William Pesek is an award-winning Tokyo-based journalist and author of "Japanization: What the World Can Learn from Japan's Lost Decades."

If you think Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg is having a terrible October, spare a thought for Rodrigo Duterte and Narendra Modi.

The corporate nation-state Zuckerberg founded in a Harvard dorm room 17 years ago is essentially the internet homepage in the Philippines and India.

It has also morphed into the fuel enabling Philippine President Duterte and Indian Prime Minister Modi to drag backward two of Asia's most promising economies. Both revel in how the social media Godzilla helps them silence opposing voices and deaden democratic institutions.

Thanks to a flurry of whistleblowers and news reports, we are learning the extent to which Facebook's algorithms do what billions of dollars of television advertising and stump speeches cannot: prioritize whatever message Duterte and Modi want, true or not, and bury what they prefer voters not to know under a blizzard of "likes," "shares" and misleading content that fattens Zuckerberg's wallet.

Do not take my word for it, take Maria Ressa's. The brave founder of news portal Rappler recently won a Nobel Peace Prize, an honor shared with Russia's Dmitry Muratov.

This well-deserved honor was a brilliant checkmate by the Nobel Committee. By championing journalists speaking truth to power in Manila and Moscow, officials in Oslo expertly trolled not only Duterte and Vladimir Putin, but Modi, Donald Trump and Zuckerberg himself.

The prize embarrassed Duterte and Russian leader Putin. It further ruined former U.S. President Trump's year. Not just because Trump had, weirdly, been arguing that he deserved the honor. The Nobel crowd called out Duterte, Putin and, by extension, Modi and Trump on the dangerous "fake news" mantra that gives these men common cause.

Zuckerberg, too. Few thought leaders have done more to expose Facebook's spin about connecting the world than Nobel laureate Ressa. Facebook, she argues, is "biased against facts." At a "dark time" in the Philippines, she told Reuters, its algorithms "prioritize the spread of lies laced with anger and hate over facts."

Facebook is the rocket fuel Trumpism used to foment the Jan. 6 riots on Capitol Hill. It is the vessel Trumpism uses to join forces with, and support, strongmen like Duterte and Modi.

Again, do not take my word for it. This week, The New York Times and other news outlets detailed that, far from policing an avalanche of disinformation, hate speech and inflammatory content, Facebook plays right into Modi's hands in the company's biggest market.

Facebook, it seems painfully clear, is too busy shoveling advertising profits into shareholders' pockets to notice how Team Zuckerberg is helping Modi drag India back toward 2004.

That year is worth considering because it is not just when Facebook went live. It is when voters last tossed Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party from power. At the time, the BJP glorified itself with an "India Shining" campaign glossing over the inequality, corruption and dysfunction stymieing the economy. Too bad for then-Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee that he did not have Facebook to bluster and blur his way to another term.

Ten years later, Mori returned the BJP to power by, in part, harnessing Facebook's growing reach in the second most populous nation. In 2019, Modi fans gamed Zuckerberg's algorithms to win another term extolling his Hindu nationalism and consigning India's troubles to the bottom of Facebook feeds.

There are many common threads pulling the Philippines and India together: the Trumpian assault on truth and reality; the casual political violence; craven efforts to spin poor COVID-19 responses; the false narrative that Duterte and Modi are once-in-many-generations reformers deserving of rabid praise.

Few economies in Asia, though, present public faces more at glaring odds with the underlying reality.

Manila's standing in global corruption rankings has tanked on Duterte's watch. His bloody assault on the drug trade put the Philippines in the worst human-rights spotlight since the bad-old Ferdinand Marcos days. And yet, polls show Duterte still enjoys reasonably high approval ratings.

Rodrigo Duterte still enjoys reasonably high approval ratings.

The Facebook effect also lets Modi create a new India Shining narrative. This time, turbocharged by powerful algorithms banishing all those who dare to question him as "haters." In 2020 alone, New Delhi's ranking on Transparency International's corruption perceptions index plunged six places to 86th from 80th. In 2014, when Modi first took power, India was 85th.

Seven-plus years ago, Modi talked big about morphing Asia's No. 3 economy into Silicon Valley East. "Digital India," was it? Yet recent events make you wonder if Modinomics is more focused on building the next China. It includes billionaire cronies growing richer while average Indians have to scroll through Facebook to learn how well Modi wants them to think they are doing.

That Modi is obscuring the truth with the full help of Facebook is disturbing, but not surprising. He enjoys ginormous followings on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter which are amplified exponentially by loyal armies of online fans. Suffice to say, I cringe at the thought of what the Modiverse will heap my way for writing this column. Ditto for Duterte's "social media army" sure to pounce.

There is nothing to like about Facebook's cyber dominance over the direction of political and economic discourse throughout developing Asia. It is high time governments took aim at this virtual Godzilla trampling progress.