MANILA Fall 2021 started to trend in the Philippines Tiktok challenge (you switch to another service): the young people had to play a march during the dictatorship and describe how their parents reacted to it.
Many dads and grandmas started marching and chasing the words of the song.
The song was associated with 1972, when the then president of the country Ferdinand Marcos ordered the march to celebrate the beginning of the “new era”.
The grandmothers and grandfathers who lived at that time now raised their hands and marched through the living rooms. Young people laughed: This challenge is legit, great!
Tiktok sounds in power use
That was not the only thing from the past that the Marcos family successfully romanticized on Tiktok, Youtube and other platforms.
The rewriting of history went through because the Philippines had been a test laboratory for disinformation campaigns for years.
In the months leading up to the election, Filipinos’ feeds were filled with videos where eerie stock photos of Marcos’ father and mother were cut to the sound of the day About Imelda Marcos. In other videos, the own family of Marcos Junior, aka “Bongbong”, made fun.
The number of accounts and the pace of publication was breathtaking.
It worked. In May, Bongbong Marcos won the election and the Marcos clan returned to power in the Philippines. It was a project that had been in the works for years.
The heist of the century
Election night MJ Tapang, 25, cried profusely. She had worked for Marcos’ main challenger, a female candidate Leni Robredon in a campaign that pushed for human rights and more transparent governance in the Philippines.
Most of the electorate were young adults like MJ who had not lived through the dark years of the country’s dictatorship.
MJ thinks people have been brainwashed into forgetting history.
– His family stole from us. Now people say that history is just “gossip,” says MJ.
It’s not hard to find students who think like MJ in the University of the Philippines campus.
19 year olds Joy, Ram and Louis are even afraid of their parents’ reaction to the interview, and therefore don’t want to tell their last names. Everyone’s families are Marcos supporters.
According to the parents, the young people lack “respect” if they challenge their opinion about the Marcoses, Ram says.
– Not even many students understand what is going on, says Joy.
Sometrolling test laboratory
Located in Southeast Asia, the Philippines is a fertile ground for distortion, as Filipinos have been studied as one of the most social media-addicted peoples in the world.
This means he might not be able to afford to google the news, but he might get unlimited access to Youtube or Facebook. The practice has already started years ago (you switch to another service).
It is not known if Cambridge Analytica helped Marcos. He lost to his opponent and accused him of rigging the election.
In any case, the Philippines was already at that time a fascinating market for manipulation experiments. Cambridge Analytica leaker has revealed (you switch to another service)that the company considered Filipinos a good test audience because they were addicted to social media, spoke English, and also had weak political control in the country.
Golden click headlines
What else explains the fact that a dictator family known as ruthless got the support of the people?
Many Filipinos are tired of liberal democracy, explains the history professor Francis Gealogo from the Ateneo University of Manila.
The democracy that followed the Marcoses’ exile promised much but delivered little. The Marcoses fled the 1986 uprising to the United States.
The elite continued to get richer, and the poor remained poor.
– The administrations after the revolution failed to solve inequality and other basic problems, which caused people to feel powerless, says Geologo.
Filipinos need a strong leader, and the nostalgia cultivated by the Marcoses is the fuel for that.
– Nostalgia can also be felt by generations that weren’t even born then, Geologo points out.
Before the elections, wild click headlines spread online.
Among the most egregious was that the Marcoses would own a huge amount of gold, which they would distribute to the Filipinos after victory. Claims that no one would have been arrested and no lawsuits would have been brought against the Marcoses during the years of absolute rule were also popular.
Some have believed in the family’s innocence all along because the Philippines has not properly accounted for its past, Geologo says. There have been no truth commissions in the country, and the Marcoses have never admitted to doing anything wrong.
The clan’s influence has never completely disappeared. After the family returned from Hawaii to the Philippines after her father Marcos’ death in 1991, Imelda Marcos ran for president twice and was elected to the House of Representatives for four terms.
One by one, his children became governors, deputies and senators.
Hit movie number three
The newest cog in the Marcos propaganda machine is a movie about the family’s last 72 hours in power in 1986.
The movie Maid in Malacañang premiered in August and has been playing to full theaters in the Philippines. Malacañang is the presidential palace in the country’s capital, Manila.
The film was produced by – none other than – the daughter of the dictator Marcos and the sister of the current president, a senator Sucks Marcos.
According to the advertisements, the film shows the never-before-seen events through the eyes of the family, which have not been reported to the public before.
Historian Francis Gealogo is outraged that such whitewashing sinks into people.
– We have a whole generation of high school graduates who know very little about the history of the Philippines, he sighs.
He himself has students at the university who deny the historical facts.
– Then why do they study history? Yes, it’s really frustrating.
Did you know how to use social media in the Philippines? You can discuss the topic until Monday, August 22. until 11 p.m.