The Triumph of Marcos Dynasty Disinformation Is a Warning to the U.S.

Maria Ressa and her staff at Rappler exposed the family’s false narratives, but social-media mythmaking prevailed in a historic election in the Philippines.
Maria Ressa is a Filipina journalist businesswoman author and expert on global terrorism. She is best known as the Chief...
Photographs by Moises Saman / Magnum

It was 9 P.M., and Maria Ressa, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning journalist, was pacing back and forth in the newsroom of Rappler, the news site she co-founded a decade ago. The polls in the Philippines had closed two hours earlier, and about half the votes had been counted. Ferdinand Marcos, Jr., the son and namesake of the former Philippine dictator, was leading by a margin so wide it was clear he would soon be President.

Across the newsroom, the reality was sinking in. Rappler journalists, most of them in their twenties, had reported on the campaign with courage and verve, posting videos, stories, and updates on their site and on multiple social-media platforms. Most important, Rappler had helped launch an innovative network of journalists, fact checkers, lawyers, activists, and academics to identify, track, and expose disinformation to voters. The outcome of the election would determine the future of Philippine democracy, and Rappler’s, too.

Marcos, Jr., had campaigned on a promise of restoring what he falsely claimed was the golden age of his father’s rule. He portrayed himself as the avenging prince, fighting to reclaim the power that had been unjustly wrested from his father. Ferdinand Marcos and his First Lady, Imelda, in fact, had enacted martial law, jailed dissidents, killed and disappeared thousands, plundered the treasury, and left the country in economic ruin. Like his father, who referred to critical journalists as “mosquitos,” he showed little patience for an inquiring press.

“They did it,” Ressa said, as early returns showed a landslide victory for the former dictator’s son who had whitewashed his father’s repressive rule. “They did it.”

Marcos, Jr.,’s running mate, and the country’s next Vice-President, was Sara Duterte, the daughter of the outgoing President Rodrigo Duterte, barred from seeking reëlection. In his nearly six years in office, Duterte, a strongman populist who excelled at manipulating social media, had muzzled the press, jailed critics, and launched a war on drugs that left thousands dead and filled Manila’s sprawling shantytowns with corpses.

Rappler’s journalists reported on the cruel excesses of that war, which included thousands of extrajudicial killings by police and unknown gunmen, and exposed Duterte’s well-oiled online disinformation machine, which demonized dissenters and amplified the President’s call for blood. For Rappler, the blowback was swift: first online, mostly on Facebook, with a deluge of insults and threats to its reporters and Ressa in particular. Then came a barrage of lawsuits, so many that if the potential jail sentences from them were added up, Ressa would be imprisoned for more than a hundred years.

In 2019, Ressa was arrested by plainclothes officers who came to the Rappler office. She was detained overnight and posted bail, but, a month later, at the Manila airport, when she arrived home from an overseas trip, she was arrested again. In the newsroom, there was fear and dread. Editors stationed guards outside the Rappler office, in a suburban mall, and prepared the staff for more arrests and possible closure.

The Nobel Peace Prize, awarded last December, lifted morale in the newsroom and earned Rappler global acclaim. Duterte, now a lame duck, came under attack for corruption and the ineptitude of his pandemic response. As campaigning began in earnest, the country’s pro-democracy groups, battered by Duterte’s rule, coalesced around the candidacy of Maria Leonor Robredo, the current Vice-President. Her call for a more caring, transparent, and responsive government drew record crowds. Tens of thousands of youthful campaign volunteers believed a “pink revolution” was sweeping the country—pink was Robredo’s campaign color.

Ressa graduated from Princeton in 1986, the year that angry citizens chased the Marcos family out of the Presidential palace and forced them into exile. Inspired by “people power”—an uprising where nuns praying the rosary and young women offering flowers stopped Marcos’s troops from firing at protesters—she returned to the Philippines to work as a journalist. Like many Filipinos of her generation, she believed that the Philippines, a nation of a hundred and ten million that is the oldest democracy in Southeast Asia, had rid itself of strongman rule.

After Maria Ressa worked to uncover Rodrigo Duterte’s cruel excesses, she faced insults, threats, and lawsuits, and she was arrested twice.

But after years of political deadlock and corruption in the nineteen-nineties and two-thousands, democracy seemed old and tired. Filipinos elected Duterte in a landslide in 2016 because many of them were exhausted from decades of democratic dysfunction. For nearly a decade, a new narrative of the Marcos era as a period of peace, progress, and prosperity had been seeded on social media, particularly Facebook and YouTube, which Filipinos could access for free on their mobile phones.

Largely unnoticed by the mainstream media, the Marcos family had created an alternative information ecosystem that appealed to large sections of the population who felt unseen and unheard by liberal élites and the news media. A generation born with no memory of the Marcos regime and who received their information via mobile phones soon filled online spaces where Marcos revisionism reigned. The Marcos family cast themselves as victims of the democratic establishment, a narrative that resonated among average Filipinos who felt that the promise of democracy was a mirage. For them, democracy made lofty promises but did not deliver for average people, and it enriched the wealthy, the corrupt, and the powerful. Like populists elsewhere, from Donald Trump to Jair Bolsonaro, Marcos, Jr., used social media to engage them and spread false claims and conspiracy theories that fed their resentments.

“This election is emblematic of everything that needs to be fought globally,” Ressa said. “What the tech platforms have done is to kill the good in people because their incentive structure allows the bad, the click-baiting anger and hate, the lies to proliferate.”

At 5 A.M. on Election Day, Rappler journalists in the field were live-streaming reports on YouTube and Facebook. The mood in the newsroom was upbeat, not least because this was the first time after more than two years of pandemic restrictions that the staff was working together in the office. They felt it was an existential election for Philippine democracy and a free press. “Look at our staff,” Ressa told me. “They’ve given their heart and soul. They know what’s at stake.”

Rappler’s reporters saw themselves on the front lines of a global information war, and they felt they were making a dent. They exposed the use of Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, and Twitter to cover up the thievery and human-rights abuses of the Marcos regime, falsely blame the C.I.A. and the Vatican for their downfall, and propagate myths on the origins of the Marcoses’ wealth. Rappler reporters posted YouTube and TikTok videos correcting those falsehoods. In January, Twitter suspended more than three hundred pro-Marcos accounts that Rappler had helped identify. Rappler fact checkers also worked with Facebook to take down and limit the distribution of falsehoods. But all these efforts didn’t seem to make a dent, and the polls consistently showed a clear majority in favor of Marcos, Jr., whose formidable money, mythmaking, and political machine the opposition could not match.

On Election Night in the Rappler newsroom, stacks of takeout food in plastic boxes—pork tonkatsu, butter chicken, shrimp tempura—had been ordered to see the staff through what was expected to be a long night. Instead, there was a stunned silence when Marcos, Jr.,’s landslide victory—the largest in the country in forty years—was clear from the moment the first results were beamed on the newsroom’s big screen. The staff struggled to focus on their work. Their editors had instructed them before the election that no matter the outcome, they should set their emotions aside. “Park your feelings,” the executive editor, Glenda Gloria, had said. “This election is not about you.”

The news editor, Paterno Esmaquel II, fielded queries from stunned reporters, who reached out to him on Telegram, asking for guidance on what they should do next. One reporter called in tears. He spoke to her calmly, giving her direction, but inside, he was thinking that all their efforts to inform the public had not been enough; so much more needed to be done. But that night, there was little else he could do, he said, except eat the tonkatsu. Mara Cepeda, a Rappler reporter who was in the field covering Robredo, was gobsmacked by the scale of Marcos, Jr.,’s win. “When those election results came in, we realized just how formidable the enemy was,” she said, referring to false narratives on social media. “To me, as a journalist, it means I had not done enough to counter disinformation.”

A little after 11 P.M., Marcos, Jr., appeared on TV to address his followers. Resplendent in a white shirt with red trim, he looked like his father incarnate. Outside the Marcos headquarters in Manila, his supporters were cheering wildly, dancing to the beat of “Bagong Lipunan” an anthem that First Lady Imelda Marcos commissioned after her husband imposed martial law in 1972. Filmed by pro-Marcos vloggers and influencers who posted the images on TikTok and YouTube, a new, triumphalist online narrative was being born, and the moment was theirs. “Autocrats, Inc., has won,” Ressa said. Once again, her future and Rappler’s were on the line. Ever the optimist, Ressa was unfazed. “This is a newsroom that has been under attack for six years,” she said. “We have a plan for every worst-case scenario you can think of.”

At 11:20 P.M., Rappler ended its live stream. Staffers in the newsroom gave one another a round of applause. “How do you feel?” Ressa asked her staff. “We are O.K.,” an editor replied. “We carry on.” But, a few feet away, many members of the social-media team were in tears. Rambo Talabong, a twenty-four-year-old Rappler reporter, was hurting so much, he told me, that “it felt like I was being stabbed.” Earlier that night, he had asked to be sent to the Marcos headquarters even though Marcos-Duterte supporters had trolled and threatened him online for years. When he showed up at the impromptu victory party there, Marcos supporters shouted, “Fake news! Fake news!” “It was as if they were saying everything you have been doing is invalid because you lost,” he said.

The following morning, Talabong was back in the newsroom reporting. Instead of giving up, he asked hard questions about the work that he and Rappler were doing. “I feel we’ve underreported on the Marcos followers, so we were caught by surprise,” he said. “We never took them seriously.”

Facts, Talabong said, carried little weight with Marcos supporters who already believed the family’s narratives that they were victims of a treasonous plot, not oppressors of the Filipino people. Dismissing Marcos believers as misinformed or manipulated by social media only heightened their alienation from mainstream society. In fact, as the election results showed, they are now the mainstream. “In our world, they are misinformed,” he said. “In their world, we are the ones who have been fooled.” Talabong added, “A lot of the thirty-one million who voted for Marcos don’t read us. A lot of them don’t read at all. How do we reach them?”

As Jonathan Corpus Ong, a professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who has studied disinformation networks in the Philippines, wrote, “For too long, progressives have taken for granted that facts in themselves are sufficient. In the case of the Philippines, the liberal weapons of historical accuracy and fact-checking are simply no match for Marcos’ creative folklore, turbocharged by social media fan culture and relatable influencers.”

The day after the election, editors acknowledged that they now faced a President-elect who distrusted journalists and preferred to speak through platforms controlled by his allies—vloggers, online influencers, and a new TV network that was the Filipino version of Fox News. Chay Hofileña, a senior editor, vowed to continue fighting disinformation. “If, in a Duterte Presidency, the main issue was human rights, in a Marcos Presidency it would be truth. I don’t know what’s worse, someone who doesn’t value life or someone who doesn’t value truth.” The challenge, she added, was reaching out to Filipinos who now inhabit an information universe beyond Rappler’s reach. Maybe, Hofilenã said, “through listening, patience, humility,” journalists can connect with them.