President-elect Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos’ sister, Senator Imee Marcos, has denied that their family is trying to rewrite the country’s history in regards to their father’s dictatorship and asserted that they were only interested in sharing their side of the story.
Speaking on ANC’s Headstart, the senator thanked voters for “giving their family a second chance” and blamed “traditional” media for not allowing her family to speak up and defend the legacy of their father, the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos Sr.
Marcos Jr. won the May presidential election by a landslide, garnering 58 percent of the votes or roughly 31 million ballots.
“I don’t think that’s our effort at all, we will not revise anything, all we we will do is to also [make public] what we know [is] our side of the story which we have perhaps been remiss in not telling simply because we were scared of the traditional media, of all the abuse, diatribe, the insult,”
The senator also brought up thr “Len-Len” viral sketch series that was part of her campaign, which critics said was an indirect way to disparage outgoing vice president and Marcos Jr.’s fiercest opponent Leni Robredo.
For Bongbong’s eldest sister, however, the social media videos were “[her] way of answering issues.”
“I just couldn’t let it go. I would need to answer issues because a lie told a thousand times becomes the truth and that’s a dangerous proceeding,” she said.
Ironically, Marcos’ quip sounds eerily similar to a quote from Nobel laureate Maria Ressa in the PBS documentary A Thousand Cuts in which she said, “A lie told a million times becomes truth. Without facts, we don’t have truth.”
In the documentary, the Rappler founder detailed being the target of a massive disinformation network made up of trolls who supported President Rodrigo Duterte, which has been linked to the same massive disinformation machinery mounted by Bongbong Marcos’ camp, according to investigations by multiple groups.
A Washington Post report also revealed that a pro-Marcos disinformation network had already been in place long before the 2022 elections and reported on how much professional trolls were able to earn for their work, which consists of disseminating “scripts” across social media platforms that propagated myths about the Marcoses.
The fact-checking collective Tsek.ph demonstrated that Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok were major purveyors of disinformation in the months leading up to the election, with Marcos’ closest rival, Vice President Leni Robredo, the “biggest victim” of coordinated trolling campaigns.
In early April, Meta (Facebook’s parent company) announced that it had suspended a network of over 400 accounts, pages and groups related to the Philippines elections in order to crack down on hate speech and misinformation. In January, Twitter suspended more than 300 accounts linked to a pro-Marcos network for violating the company’s platform manipulation and spam policy.
Marcos’ camp has repeatedly denied employing troll farms, with the President-elect once daring detractors to “show [him] one troll. They don’t exist.”
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