Historical Uses of Disinformation in the Philippines as Weapons of Authoritarian Rule and Empire
Case Study from the Asian American Disinformation Table 2025 Landscape Report, “Where do we go from here?” , co-authored by FYLPRO and Malaya Movement USA
The Spanish-American War, which resulted in the U.S. annexation and colonial relationships with Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines, is referred to as the “first media war” in some quarters and was also a watershed moment in the history of mis- and disinformation. Epitomizing what came to be known as “yellow journalism,” the sensationalist reporting of U.S. newspapers owned by rival publishers Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst rose to a fever pitch as their respective outlets fought for market share and oftentimes played fast and loose with the facts on the ground in their coverage of Cuba’s struggle for independence from spain.
On February 15, 1898, the battleship USS Maine inexplicably blew up and sank while stationed in the harbor at Havana, Cuba, leading to a torrent of sensationalist articles in the yellow press laying blame on the Spanish. Drumming up popular support for U.S. military intervention, President William McKinley swiftly set his sights on Spain’s colonies in the Pacific once war was officially declared. As a takeover of the strategically located Philippines became an increasingly enticing prospect for the United States, its prosecution of the war against Spain and its racist justifications for subjugating the Filipino populace were both enabled by the deceptive manipulation of information. While the U.S. navy easily neutralized the decrepit Spanish fleet during the Battle of Manila Bay on May 1, 1898, capturing the capital would require a larger military push. This led the United States to enlist the assistance of exiled Filipino revolutionary commander Emilio Aguinaldo, who returned to the Philippines unaware of the Americans’ true intentions and declared the country’s independence in June as local fighters successfully routed Spain’s land forces throughout various parts of the islands.
Because the war had been pitched as a noble endeavor to liberate oppressed peoples from European domination, U.S. military authorities made a concerted effort to keep domestic audiences in the dark about Filipino aspirations for self-determination and even brokered a deal for the beleaguered Spanish to formally surrender to the United States following a second, staged battle at Manila in August. By December, the U.S. signed the Treaty of Paris and took possession of the Philippines in exchange for $20 million to Spain, which was followed by proclamation from President McKinley announcing the policy of “benevolent assimilation,” wherein the U.S. would take military control of the territory under the guise of “civilizing” the Filipino people. Expansionist propaganda portrayed the Filipinos as a primitive, child-like people who were morally and intellectually incapable of governing themselves. McKinley explained, “there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them,” never mind the fact that the Spaniards had already established Catholicism as the majority religion in the islands several centuries prior. In modern times, almost 80% of Filipinos still identify as Roman Catholic, according to census data from 2020.
America’s campaign in the Philippines involved forced relocation of communities into concentration camps, gruesome forms of torture, and massacres of women and children. The U.S. military government suppressed news about these bloody attempts to pacify the Philippines, a media blackout that would be undermined by U.S. troops who gave eyewitness accounts to independent journalists and described the atrocities they committed in their correspondence with loved ones back home.
Plans to eventually transition the Philippines to self-governance were disrupted by World War II, when the Japanese imperial army invaded the archipelago in 1941 just hours after attacking U.S. naval facilities at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. This new set of colonialist intruders deployed a civilian-staffed propaganda corps conscripted from Japan’s intellectual and creative classes, some of whom “had been sent to the war front . . . as punishment for their liberal political ideas.” Their purpose was to conduct influence operations promoting the following themes: “that Japan was compelled to start the war in order to establish peace in East Asia, that Japan had sincere intentions in its bid to create a new order in East Asia and that the U.S. did not try to understand Japan's stand and continued to harass her.” The Filipinos’ affinity for mass media was regarded by the Japanese as “a manifestation of the negative influence of Americanism,” which prompted the invading forces to expropriate newspapers, radio stations, and movie theaters and repurpose them to parrot their own version of East Asian imperialism.
Japan’s messaging, which was intended to win the hearts and minds of everyday Filipinos as well as entice the organized resistance to lay down their arms, dangled the prospect of Philippine independence on a much quicker timeline than that promised by the Americans. It played on frustrated nationalist longings by recruiting the aging Aguinaldo as a pro-Japanese mouthpiece. Leaflets and handbills cited instances of racial discrimination towards Filipinos who were serving the United States in uniform while also making nostalgic references to the earlier struggle for Philippine liberation which had unfolded several decades prior. The U.S. military responded with its own anti-Japanese radio broadcasts, and interestingly enough, both sides would invoke the legacy of Dr. José Rizal, whose political writings inspired the Philippine revolution against Spain in the late 1890s. Faced with total Japanese control of domestic mass media, the Philippine guerilla movement formed a network of underground newspapers to rally support for its cause, provide updates on the war effort, and expose abuses by the occupation government.
Ultimately emerging victorious over the Axis powers in World War II, the United States would finally grant independence to the Philippines in 1946 and renew its attention to another foe: communism. Still a key strategic region to the U.S., the Philippines’ newfound independence did not discourage the U.S. government from continuing its influence campaigns there. America’s Cold War-era rivalry with the Soviet Union saw the U.S. engage in all sorts of clandestine activities abroad. In the 1950s, when CIA officer Edward G. Lansdale led an anti-communist fueled psychological warfare operation in the Philippines against the Hukbalahap (“Huk” for short), a guerrilla peasant army fighting for genuine land reform that originated as an anti-Japanese resistance force during World War II. Lansdale’s campaign exploited local superstition and folklore by using light aircraft to broadcast curses onto villagers from loudspeakers and in one storied case, drained the corpse of a Huk fighter of its blood and planted the body in the countryside with bite marks meant to invoke popular beliefs in the aswang, a vampire-like creature from Philippine mythology. During the Cold War, the CIA also worked with anti-communist political leaders in other Southeast Asian countries, like Malaysia and Singapore, to exploit anti-Chinese sentiments to ally those countries with the United States against China.
Fears of communist insurgency, spurred on by the U.S.’s anti-communist intervention, would be a running theme throughout the autocratic rule of Ferdinand Marcos Sr., which lasted from the former senator’s election as president in 1965 until the Marcos family’s ouster in a nonviolent revolution during 1986. A charismatic figure who first gained notoriety as a young law grad when he successfully argued to have the Supreme Court of the Philippines overturn his conviction for allegedly murdering his father’s political rival, Marcos Sr. leveraged the potency of mythmaking and narrative control to legitimize and maintain his grip over the highest echelons of power in the Philippines.
On August 21, 1971, several hand grenades were detonated at a rally held by the opposition Liberal Party in Manila’s Plaza Miranda that left nine dead and about a hundred people injured, including a number of prominent elected officials. President Marcos Sr., who had been facing months of corruption allegations and claims that he had cheated his way towards a reelection victory three years prior, attributed the Plaza Miranda bombing to members of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), a move that would be denounced by critics as a pretext for the crackdown on civil liberties that soon came to follow. While blame for the attack has shifted between the Marcos Sr. administration and the CPP over the decades, Marcos Sr. directly cited the threat of communist led-destabilization as the reason for suspending the writ of habeas corpus, allowing him to imprison people without judicial review, and eventually the historic declaration of martial law on September 21, 1972, ushering in his so-called “New Society.”
The proclamation of martial law immediately triggered the government takeover of mass media outlets such as newspapers, magazines, radio stations, and television channels. Accordingly, thousands of journalists, editors, and broadcast personnel were arrested and jailed without due process. The administration also began censoring short-wave radio transmissions from international news outlets as well as the expulsion and denial of visas to foreign correspondents. In turn, the Marcos controlled media embarked on a wide scale propaganda campaign to “inculcate authoritarian ideology through all forms of communication-canned TV programmes, trained choruses praising the 'New Society' in songs performed in business offices and plants; two to five minute blurbs for Marcos on radio and TV, and a 10-minute film for the cinemas eulogising the accomplishments of martial law.”
Martial law officially lasted until January 17, 1981, but Marcos Sr. would continue to wield sweeping powers until his overthrow in the People Power Revolution just over five years later. During this period, the president went to great lengths to shield the public from his deteriorating health, while dissident journalists remained subject to murder and imprisonment.
Before the return of the Marcos family to power in 2022, disinformation was a central element of Rodrigo Duterte’s successful bid for the presidency in 2016, which was marked by the proliferation of “fake news” and the opportunistic manipulation of user engagement on social media, an approach that Duterte’s campaign admitted to relying upon to make up for a relative lack of financial resources. The Duterte election team was linked to a “troll army” of some 400 to 500 people who used bots, doctored media, and fake accounts to drum up political support for the candidate and delegitimize his opponents on Facebook, which was still the most popular social network in the Philippines as of 2023, with around 95% of the country’s internet users having accounts on the platform. These tactics then became institutionalized as pro-Duterte bloggers and influencers were appointed to high level government posts, bolstered by an alternative media ecosystem that would regularly lodge reputation-damaging and oftentimes violent online attacks against dissenting voices.
In 2018, the Duterte administration established the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC), a body composed of mostly government officials with two private sector representatives that is assigned with tackling the root causes of communist insurgencies and crafting peace settlement proposals at the local level. However, the NTF-ELCAC has become more notorious for accusing activists and journalists on social media and through official proclamations of harboring ties to armed Communist insurgents—a practice known as “red-tagging"—thus exposing critics of the government to deadly violence and detention. Civil society organizations targeted for red-tagging under Duterte have ran the gamut from indigenous land defenders to call center worker advocates, while tallies of suspected drug users and dealers killed by the end of his presidency range from just over 6,200 according to official sources, all the way to 30,000 based on estimates by human rights groups.
The kinds of influence tactics pioneered by the Duterte network continued to evolve as a feature of the Philippine political landscape over the years which in 2022 saw Marcos Jr. rack up a landslide presidential win alongside running mate Sara Duterte, daughter of the term-limited President Rodrigo Duterte. The two clans had forged a timely alliance as the elder Duterte’s authoritarian preoccupation with cracking down on perceived threats to law and order dovetailed with the decades-long campaign by the Marcos family to rehabilitate the legacy of Ferdinand Sr. with denialist propaganda downplaying the abuses of the martial law era.
As disinformation continues to exploit hierarchies of difference, we must critically engage with how historical formations of authoritarianism, colonialism, and war facilitate contemporary problems of information and governance. As FYLPRO and Tayo wrote in 2022, the layers of colonial history in the Philippines and weaponization of cultural discontent in electoral politics underscore the importance of historical, political, and cultural contextualization of mis- and disinformation in the Filipino diaspora.
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