally, content from these fan accounts are missing a key ingredient that tends to be present in many political operations – tearing down opponents.
Sen. Risa Hontiveros as a romantic figure, not a villain
Given that Senator Risa Hontiveros is Guo’s most prominent opponent both in social media and traditional media, one would think that the next natural thing is for Guo’s fans to attack her. However, in positive content about Guo, Senator Hontiveros is either ignored or, as in 8% of positive videos, fans are “shipping” her with Guo, sometimes using the hashtag #guontiveros. So far, we’ve identified 136 unique TikTok accounts using this hashtag.
Screenshot of a video about Guontiveros (Source: TikTok user ilovealiceleal)
What is shipping?
In fandoms, shipping is the act of imagining or supporting a romantic pairing among two fictional or real-life characters. Fans typically create content such as fanfiction, images, and videos depicting these relationships which may or may not be part of the “canon” or official storyline.
Fans also typically create “ship names”, which is often a portmanteau of the names of the characters or real-life people involved. In this case, fans who ship Mayor Alice Guo and Senator Risa Hontiveros together have called the ship “guontiveros”.
The Guontiveros ship is not limited to TikTok, they also have a presence of Facebook and other platforms. One could even find Guontiveros fanfiction on Wattpad, an online publishing platform for users to share and comment on stories, typically original novels or fanfiction. Wattpad currently has 60 stories published with the tag “guontiveros” with the most viewed being a story entitled “Your Honor”, which has generated over 150,000 views so far.
The top six (6) Guontiveros stories on Wattpad, ranked according to the level of “community support” they receive.
While shipping political figures is not new, these are usually limited to people who are, at the very least, not direct opponents. Senator Hontiveros herself was made part of another ship called “Lenrisa”, where she is romantically paired with former Vice President Leni Robredo. There are also those shipping Senators Loren Legarda and Pia Cayetano via “PiLo”. This phenomenon is not limited to the Philippines either. A few years ago, two male Dutch members of parliament were also shipped by fans on TikTok.
As you can see from these examples, just like with fictional characters, same-sex pairings are common in ships of real-life people. Those who study media often attribute this to the lack of canonically LGBTQIA+ characters or pairings in popular TV series, films, and books. In other words, the Guontiveros ship is likely a product of young queer fans expressing themselves and exploring their identity and politics.
A phase shift in the fandom
We gathered the data we used in the analysis above on July 10, 2024, after most of the Senate hearings were conducted and shortly after Guo stated that, despite the issuance of a subpoena, she would no longer attend any future hearings.
Almost a month later, we revisited some of the Alice Guo fan accounts. While many of them are still regularly posting positive content, a few accounts had a slight or complete turnaround. Some have moved on to other fandoms such as BINI, Rico Yan, or other local celebrities, sometimes even deleting all their Alice Guo content completely. Other accounts just “went back to normal”, sharing their other fanfiction that had nothing to do with Guo.
There were also a few accounts who shifted the slant of their posts from positive to neutral, sometimes even negative. The inflection point seemed to be around late June, the time the NBI documents were bared, showing the other “Alice Leal Guo” with the same birthday or confirming that Mayor Guo had the same fingerprints as a Chinese national named Guo Hua Ping. Some fan accounts shared photos and videos of these documents or art cards from Senators Hontiveros and Gatchalian, stating they were “disappointed” or “ang sakit”. Others balanced their disappointment by referring to her work as Mayor of Bamban, saying she still did good work there or had good intentions despite the controversy around her identity.
A few Alice Guo fan accounts on TikTok have lessened or eliminated their support after the NBI’s findings about her identity came out.
It remains to be seen what percentage of Guo’s fandom is winding down, but this definitely shows the limits of fandom, especially when this one-sided relationship relies merely on “vibes'' such as attractiveness and warmth. Mayor Alice Guo’s prolific fandom hasn’t stopped the arrest order, her disappearance, or the quo warranto petition against her. It’s also unlikely that it’s moved the needle in terms of public opinion, because the dominance of the fandom is largely on a single platform (TikTok) and has no presence or coverage in offline channels such as broadcast media or in-person events and organizing.
One thing’s for sure though: the fans, like the rest of us, are hoping she’d resurface.
Story Updates:
UPDATE on August 16, 2024: Teka Teka talked to SocialSignals Managing Director CX Roque about the findings of the study, focusing on details about the #Guontiveros ship. Listen to it on Spotify.
UPDATE on September 5, 2024: At end-August, we revisited the data to quantify how the fandom has shifted. We found that 18.5% of Alice Guo fan accounts had shifted away from the fandom.
Some fans have clearly moved away from making Alice Guo content.
Most of these accounts had changed in some way (13.2%), whether it was a shift to a new fandom, topic, or a deletion of all their Alice Guo videos. These accounts had also changed their names away from any references to Guo. The rest had deactivated (5.3%) their accounts.
Additionally, 4% of active accounts have not posted since late June. We’ll continue to monitor the fandom as other major developments on the issue unfold.
Written by CX Roque, Managing Director and Lead Analyst, SocialSignals
Includes analysis and input from Jude Karlo Gobenciong, Senior Analyst, SocialSignals
