It was during the 2016 United States (US) Presidential Elections that Donald Trump introduced the term “fake news” in reference to media outlets he accused of feeding the public false information. Three years later, Trump is now in the White House, and his campaign rhetoric has become an international phenomenon.

Social media has opened channels for fake news to take on a variety of forms. With a plethora of “news providers” each marketing legitimacy, it has become more difficult to distinguish genuine news from satire, propaganda, advertising, and flat out lies. However, the above caveats merely belong under the umbrella of a historically dangerous phenomenon known as disinformation.

The earliest accounts of disinformation can be traced back to the Roman Emperor Octavian’s smear campaign against Mark Antony. Throughout history, disinformation has been used as a political tool. However, the art of weaponizing disinformation was perfected by the US and Russia, maximizing its utility through divergent methods. Recent events suggest that this trail of deception has now reached the Philippines.

Active measures

Infamous for its proficiency in espionage, the Soviet Union’s Committee for State Security (KGB) was the first to engineer a complex system of disinformation tactics. Defectors of the agency have stated that more than 80 percent of the organization’s resources are allocated for “Active Measures”—a term referring to their methods of formulating information that would catalyze internal division against the West.

The world first witnessed the power of Active Measures when the Soviets launched Operation InfeKtion, a campaign which framed the CIA as the creators of the AIDS virus. In 1983, the KGB bribed a New Delhi broadsheet to release an article claiming that the virus spread following a series of CIA funded experiments on biological weaponry. The piece also asserted that the virus was originally conceived to target African Americans and homosexuals. The story spread like wildfire, motivating a number of African publications to write about the issue. In 1986, the KGB hired a scientific journal to publish studies tracing the origins of the virus to the US. The following year, Operation InfeKtion made national headlines on an American news channel. The White House suffered the aftermath, having to realign its healthcare initiatives and foreign policy in order to appease the growing mistrust from its rioting public and international partners.

When the USSR collapsed in 1991, multiple countries perceived it to be the end of Soviet reconnaissance. However, the KGB left behind a healthy foundation that would ultimately be harnessed by Vladimir Putin. Upon vacating the Kremlin, Putin recognized that Russia was far from its once regal position in the global arena. For this reason, he opted to tweak the objectives of Active Measures. Moscow now focused on dividing a unified Western world so as to tip the balance of power in its favor. To realize this objective, he established Russia Today, a Soviet run international news network, which solely reported stories drawn up by the administration.

In 2016, the US was once again subjected to the might of Russian gambits when numerous websites leaked bogus articles that accused presidential candidate Hillary Clinton of running an underground prostitution ring in a DC pizzeria. With that, Putin and his camp effectively struck a devastating blow to the Democrat’s public relations and, as some analysts suggest, won Trump the election.

The city on the hill

Contrary to Soviet methods, US disinformation takes on a more insidious form. As Noam Chomsky suggests in his book Who rules the world (2016), at the heart of American propaganda lies the narrative of the “City on the Hill.” This notion paints the US as a democratic icon and the lone government with the capacity to administer global affairs through enshrining human rights and market liberalization. According to Chomsky, this fallacious sense of exceptionalism accounts for and is even used to justify the numerous and often violent instances of US involvement covered by the alias of “humanitarian intervention.”

Semblances of this worldview can be identified in American engagement with underdeveloped countries. In its interference with the elections of budding democracies, the White House quelled grassroots movements in favor of authoritarian leadership for the fear of a communist uprising. For example, in supporting the Indonesian government’s mass violence against the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) in 1965, the White House installed General Suharto in office, instigating a military government which committed crimes against humanity comparable to the likes committed by Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong. Similarly, the Nixon administration helped organize Chile’s military junta which successfully replaced the Allende government with Augusto Pinochet’s brutal dictatorship.

After September 11, the Bush regime invaded Iraq under the assumption that Saddam Hussein housed weapons of mass destruction. However, when the warheads were not located, the President’s rhetoric shifted from the topic of armaments, to Iraq being “undemocratic”. Throughout such momentous events, certain publications were ever active in commending Washington.

Domesticating colonial politics

It is difficult to pinpoint the exact moment disinformation infiltrated the Philippines. When the US annexed the Philippines under the guise of “benevolent assimilation,” the imperial government established a constabulary in possession of dangerous surveillance technology and the personal data of majority of Manila’s inhabitants. US control was augmented by the presence of several tabloids which disseminated military propaganda and propagated falsified news. Consequently, politics was muddied by the American strategy of collecting incriminating data against Filipino legislators and bureaucrats so as to direct the colony’s policies towards American standards.

The local gentry eventually responded by adopting these practices while incorporating their own expediencies. As a result, a political culture of fraud and coercion was conceived. This is fittingly illustrated by the tactics of Ferdinand Marcos Sr. To instigate his dictatorship, Marcos first incited public unrest by warning of an impending communist insurrection. After Plaza Miranda, the president made his infamous declaration, reasoning that the country was under siege from lawlessness and communist insurgency.

Presently, the ascendance of the Duterte administration has been accompanied by a rise in the activity of fake news outlets. Not only is disinformation utilized to sustain the incumbent President’s popularity, it simultaneously discredits the opposition. To make matters worse, politicians themselves proliferate fake news, and even fake history. Despite the action taken by Malacañang to ameliorate the situation, fake news channels continue to operate.

Disinformation has stood the test of time due to the efficacy of its delivered results. However, these results entail social regression and rising distrust for legitimate sources of information. Considering the volume and frequency by which disinformation is now being transmitted, this epidemic becomes harder to contain as the lines demarcating the factual from the fictitious become more blurred each day.

Kremlin photo sourced from Dook International

White House photo sourced from State Plaza Hotel

Malacañang Palace photo sourced from The Filipino Times

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