Prof. Aries Arugay and Asst. Prof. Maria Elize Mendoza recently published a chapter entitled “Digital Autocratization and Disinformation in Philippine Elections” in Oxford Intersections: Social Media in Society and Culture, published by Oxford Academic (Oxford University Press).
The abstract reads:
The Philippines simultaneously experienced massive disinformation and deliberate autocratization under the Rodrigo Duterte administration (2016–2022). Starting from the 2016 elections, securitized narratives drawing from Duterte’s rhetoric were used to justify extrajudicial killings and arrests against dissidents and opposition actors. Online disinformation propagated by organized and paid cyber troops or “troll” farms reinforced these narratives. The pernicious political cocktail of autocratization and online disinformation is called digital autocratization. The 2022 Philippine elections also witnessed a variant of digital autocratization with the presidential campaign of Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr., son of the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos Sr., using authoritarian nostalgia that started during his failed 2016 vice presidential campaign. Propped by a robust disinformation machinery, the Marcos Jr. campaign diffused nostalgic narratives in social media, focusing on the myth of the Marcos golden age and the cleansing of the country’s martial law past, while also capitalizing on Duterte’s securitized narratives as a reinforcement of the strongman leadership style that Marcos Jr. sought to emulate. As the “patient zero” of global disinformation, the Philippine case demonstrates how the weaponization of disinformation started by Duterte and continued by Marcos Jr. can continuously undermine democracy.
Link to the chapter: https://doi.org/10.1093/9780198945253.003.0048