Social media fueled widespread dissemination of disinformation narratives during the 2022 Philippine national election campaign period

Social media played a significant role in the 2022 Philippine national elections. Using various empirical sources, including an original pre-electoral survey, we found that social media was critical in the production, transmission, and reception of election-related information and narratives that resulted in offline and online polarization and mobilization of Filipino voters in the 2022 elections. Social media-driven campaigning has become a fertile ground for disinformation narratives to proliferate. We argue that such narratives resonated with the public mainly due to changing patterns of information consumption, prior political attitudes, and long-standing grievances with the post-1987 EDSA people power order. This research’s key findings are as follows:

• Voters of Ferdinand Marcos Jr. are slightly more engaged in offline and online candidate promotion than voters of other candidates. They also have a higher reliance on social media as a source of information.
• There is a changing information landscape from “disinformation” – conventionally understood as the purposeful use of false information – to “influence operations”, or the broader manipulation of the public’s attitudes and beliefs without necessarily resorting to falsehoods.
• The leading disinformation narratives during the election are authoritarian nostalgia, conspiracy theory, strongman leadership, and democratic disillusionment, which fueled support for Marcos Jr. and undermined the other candidates.

This work is a critical assessment of the role of social media in the 2022 Philippine national elections. It utilizes various empirical sources, including original data from election surveys conducted in the four months preceding the May polls. Firstly, the article unpacks the relationship between social media and electoral politics in the Philippines by pointing out specific mechanisms by which social media resulted in offline and online polarization and electoral mobilization of Filipino voters in the presidential and vice-presidential campaigns. Secondly, the article provides both domestic and international audiences with a post-mortem of the Philippine national elections using a political science lens – it recounts current affairs and relates them to broader academic research on the matter and posits its own novel explanations using original and secondary survey data. The work discussed policy and academic works on key electoral politics themes such as disinformation, mass attitudes, and civic education. Finally, it points out specific policy issues relating to Philippine democracy based on recent developments in social media usage, including the efficacy of fact-checking, trends in mass beliefs, and the changing landscape of information-acquisition by voters (e.g. from social media).

Read the full paper: https://pacificaffairs.ubc.ca/perspectives/mobilized-and-polarized-social-media-and-disinformation-narratives-in-the-2022-philippine-elections/