FALSE

The Philippines doesn’t have the fifth-largest gold deposit in the world, contrary to a claim by independent senatorial candidate and social media personality Francis Leo Marcos in a Facebook video posted on his page March 22.

The distinction belongs to Indonesia, which ranked fifth in the world with 2,600 metric tons of reserves of gold, based on the Mineral Commodity Summary for gold by the United States Geological Survey (USGS) this year. The Philippines is not among the top 19 countries.

The USGS defines reserves as “that part of the reserve base that could be economically extracted or produced at the time of determination” with or without extraction facilities in place.

The USGS collects and analyzes information on the mineral industries of more than 170 countries, the Philippines included.

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FactRakers is a Philippines-based fact-checking initiative of journalism majors at the University of the Philippines-Diliman working under the supervision of Associate Professor Yvonne T. Chua of the University of the Philippines’ Journalism Department. Associate Professor Ma. Diosa Labiste, also of the Journalism Department, serves as editorial consultant.

The name of the initiative, coined from the words “fact” and “raker,” is inspired by the term “muckrakers,” first used in the early 1900s by American president Theodore Roosevelt to express his annoyance at progressive, reform-minded journalists at the time.

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