Ninoy’s legacy and the post-truth era

Unlike in 2015 and 2016, fake news and misinformation online should be obvious to many people by now. To recall, it was around that time when online social networks were used to the hilt to create divisions among voters in 2016 and provoke them into loosening their moral restraints in favor of populist, tough-talking, candidates.

Once regarded as safe havens for sharing information and providing mutual support among groups of people, online social networks “have become breeding grounds for spreading toxic behaviors, political propaganda, and radicalizing content” (Obadimu, Mead & Hussain, 2019).

In the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the US Justice Department accused Russian intelligence agents of organizing a troll army to create fake social media accounts in order to influence the election. Russia and China, the ideological rivals of Western democracies, know that if they cannot beat the West in terms of advanced technology and military strength, they can bring it down to its knees by manipulating information; weaken its societies from the inside.

Propaganda and disinformation are as old as the accounts of two worlds wars and even the Bible. Today’s mainstream media are likewise not immune from accusations of deliberate bias, but at least most try their best to stick to the truth. This era’s propaganda and disinformation are, however, different in scary ways.

In the words of Israeli historian and author of the bestselling book “21 Lessons for the 21st Century”, Yuval Noah Harari, we are “living in a terrifying era of post-truth.” “And what triggered our transition to the post-truth era – the Internet? Social media? The rise of Putin and Trump?” Harari asks.

August 21 last week our country observed the 37th death anniversary of Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino, Jr.. I mentioned Ninoy because his legacy has been under attack in recent years – not in history books, not in academic journals, not even in mainstream media – but in online social networks, particularly YouTube and Facebook.

Flawed as he was as a member of the country’s political elite before his incarceration for seven years under Martial Law, Ninoy’s moral transformation as the symbol of an indomitable opposition was a reminder of the inevitable end of a crumbling kleptocracy. His death from an assassin’s bullet that fateful day on August 21, 1983 hastened the end of those dark years under Ferdinand Marcos.

I remember that day. I was a seven-year-old kid occupied with my toys when father suddenly hushed me up as news of Ninoy’s death reached our living room that evening. My generation saw, heard, and felt those waning years of the dictatorship. Papa was in Fuente Osmeña during the rally in Cebu of Ninoy’s widow Cory a day before EDSA People Power revolt broke out.

Today, my batchmates in high school talk about how things have seemingly changed. Videos from anonymous accounts posted on YouTube about the so-called “golden years” of the Marcos regime garner over a million views and thousands of supporting comments. Video posts about Ninoy, meanwhile, get around 54,000 to 200,000 views, and thousands of bashers in the comments section.

If YouTube were a history channel, Marcos would be a hero and no shadow of Ninoy would be found in the international airport and in five hundred-peso notes. Fortunately, YouTube is just a “shimmering evanescent bubble” for historical revisionism. We have the means to fight back against well-funded campaigns to revise history. We can push back against the work of trolls and paid influencers, they who inanely seek to revise established historical consensus without the discipline of scholarly research and writing. More on this in my next column article.