Son of disgraced Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos and heir to the family dynasty, Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. won the Philippine general election in a landslide victory on Tuesday. Based on polling and prevailing sentiment in the Philippines, the results didn’t surprise many, including the nation’s journalists. However, as Philippine fact-checkers noted, the victory relied on a misinformed electorate and a potent propaganda campaign.
“Even in the months before the filing of candidacies had taken place, we were already flagging bits of election-related misinformation and disinformation,” said Meeko Angela Camba, head of a fact-checking initiative focused on public figures at VERA Files, a Philippine journalism and fact-checking outlet. “Among the patterns that we've spotted, particularly for online disinformation, was that disinformation and misinformation tends to favor one particular candidate and targets others.”
The candidate that benefited most, Camba explained, was Marcos.
“We have seen disinformation falsely claiming that the Philippine economy during the Marcos Senior regime was the golden age,” Camba said.
Smaller claims have also popped up around that narrative — that the exchange rate of the Philippine peso to the dollar was very low or that the Philippines was the richest country in Asia, or second after Japan, during that period.
Other false posts protected the reputation of the Marcos dynasty, deflecting or denying that the family’s wealth was “ill-gotten,” or claiming that Bongbong Marcos holds a bachelor’s degree from Oxford when in fact he only has a “special diploma.” (There is an entire topic section devoted to the Marcos family's ill-gotten wealth on the Rappler website, which details some of the ways the family took billions during the Marcos Senior dictatorship and its current legal battles with government agencies in the Philippines.)
In addition to there being beneficiaries of the election-related mis- and disinformation, there have also been targets. According to Cambda, there have been stark differences in how the disinformation portrays the characters of the two rival candidates – Vice President Leni Robredo and Marcos – to online voters.
“Robredo has been a favorite target of misinformation,” Camba said. “These claims tend to question her capability as a public official, portraying her as someone who is kind of intellectually inferior against the other candidates.”
“I'm not questioning the credibility of the election itself. I think we can say that the election was conducted properly,” said Ellen Tordesillas, a veteran Filipino journalist and a co-founder of VERA Files. “Really what the problem was when the people went to the polls yesterday was that that they were not making informed decisions; they were making ‘disinformed’ decisions.”
Fact-checkers noted the younger Marcos’ presidency will likely represent a continuation of Duterte’s when it comes to press freedoms and access.
“Under the Duterte administration, it's been quite challenging already,” Cambda said. “With indications of how Bongbong Marcos has acted toward the media, throughout the campaign, you know, avoiding interviews or not holding many press briefings or conversations with journalists on the campaign trail, access to information is something we should watch out for.
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