Disinformation in the New Philippine Elections
In 2022, the Philippines saw the rise of Bongbong Marcos to the Philippine presidency years after his father, infamous dictator Ferdinand Marcos, was ousted from power by the EDSA People’s Power revolution in 1986. So how is it that yet another Marcos has ascended to office yet again in the Philippines, not a full lifetime after their family’s exile by popular revolution? Why has the myth of a Philippine Golden Age under Ferdinand Marcos, rife with recorded human rights abuses, persisted to this day to help propel Bongbong Marcos to the highest levels of government? It is decades of extensive historical revisionism and a complex disinformation network with roots in the administration of former president Rodrigo Duterte that have placed the Marcos family back into the presidential office.
Extensive myth-making and historically inaccurate narratives beginning in the days of martial law continue to reach into the politics of the present-day Philippines. This period began on September 23, 1972, when then-president Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law in the Philippines under the pretense of a potential Communist conspiracy to overthrow the government, beginning a 14-year period from 1972 to 1986 where Marcos wielded extensive power and remained head of the state for years after his term was set to expire as a result of his declaration (Bicker, 2022; Martial Law Museum). During his terms as president (1965-1972) and during the martial law era, Ferdinand Marcos claimed he wanted to bring the Philippines back to a supposed Golden Age, and that his administration was responsible for extensive infrastructure construction projects and economic growth as a key feature of his term (Venzon, 2022). While Marcos was responsible for infrastructure projects, these came at a heavy human and financial cost such as in the case of the Manila Film Center, which cost the lives of 169 workers and $25 million dollars in public funds (Pangilinan, 2022). Such projects, even extending to infrastructure such as bridges, roads, and public buildings, were oftentimes ostentatious and needlessly expensive (de Dios, 1985). Additionally, claims of economic prosperity ring hollow when compared to official figures – by the tail end of martial law in 1983, the Philippine foreign debt had risen to $24.6 billion from under $1 billion as a direct result of government spending and reliance on foreign investments (de Dios, 1985). Further fabrications include that of the Marcoses' wealth being given to them by pre-colonial royalty, the myth that no Filipino was poor during their tenure, and that no one had been arrested over the course of martial law (Beltran, Mahtani, 2022). One claim made by supporters of the administration is that Marcos was a hero for ordering his troops to not fire at unarmed protestors during the People Power revolution (Salazar, 2022). These claims were echoed in the current election by Bongbong and his supporters. However, a closer look at some of these claims reveals the extent of the misinformation circulating as popular fact.
Firstly, while the Marcoses enjoyed great wealth and claimed to want to distribute it to the Filipino people, their wealth was largely stolen – according to the World Bank Stolen Asset Recovery Report, it is estimated that the Marcos stole $5-10 billion dollars from the Philippines through illegal takeovers, monopolies, fraudulent loans, and company bribes (Venzon, 2022). In addition, after their exile to Hawaii, the Hawaii State Courts ruled that the Marcos family owed $2 billion in reparations to the victims of martial law, a debt that has never been paid; a regional court in the Philippines denied the request to victims of martial law and declared it to be a flawed ruling in 2013, a decision which was upheld by a Court of Appeals in 2017 (Rappler, 2017; CNN, 2017). Secondly, reports from Amnesty International place the number of those imprisoned during the Marcos administration at a staggering 70,000, with 34,000 tortured and over 3,000 killed, a far cry from the claim that no one had been imprisoned, killed, or tortured (Salazar, 2022). Claims of an economic golden age are slightly harder to debunk, as there are infrastructure projects constructed during the Marcos reign that are still standing today.
But context is important to consider in the case of this supposed economic prosperity. From the mid-70s to the 80s alone, there was a sharp decline in the overall standard of living in the Philippines with increased poverty, inflation, and unemployment paired with decreased wages, especially for the poor and working class (Juego, 2022). Additionally, fiscal reports from 1970 to 1982 show that the percentage of the national budget dedicated to education and health dropped from 33.5 to 21.5 percent in the face of an increasing military budget (de Dios, 1985). This spending points to a focus on governmental spending on infrastructure and an armed force, but not on sectors designed to increase the quality of life, economically or physically, for the majority of Filipinos. Finally, any claims that Ferdinand Marcos ordered his troops not to attack People Power protestors is debunked in historical accounts– it was soldiers who refused the order to attack protestors, and it was the non-compliance of soldiers that in part helped oust Marcos Sr. (Salazar, 2022). For example, upon receiving the order to fire on protestors on February 24, 1984, Col. Braulio Balbas refused four separate times to launch the attack; similar stories of refusal to carry out such orders were echoed through the Navy and Air Force of the Philippine military (The Official Gazette, n.d.).
While persistent myths about the old Marcos regime continue to gain traction, it is the modern mechanisms and networks of disinformation that greatly assisted in the election of Bongbong Marcos to the presidency after so many decades. Marcos's supporters capitalized on the social media saturation in Filipino society, as well as a lax policy on disinformation on these platforms, to spread propaganda and enhance their public image for their campaign. In the Philippines, 90% of the population which has access to the Internet is on social media, and a 2021 survey reveals that at least 57.1% of those surveyed with access to social media trust vloggers and social media influencers more than official news channels (Quitzon, 2022; Arugay, 2022). Pro-Marcos supporters took advantage of this collective reliance on social media to rapidly spread their ideas and propaganda.
Another way the 2022 Marcos campaign took advantage of social media was as a tool to decontextualize both current and historical events (Salazar, 2022). Fan edits circulating on Tiktok and YouTube of the Marcos family depict them not as politicians or dictators, but as patrons of the arts, loving family members, and proud celebrities even going back to the martial law era. Such videos serve to erase the historical context behind their wealth, political status, and power in society, furthermore distancing the Marcoses from their crimes and recontextualizing them as celebrity figures. These new forms of disinformation are insidiously effective in that they are not strictly factual or non-factual – rather, they push ideas and images that speak to the candidate’s personal character rather than political action in order to endear them to potential supporters, making such character portraits more difficult to debunk (Salazar, 2022). However, social media is not simply a passive platform where such images spontaneously appear, and pro-Marcos campaigners have had a direct hand in the use of social media to spread disinformation in a more direct way than many might realize. In fact, it is the disinformation infrastructure that flourished under the Duterte administration that Marcos supporters have taken and expanded upon in order to weaponize social media.
Pro-Marcos campaigners have taken advantage of a complex disinformation network to control their public image and narrative, taking advantage of a combination of professional advertising strategists, grassroots supporters, and paid internet trolls in order to bludgeon political opponents and shield the Marcos family themselves from criticism using social media. This disinformation structure, created and used by the Duterte administration, operates under a hierarchy that sees advertising and PR strategists at the top and extends down into paid and unpaid operators in lower classes (Ong and Cabanes, 2018). Those that operate at the top level of the hierarchy are often former corporate elite in direct engagement with political actors who formulate complex branding strategies to simultaneously tear down opponents and build up the Marcos “brand”. Below them are influencers, vloggers, celebrities, and pundits with large followings who are employed by upper-level strategists to promote their chosen candidate on social media, television, and other mediums. At the lower levels, paid trolls and volunteers create multiple fake accounts and promote the messages from the top, harass critics online, or take advantage of lax social media information regulations to create legions of accounts spreading false information.
This hierarchy directly takes advantage of social media to launch “digital black ops” which spread disinformation that includes smear campaigns, historical revisions, or personal attacks on critics of the chosen administration (Ong and Cabanas, 2018). An example of a victim of these campaigns is Leni Robredo, the prime political opponent of Duterte and Marcos Jr. According to a fact-checking initiative by UP professor Yvonne Chua, Robredo had been the biggest target of disinformation through social media such as Facebook, disinformation spread by various pro-Marcos pages and groups (Gajete, 2022). Attacks against Robredo have taken the form of accusing her of being a communist, attacks on her intelligence, and accusations of electoral fraud through doctored photos and false testimonies amplified by pro-Marcos social media groups (France-Presse, 2022). In another instance, digital black ops operators attacked Leni Robredo for her opposition to the erection of a national monument to Ferdinand Marcos by fanning popular anti-liberal sentiments by inviting insults, death threats, and vitriol upon the politician through Facebook groups (Ong and Cabanes, 2018).
While it is difficult to precisely lay blame on individuals, there is some connective tissue between both the Marcos and Duterte regimes that point to this hierarchy being used. Though most research has focused on Duterte’s use of this disinformation network, the continued political partnership between the two with the former president’s daughter Sara Duterte as Vice President to Marcos Jr., as well as the similarity of the effect of social media on the political victories of former president Rodrigo Duterte and Marcos Jr., points to the same system being used for both politicians (Tuquero, 2022). In fact, the biggest difference between the use of disinformation networks between the two campaigns is not in function but in scale. While Duterte’s campaign focused mostly on Facebook, the Marcos campaign employed the same tactics across all social media platforms – Gen Z influencers on Tiktok post decontextualized historical clips painting Marcos as a hero and the martial law era as glorious, memes shared on Facebook decry and insult political opponents with incendiary language, Youtube channels have vloggers posing as legitimate news channels which engage in historical revisionism and post conspiracy theories portraying the Marcos wealth as legitimately earned or inherited (Mahtani, Salazar, Tuquero, 2022). Perhaps one of the biggest pieces of evidence of an organized disinformation network operating during the 2022 Philippine elections is the slew of fake accounts that flooded Twitter to heckle and harass Marcos critics during the campaign season, with data showing that there were spikes in newly created accounts pushing pro-Marcos rhetoric and that 42.6% of Bongbong Marcos’s Twitter followers were fake accounts (Baizas et al., 2022). Additional evidence of an intentional push for historical revisionism comes from a report from a whistleblower at Cambridge Analytica, who claims that Marcos Jr. came to the company to rebrand his historical and social image (Baizas et al., 2022). Such evidence paints a multi-pronged effort to simultaneously whitewash the bloody recorded history of the Marcos family across new digital fronts.
The mass proliferation of historical revisionism and digital disinformation that has spread through different social media platforms during the 2022 Philippine elections creates an ahistorical view of the past, with real historical events being taken out of context and repurposed to serve a political agenda that sees the return of a family previously evicted from the country in a popular revolution by the Philippine masses. In an age of increasing social media presence, it is more important than ever to critically examine the information and historical narratives presented across all media platforms.
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