The £350 million a week claim for the NHS that Brexit promised. The spreading and influence of fake or extremely biased news on Twitter during the 2016 US Presidential elections. Its prolific use in the latest set of elections in Brazil and Kenya. Digital disinformation campaigns have fast become a feature of modern electioneering. With significant elections due to take place across the world over the next two years, this year is guaranteed to be another that is fraught with political disinformation.

Given its recent pervasiveness and notoriety, warning of its threat is hardly news. That in and of itself is a problem. The dissemination of disinformation is becoming so normalised, that it’s treated like another bump in the road for our democratic processes rather than the car crash it should be. As we drive towards an unpredictable future, the warning lights on the dashboard are flashing.

Of the world’s six most populous democracies, five will hold elections over the next two years – India, the USA, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Nigeria. The exception is Brazil (they went to the polls in October 2022) and scenes of the storming of Congress by supporters of the defeated incumbent fuelled by disinformation give a timely warning of what’s at stake. The future of global democracy might have a rapidly approaching date with a brick wall.

When the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke in 2018, it was thought to mark a pivotal moment in the public understanding and scrutiny of social media companies and the content and data their platforms are built on. The company had harvested the profiles of up to 87 million Facebook users to generate psychological data that could be exploited to micro-target voters, manipulating them to support Ted Cruz and then Donald Trump in their presidential campaigns. While the fallout from the scandal “didn’t change Facebook”, some commentators claimed that “it changed the world”.

But did it?

Did we seriously rethink how we used social media once we were cognisant of the unchecked collection and manipulation of our personal data? Or did we just jump on the next cool app that promised entertaining, engaging, personalised content without paying due heed to the lessons of before? The continued proliferation of time spent online and dependence on our devices tell their own story; Facebook has shown year-on-year growth since 2019 and remains the most used social platform worldwide. Meanwhile, TikTok, a relatively new social media app, is expected to reach two billion active users in 2024.

Just as the pandemic’s seismic nature burrows its way into our collective memory and we accept that COVID-19 will circulate for the foreseeable future, disinformation through social media has become the endemic virus infecting our information ecosystem. So, if we can’t eradicate it, what vaccine will ensure its containment and minimise its harms?

“Without facts, you can’t have truth.” 

A photograph of a nine-year-old girl who had been raped and murdered went viral in the Philippines in August 2016. Lying on the grass in a pink tank top, her mother crouched down beside her with one hand placed softly on her chest, the other clutching her phone to her head as she cried.

Peter Tiu Lavina, a campaign spokesman for the then President Rodrigo Duterte, posted the photo on Facebook, writing: “Truly revolting – Nine-year-old raped and murdered and we haven’t heard condemning this brutal act from human rightists, bishops and ‘presstitutes’ who are derailing the government’s war against drugs and crime.” He argued that this was the latest justification in the government’s “righteous battles against drugs and crime”. However, there were two major inaccuracies at play here: the photo that sparked his outrage wasn’t from 2016; it was from 2014. Furthermore, it wasn’t even from the Philippines. The victim was Evelin Nicole da Silva Sousa who lived in Brazil and died at the hands of her grandfather.

Facebook had become the internet of the Philippines since the rollout of ‘Free Basics’ in 2013. The initiative sought greater global digital inclusion by bringing basic internet access to its population for free. Its overwhelming popularity meant that, by August 2016, Filipinos were spending nearly twice as much time on Facebook and Instagram as they spent watching television, and the average Filipino had 60% more Facebook friends than the global average. 2021 marked the sixth consecutive year where Filipinos spent more time online than any other nation.

Filipino-American journalist and CEO of Rappler Maria Ressa wrote, “The Philippines is “ground zero” for the terrible effects social media can have on a nation’s institutions, its culture, and the minds of its populace.”

This isn’t mere conjecture or scaremongering on her part – it’s how both Facebook’s Global Politics and Government Outreach Director Katie Harbath and Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie described the country. The Philippines was both “patient zero” and the “petri dish” for road-testing the playbook for manipulating democracy. In other words, Maria argues that Filipinos were treated like “Pavlov’s dogs”. After techniques of electoral manipulation, foreign disinformation, trolling, and deepfakes were successfully cultured in the Philippines, they were exported to the West in time for the Brexit referendum and the 2016 US presidential elections.

“Without truth, you can’t have trust.”

The Philippines gained independence from the United States in 1946, after which a string of more liberal, then authoritarian leaders culminated in the People Power Revolution of 1986 in which President Ferdinand Marcos was overthrown. Fast-track to 2016, Duterte became the first politician in the country to use social media to win an election. Elected on a campaign that promised a ‘war on drugs’, he turned an issue that was no doubt prevalent but was nonetheless only the country’s eighth national concern, into an issue that ascended to the forefront of the national consciousness. Influencers coordinated online affinity groups making “astroturfing” – the fake bandwagon effect – and extreme social polarisation possible via the friends-of-friends algorithm on Facebook. Together, this embedded the classic ‘us’ (the ordinary Filipino) versus ‘them’ (drug neighbourhoods) paradigm into a larger ‘drug war’ meta-narrative making Duterte’s response appear forceful but natural, logical, and necessary. Following his election, official figures on the number of people killed in police operations were continually underestimated and revised. According to the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency under the #RealNumbersPH, 6,201 were killed by the police between July 2016 and September 2021, while the International Criminal Court estimated that it was between 12,000 and 30,000 from July 2016 to March 2019.

During the same election campaign, “BongBong” Marcos Jr. ran for Vice-President. Filipinos watched as his campaign drew on the nostalgia of days gone by as his father’s legacy as a dictator was reimagined. Brittany Kaiser, another Cambridge Analytica whistleblower, revealed that the company had been employed to “rebrand” the Marcos family’s image, which stood as a huge “financial opportunity” for the company. This ultimately contributed to Marcos Jr’s win of the presidency in May 2022 with a 59% vote share that represented the greatest electoral mandate of any president since his father’s dictatorship. It provided a “showcase for the impact of disinformation and relentless information operations on social media” which had transformed Marcos from the son of a deposed pariah “into a hero”, as described by Maria.

As media evolved from the material to immaterial, reinventing how we search for and consume information, the neuroplasticity of our brain – its ability to adapt to change – has been weakened. With an edge of disgust, we have all often joked that we’re becoming more addicted to our phones, or reflect that a social media detox would relieve our anxieties. Yet, we still find ourselves repeatedly reaching for that dopamine hit, one last scroll to take the edge off our boredom and ignite the reward pathway in our brains. The average TikTok user opens the app 19 times a day, according to a leaked pitch deck from the company. As apps compete in an attention economy, and our minds open to an echo chamber of hyper-personalised information, our brains are morphed into those of addicts at scale, reducing our attention spans and cognitive function. In an inflammatory 2016 speech citing drug addiction as a national security threat, Duterte said “there are three million drug addicts; I’d be happy to slaughter them… and save the next generation from perdition.” Yet, there remains a novel and far more widespread form of addiction that shouldn’t be ignored from a social and security standpoint.

Taken together, social media has provided the vehicle for the construction of lies to bend to and reflect, enact, and reify capitalist relations of power, transmitting them six times faster than facts. Alluding to Nietzsche, these lies then embody truths which we have forgotten are illusions and are subsequently understood and accepted as ontological facts. Online fear-mongering – especially on Facebook – has insidiously fed people’s insecurities, weaponising and radicalising their psyche to proliferate offline violence, often fuelled by racial hatred. This corrodes our trust in our institutions and in one another, and calculatedly coaxes us away from independent or balanced media, leading to mob violence as demonstrated in the US Capitol Hill attacks, and echoed this year in Brazil’s insurrection.

“Without facts, truth, and trust democracy is dead” – Maria Ressa

Undoubtedly, the notion that we are sleepwalking our way into an Orwellian dystopia premised on information warfare and the death of “all meaningful human endeavour” is incredibly alarming. It cannot mean that we start from the assumption that all news is fake until proven otherwise; nihilism would drive us towards existential insanity. Nor is it a safe choice to believe everything you read on the internet or elsewhere, as has been overstated. Tackling disinformation therefore requires a whole societal approach. Maria has proposed a four-tiered multi-sectoral pyramid which alongside an “influencer marketing campaign” has instructed NGOs, human rights groups, and businesses to take “boring fact checks and spread them with emotion”. Its effect was immediate – they found that “inspiration spreads as fast as hate”.

When society feels as though it’s in a prolonged period of acute political self-harm, the likely urge to disengage and hold your hands up in exasperation in the run-up to the major political events of 2023/24 will be understandable. But that is the point of the disinformation game – to cleave irrevocable damage to our democratic spheres and enable ‘illiberal’ modes of governance to take root. The resulting ‘post-truth’ society, one which is founded on ignorance, cannot be allowed to become our new norm.

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