Those who deploy these weapons are the 3P autocrats. 3P autocrats are political leaders who span traditional ideological divides and who come to power through a reasonable democratic election and then proceed to take apart the checks on executive power through populism, polarisation and post-truth. As they cement their power, they cloak their autocratic aspirations behind veils of secrecy, bureaucratic obfuscation, pseudo-legal subterfuge, manipulation of public opinion, and the repression of critics and adversaries. Once the mask drops, it is too late. (1)
I have termed this 3P phenomenon as the Triple P Virus not only because of the commonality of governance style in each autocracy but also the linkages and crosspollination of ideas between the 3P autocrats. Each learn from each other; share resources with each other as mafia states and have each other’s back in international bodies such as the United Nations. The turn of this decade has seen some pushback of the 3P tide in the electoral defeats of Presidents Trump and Bolsonaro in the US and Brazil, not least because of the hundreds of thousands of needless deaths from Covid 19 due to the flagrant violation of public health advice and denigration of medical expertise indulged in by both rogue leaders. The coming together of liberal democracies to support Ukraine in its struggle against the military aggression of Vladimir Putin’s Russia (the 3P autocrat par excellence and lodestar to illiberal regimes and movements globally) is heartening. Defeats of right-wing nationalist populism in national elections in the Czech Republic and Slovenia are also positive markers on liberal democracy’s scorecard.
However, there is no room for complacency in the struggle against the illiberal, pseudo democracies of 3P type. Marine Le Pen achieved 24 per cent of the vote in the 2022 French Presidential election and her rebranded party has ninety-five seats in the National Assembly. For the first time in a West European liberal democracy, the far right has a presence in government in the form of Giorgia Meloni who, coming from a fascist background, heads up a rightwing coalition in Italy. The poster boy for European and North American 3P aspirants, Victor Orban, has been comfortably returned to power in Hungary having virtually neutered all independent media and civil society there.
Perhaps most alarming of all has been the formation of the most right wing government in the history of Israel under the premiership of Benjamin Netanyahu which consists of Jewish supremacists and apologists for the anti-Arab racist Kahane movement and the terrorist Baruch Goldstein (who massacred 29 worshippers in a mosque in Hebron in 1994) such as Itamar Bin Gvir as Interior Minister and Bexalel Smotrich, leader of the Religious Zionist Party as Finance Minister. Following the 3P playbook elsewhere, this administration seeks to curb the power of the Israeli Supreme Court to overrule laws and actions of the government, the only major check in Israel on the executive. It also seeks to attack LTGB rights.
It is hardly coincidental that Netanyahu is facing long standing corruption charges and that by blatantly seeking to neutralize the power of the judiciary in the manner of a Trump or Duda in Poland he seeks to get himself off this particular hook. Recall that Trump and Berlusconi saw election to office as a means of avoiding criminal prosecution for business malpractices and one can understand Netanyahu’s criminal logic. It is a logic that could well lead to not just Israel becoming another pseudo democracy but the descent of already poor Israeli - Palestinian relations into a complete death spiral as Itamar Ben Givr and his supremacist and Religious Zionist colleagues propose ever more punitive measures on the Palestinian Arab population of the occupied West Bank leading to possible annexation of the Palestinian territories; territories awash with weapons held by a despairing Palestinian Arab populace who see a diminution of the possibility of a two state solution to practically zero. Smotrich has been given sweeping authority over governance over the West Bank and the former US ambassador to Israel has accused Netanyahu’s far right government of breaking a written agreement in 2004 to dismantle illegal outposts and settlements in the West Bank by retrospectively legalizing them. (2)
The reactions of Israeli settlers to the murder of two brothers in Huwara on the weekend of 24-25 February 2023 gives a chilling foretaste of just what such a cycle of violence could amount to with settlers, in revenge for the murder of two settler brothers, accompanied by an inactive IDF launched an hours long rampage with hundreds of Palestinians injured; miraculously just one fatality and dozens of cars, homes and buildings set alight, leading to one Israeli commentator to compare the violence to “Kristallnacht in Huwara”. (3) Prospects for Israel’s Arab citizenry also look bleak under this administration.
It is heartening that Israelis are demonstrating in their tens of thousands against these threats to their democracy but it will take the mobilization of Israeli Arabs and their votes to enable the broad based campaign that is necessary to eject the SP autocrat Netanyahu and his dangerous allies from power (Fresh elections in the Palestinian territories and Gaza would also help but that is an argument and discussion for another occasion and paper).
Choosing the Battlefields for Democracy
In his latter-day incantation of President John F. Kennedy’s “long twilight struggle,” Naim advises that democracy’s defenders must choose their battles wisely to triumph. He identifies the following five: the battle against the Big Lie; the battle against criminalised governments; the battle against autocracies that seek to undermine democracies; the battle against political cartels that stifle competition, and the battle against illiberal narratives. (4)
All these struggles are interconnected. They are all part of the modus operandi and discourse of authoritarian, populist pseudo democracies all feed parasitically of each other. However, the foundation stone of all contemporary populist movements from the Brexit campaign and governments from Trump to Orban to Modi is the Big Lie. And that is why I choose to focus on that part of the 3P armoury.
The 21st Century Big Lie: Goebbels for Our Age
Every populist pitch has a Big Lie at its core, casting the aspiring autocrat as the rescuer, the only hope of the noble, downtrodden and betrayed people against a shadowy elite that hates them. Any strategy to defend democratic values and society rests on the capacity of citizens to differentiate truth from lies. As Timothy Snyder warns, “Post truth is pre fascism … to abandon facts is to abandon freedom”. (5)
Big Political Lies are of a fundamentally different character to the spin, economies of the actualite and massaging of information that is (sadly) common in contemporary democracies. In a very competitive field, probably the Champion Big Liar and Big Lie is Donald Trump for his totally unfounded “Big Steal claim that his loss in the 2020 US Presidential Election was due to fraudulent voting. Sharing No.1 spot is Putin’s assertion of the “Nazi” nature of the Ukrainian government to justify Russia’s “special military operation against Ukraine in February 2022. In the running for Champions League places are the clams made by Leave campaigners in the UK’s EU was the notorious figure for supposed weekly UK contributions to the UK and that remaining in the EU would enable 70m Turks to come to the UK. Not far behind is the Kremlin’s framing of Chechen separatists for the false flag operation in 1999 in which four apartment blocks in Moscow and other Russian cities were bombed by the FSB which enabled Putin to consolidate his power; Turkey’s Erdogan alleging a shadowy conspiracy of Guelenist wreckers and Trump’s fulminations about the “Deep State” arrayed against his administration.
To stretch football analogies further, the assertion by the UK Home Secretary Suella Braverman that 100m asylum seekers could up to Britain as justification for her draconian Illegal Migrants Bill is certainly worthy of a Europa League place. It is no coincidence that Ms Braverman was a prominent member of the uber-Brexiteer Tory pressure group, the European Research Group and is a strident anti-woke rhetorician.
To tackle the epidemics of post truth and false narratives that are sweeping the world and risks they pose of possible terminal damage to democracy, it is vital to interrogate the meaning of post-truth and to grasp the changes in media ecology especially the impact of the internet on the roles of journalism as traditional gatekeepers of facts and truth and the harmful impact of Big Tech on how humanity receives and is, often unconsciously moulded, news and information.
Speaking Lies to Power: Post-Truth and Propaganda
Post-truth has been defined by the Collins English Dictionary as “the disappearance of shared objectives for truth." It is a feature of the communications architecture of politics and power in today’s world. In the words of Alan Rusbridger, the former editor in chief of The Guardian newspaper, “a society that cannot agree on a factual basis for discussion or decision making cannot progress.” (Naim)
Timothy Snyder warns that “you submit to tyranny when you renounce the difference between what you want to hear and what is actually the case”. Quoting Victor Klemperer, the astute and courageous observer of totalitarianism in Nazi Germany, he states that truth dies in a quadruple of ways. (Snyder, 2017)
The first way is open hostility to verifiable reality like, as mentioned earlier Trump’s Big Steal fiction of the 2020 Presidential Election and the denial of objective scientific reality practiced by climate change deniers and opponents of medical vaccination.
The second is shamanic incantation depending on “endless repetition, designed to make the fictional plausible and the criminal desirable. The systematic use of nicknames such as “Crooked Hillary” and “Sleepy Joe” by Trump at campaign rallies and on Twitter transformed these individuals as stereotypes that people spoke aloud. The repeated chants of “Lock Her Up” and “Build That Wall” at rallies with their grandiose promises and demonological depiction of opponents fused further a sense of oneness between Trump and his audience.
The next mode is magical thinking or the open adoption of contradiction such as Trump’s promises to cut taxes for everybody, eliminate the national debt and increase expenditure on both social security and defence; acceptance of such mutual contradiction requires total abandonment of one’s critical thinking faculties and of reason.
Related to the abandonment or reason is the fourth operating mode of post truth; misplaced faith in deity type figure like Trump or his contemporary analogues who tells his followers “I alone can solve it” or “I am your voice”. Such heaven-descended faith permits no room for individual experiences nor the acceptance of evidence not least because it becomes necessary to the psychic makeup of the believer as is borne out by the comment made to Klemperer at the end of the war by a worker that “understanding is useless, you have to have faith. I believe in the Fuhrer."
So fascists and their 2tst century variants and indeed of populists of all ideological hues despised the small truths of daily existence, loved slogans that pressed the same buttons as a new religion and preferred creative myths to history or journalism. They used new media , which at the time was radio, to create a drumbeat of propaganda that aroused feelings before people had the opportunity to discern the facts. And then, as now, Snyder writes , faith in a very flawed leader was confused with the truth about the world that belongs to all of us. (Snyder, p.71)
Propaganda is at its core a set of communication strategies designed to sow confusion and uncertainty, discourage critical thinking, and persuade people that reality is what the leader says it is. In the words of Goebbels “In Propaganda as in Love, anything is permissible, which is successful” While few strongmen have a Goebbels equivalent, all of them shared his “ends justify the means” credo. Many of them had backgrounds in the arts of mass communication and dissimulation. Mussolini and Mobutu were professional journalists and, like Hitler and Gaddafi, knew how to use their voices and bodies for maximal impact. Putin honed his skills at deception in the KGB. Pinochet and Franco’s military backgrounds trained them in the optics of power and pageantry (Ben Ghiat, 2021).
From Mussolini’s use of newsreels to Trump’s use of Twitter, authoritarians have had direct communication channels with the public, allowing them to pose as authentic interpreters of the popular will. From the Nuremberg rallies, with Hitler’s name spelled out in Klieg lights, the strongmen have turned politics into an aesthetic experience, with him as the star. The communication codes and celebrity cultures and celebrity cultures of film, television and now digital storytelling shape the leader’s self-preservation and the images he releases of both followers and enemies. So do advertising and marketing strategies. (Ben Ghiat, p.93)
Propaganda is also a system of attention management that works through repetition. The state disseminates the same message through multiple channels and institutions to synchronise society around the leader’s person and ideological priorities. Slogans and ways of thinking are drip fed insidiously to individuals leading them “in the same direction, but differently” (Ben Ghiat, p.94)
Leaders use propaganda to legitimate and solidify their authority through the discrediting of the press and manipulation, falsification and suppression of information. While, as we have seen, the Big Lie can be effective; falsehoods and the consequent othering of can be built around a grain of truth. This has particularly pertinent in immigration narratives in both Trumpian and Brexiteer propaganda in which the strongman claims that the foreigners are breaching borders in order to commit crime. The fact that large numbers of foreigners do indeed traverse the border is contorted by the absence of information as to reasons and time sales of arrival and the reasons for the migration. Information massaging on this subject often links immigration to crime and terrorism. In 2019, when Trump’s Department of Justice was forced to admit that its data on the subject was false, it refused to alter the official record this paper trail of lies was needed to justify further repressive actions.(Ben Ghiat)
In the UK, right wing nationalist narratives talk about the “invasion” of its shores (with the white cliffs of Dover acting as an historically potent symbol of this “invasiveness”) by “swarms” of “illegal” immigrants including many unaccompanied single men from “backward”, invariably Islamic cultures. Populist folk devils are created such as “woke” or “liberal” immigration layers and refugee advocacy networks. Blame for the flotilla of small boats carrying migrants is conveniently deflected onto another, albeit much more deserving, folk devil - people smugglers while the truth that all legal avenues for migrants have been closed down is conveniently airbrushed from the dominant narrative. The treatment of migrants to the UK hasn’t quite exceeded the depth of hostility and repressive response demonstrated by Italy’s far right led government but the centrality of immigration and the “enemies of the people” designation of the judiciary and parliamentarians who sought scrutiny of Prime Ministers May and Johnson’s legislative pathways to withdrawal from the EU to Brexiteer discourse are worrying echoes of the words and actions of the 3P autocrats.
While not the unexpurgated version of 3P autocracy, the right wing “Get Brexit Done” populist nationalism of the Boris’ relatively brief Premiership; the proven law breaking over Covid restrictions; the cronyism evident in key public appointments and government contracts for PPE equipment; the (unlawful) prorogation of Parliament in August 2019 and the wholesale purging from the Conservative Parliamentary Party of MPs insufficiently committed to Hard Brexit certainly ticked more than a few boxes.
Ireland’s nascent (and hopefully short lived) far right movement has also deployed historically potent tropes in its opposition to the entry and settlement of migrants; describing it as the “new plantation”; a conscious invocation of the dispossession of indigenous Gaelic clans and communities by in the Ulster and Munster Plantations of English and Scottish settlers by the conquering English Crown in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. It is of no great irony that professed English uber nationalists such as Nigel Farage and Stephen Yaxley Lennon (aka Tommy Robinson) have attached themselves to this Irish nativist movement with contrasting reactions from within. the Irish far right.
Theodor Adorno’s assertion that television could continue fascist tyranny by fostering “intellectual passivity, and gullibility” has even more resonance in the 3P era. All autocrats know that discouraging critical thinking is key to maintaining themselves in power. (Ben Ghiat). Berlusconi’s Forza Italia movement in the 1990s was practically the political arm of his media conglomerate Mediaset. A landmark study in 2019 found that heavy viewing of Mediaset’s entertainment channels translated into a decline in civic engagement and a preference for simplistic populistic rhetoric. This translated into almost 10 percent spike in the polls for Berlusconi and his party over five elections from 1994 to 2008. (Ben Ghiat, p.114).
Rather than ban all opposition media, the 3P authoritarians deny licenses to media outlets, bribe, sue, threaten their owners, call for advertising boycotts to cause financial ruin, and stage hostile takeovers. In a mass deference in 2018, media bosses in Orban’s Hungary “donated” almost five hundred media properties to a government allied foundation. As a consequence in the words of one analyst, “opposition views could not even reach significant portions of the electorate”, just as the Hungarian Prime Minister intended (Ben Ghiat, p.111).
Autocrats also suppress knowledge that challenges their ideologies and goals. Pinochet closed down philosophy departments and Orban prohibited gender studies. All 21st century authoritarians suppress climate change science, lest that discourage the theft of national resources that generates profits for them and their allies (Ben Ghiat).
Just as the strongmen of the past used radio and television to project their image and to amplify their propaganda, so contemporary authoritarians use digital media to target critics, and spread hate speech, conspiracy theories and lies. Among the recipients of their hate are the press. The Committee to Protect Journalists found “an unprecedented level of hostility towards media personnel” around the world in 2018, with record breaking numbers of journalists murdered, imprisoned and taken hostage (Ben Ghiat, p.112).
Case Study: Rappler and Big Tech’s Role in the Suppression of Free Media
In 2012, Maria Ressa, who was to win the Noble Peace Prize in 2021 for services to independent journalism, cofounded Rapper, a digital only news website in the Philippines. Her ambition was to create a new standard of investigative journalism in the Philippines which would harness the social media platforms to build communities of action for better governance and stronger democracies. Using Facebook and other platforms, her service was able to crowdsource breaking news, find key sources and tips, harness collective action for climate change and good governance, and help increase voter knowledge and participation in Filipino elections.(Ressa, 2022)
Rappler exposed corruption and manipulation both in government and increasingly in the behemoth of technology companies that had begun to dominate, if not colonise all of our lives. But by the fifth year of its existence, Rappler was being targeted by the government of the 3P autocrat, President Rodrigo Duterte due to its highlighting of the impunity in Duterte’s drug war (estimated by the Philippines’ Commission on Human Rights to have cost 27,000 lives from 2016 to 2018) and that of Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook. (Ressa, pp.1-3)
Ressa tells a cautionary tale of how the Philippines is ground zero for the pernicious effects that social media can have on a nation’s institutions, its culture and the minds and deliberative capacities of its citizenry. 2021 was the sixth year in a row that Filipinos spent the most time out of all global citizens on the internet and social media. Despite slow internet speeds, Filipinos uploaded and downloaded the largest number of videos on You Tube in 2013. By 2017, 97 percent of Filipinos were on Facebook. (Ressa, p.3).
Every development in the Philippines, Ressa saw as a chronicle foretold of what would occur in the rest of the world. As early as 2015, there were reports of account farms creating social media phone verified accounts, or PVAs, from the Philippines. That same year, a report showed that most of Donald Trump’s Facebook likes came from outside the United States and that one in every twenty-seven Trump followers was from the Philippines. She describes how when the influence economy took off, shady companies that sold Twitter likes and followers had offices in the Philippines. Political marketing was by now morphing into “networked disinformation. (Ressa: p.124).
She also describes the evolution of Philippines into a fraud hub. By 2019 it was the global leader of online attacks, both automated and human, followed distantly by US, Russia, UK and Indonesia. This development was facilitated by sophisticated tools, cheap manual labour and good economic incentives associated with online fraud. The Philippines also has a higher-than-average number of unlicencsed software installations, often seeding malware into PCs to turn them into botnet platforms for automated attacks. (Ressa: p.124-250).
So began “democracy’s death by a thousand cuts” (Ressa, p.4). Ressa lays out how Rappler had charted three stages of the degradation of the online information ecosystem and political life in the Philippines. The first was the early experimentation and buildup of campaign machinery in 2014 and 2015. The second was the concentration of a new black ops industry. The third was the consolidation of power at the top and the spread of political polarization across the country (Ressa, p.127)
Rappler documented the homicidal nature of Duterte’s extra-judicial war on drugs policy in its “The Impunity Series”. Every night since the June 2016 Presidential election, an average of thirty-three dead bodies had been found on the streets and in the poorer environs of Manila. The Impunity Series gave names and faces to the people killed (many poor teenagers and children) and detailed police involvement in the killings. It carefully tracked the rising death toll and how the police tried to change the numbers. The drug war, in reality a war against the poor as it is around the world, was Rappler’s focus (Ressa, p.149).
In 2016 Rappler launched its #NoPlaceForHate campaign to alert and warn the public by introducing more rigorous comment moderation standards to counteract the hate, gaslighting and reputation smearing by Duterte supporters against anyone questioning the drug war. Ressa documents how, sadly, despite the rearguard action performed by a few users, most real people elected for silence and so legitimizing and enabling victory for the narrative for Duterte’s arguments for killing.
Eventually, following the playbook of 3P autocrats elsewhere such as Orban and Erdogan, the Filipino Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), after an enquiry ordered by the solicitor general, Jose Calida, revoked Rappler’s license to operate in January 2018. This decision was taken on the absurd grounds that Rappler’s Philippine Depositary Receipts (PDRs), a kind of security, owned by investors outside the country constituted foreign control and violated the Constitution (Ressa: pp.176-179).
So ends the cautionary tale of this brave attempt by Rappler to create “a kind Interpol for disinformation networks” (Ressa, p.131). It is the story of the subversion of truth by falsehoods; of facts by lies; of proper investigative journalism by the ad hominem attack; of the complexity of the modern world by the conspiracy theory and cheap populist headline.
Ireland’s nascent (and hopefully short lived) far right movement has also deployed historically potent tropes in its opposition to the entry and settlement of migrants; describing it as the “new plantation”; a conscious invocation of the dispossession of indigenous Gaelic clans and communities by in the Ulster and Munster Plantations of English and Scottish settlers by the conquering English Crown in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. It is of no great irony that professed English uber nationalists such as Nigel Farage and Stephen Yaxley Lennon (aka Tommy Robinson) have attached themselves to this Irish nativist movement with contrasting reactions from within. the Irish far right.
Theodor Adorno’s assertion that television could continue fascist tyranny by fostering “intellectual passivity, and gullibility” has even more resonance in the 3P era. All autocrats know that discouraging critical thinking is key to maintaining themselves in power. (Ben Ghiat). Berlusconi’s Forza Italia movement in the 1990s was practically the political arm of his media conglomerate Mediaset. A landmark study in 2019 found that heavy viewing of Mediaset’s entertainment channels translated into a decline in civic engagement and a preference for simplistic populistic rhetoric. This translated into almost 10 percent spike in the polls for Berlusconi and his party over five elections from 1994 to 2008. (Ben Ghiat, p.114).
Rather than ban all opposition media, the 3P authoritarians deny licenses to media outlets, bribe, sue, threaten their owners, call for advertising boycotts to cause financial ruin, and stage hostile takeovers. In a mass deference in 2018, media bosses in Orban’s Hungary “donated” almost five hundred media properties to a government allied foundation. As a consequence in the words of one analyst, “opposition views could not even reach significant portions of the electorate”, just as the Hungarian Prime Minister intended (Ben Ghiat, p.111).
Autocrats also suppress knowledge that challenges their ideologies and goals. Pinochet closed down philosophy departments and Orban prohibited gender studies. All 21st century authoritarians suppress climate change science, lest that discourage the theft of national resources that generates profits for them and their allies (Ben Ghiat).
Just as the strongmen of the past used radio and television to project their image and to amplify their propaganda, so contemporary authoritarians use digital media to target critics, and spread hate speech, conspiracy theories and lies. Among the recipients of their hate are the press. The Committee to Protect Journalists found “an unprecedented level of hostility towards media personnel” around the world in 2018, with record breaking numbers of journalists murdered, imprisoned and taken hostage (Ben Ghiat, p.112).
Case Study: Rappler and Big Tech’s Role in the Suppression of Free Media
In 2012, Maria Ressa, who was to win the Noble Peace Prize in 2021 for services to independent journalism, cofounded Rapper, a digital only news website in the Philippines. Her ambition was to create a new standard of investigative journalism in the Philippines which would harness the social media platforms to build communities of action for better governance and stronger democracies. Using Facebook and other platforms, her service was able to crowdsource breaking news, find key sources and tips, harness collective action for climate change and good governance, and help increase voter knowledge and participation in Filipino elections.(Ressa, 2022)
Rappler exposed corruption and manipulation both in government and increasingly in the behemoth of technology companies that had begun to dominate, if not colonise all of our lives. But by the fifth year of its existence, Rappler was being targeted by the government of the 3P autocrat, President Rodrigo Duterte due to its highlighting of the impunity in Duterte’s drug war (estimated by the Philippines’ Commission on Human Rights to have cost 27,000 lives from 2016 to 2018) and that of Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook. (Ressa, pp.1-3)
Ressa tells a cautionary tale of how the Philippines is ground zero for the pernicious effects that social media can have on a nation’s institutions, its culture and the minds and deliberative capacities of its citizenry. 2021 was the sixth year in a row that Filipinos spent the most time out of all global citizens on the internet and social media. Despite slow internet speeds, Filipinos uploaded and downloaded the largest number of videos on You Tube in 2013. By 2017, 97 percent of Filipinos were on Facebook. (Ressa, p.3).
Every development in the Philippines, Ressa saw as a chronicle foretold of what would occur in the rest of the world. As early as 2015, there were reports of account farms creating social media phone verified accounts, or PVAs, from the Philippines. That same year, a report showed that most of Donald Trump’s Facebook likes came from outside the United States and that one in every twenty-seven Trump followers was from the Philippines. She describes how when the influence economy took off, shady companies that sold Twitter likes and followers had offices in the Philippines. Political marketing was by now morphing into “networked disinformation. (Ressa: p.124).
She also describes the evolution of Philippines into a fraud hub. By 2019 it was the global leader of online attacks, both automated and human, followed distantly by US, Russia, UK and Indonesia. This development was facilitated by sophisticated tools, cheap manual labour and good economic incentives associated with online fraud. The Philippines also has a higher-than-average number of unlicencsed software installations, often seeding malware into PCs to turn them into botnet platforms for automated attacks. (Ressa: p.124-250).
So began “democracy’s death by a thousand cuts” (Ressa, p.4). Ressa lays out how Rappler had charted three stages of the degradation of the online information ecosystem and political life in the Philippines. The first was the early experimentation and buildup of campaign machinery in 2014 and 2015. The second was the concentration of a new black ops industry. The third was the consolidation of power at the top and the spread of political polarization across the country (Ressa, p.127)
Rappler documented the homicidal nature of Duterte’s extra-judicial war on drugs policy in its “The Impunity Series”. Every night since the June 2016 Presidential election, an average of thirty-three dead bodies had been found on the streets and in the poorer environs of Manila. The Impunity Series gave names and faces to the people killed (many poor teenagers and children) and detailed police involvement in the killings. It carefully tracked the rising death toll and how the police tried to change the numbers. The drug war, in reality a war against the poor as it is around the world, was Rappler’s focus (Ressa, p.149).
In 2016 Rappler launched its #NoPlaceForHate campaign to alert and warn the public by introducing more rigorous comment moderation standards to counteract the hate, gaslighting and reputation smearing by Duterte supporters against anyone questioning the drug war. Ressa documents how, sadly, despite the rearguard action performed by a few users, most real people elected for silence and so legitimizing and enabling victory for the narrative for Duterte’s arguments for killing.
Eventually, following the playbook of 3P autocrats elsewhere such as Orban and Erdogan, the Filipino Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), after an enquiry ordered by the solicitor general, Jose Calida, revoked Rappler’s license to operate in January 2018. This decision was taken on the absurd grounds that Rappler’s Philippine Depositary Receipts (PDRs), a kind of security, owned by investors outside the country constituted foreign control and violated the Constitution (Ressa: pp.176-179).
So ends the cautionary tale of this brave attempt by Rappler to create “a kind Interpol for disinformation networks” (Ressa, p.131). It is the story of the subversion of truth by falsehoods; of facts by lies; of proper investigative journalism by the ad hominem attack; of the complexity of the modern world by the conspiracy theory and cheap populist headline.
The creation of metanarratives of “alternative facts” and the accompanying trashing of the “mainstream media” is in no small measure due to the algorithms and business models of Facebook, Twitter and other social media outlets which (purposefully or not) push their consumers into polarized tribes and monetizes the lies and disinformation of the Trumps, Putins and Dutertes with real life global consequences such as Russia’s aggressive war in Ukraine; climate change denial and vaccine hesitancy.
An information ecosystem which collapses the difference between private and public through salacious and malicious gossip and which tries to draw the whole of society away from normal politics and toward conspiracy theories reawakens the vista of totalitarianism. That is the main danger to humanity of the 3P virus and its main antidote has to be a free print and online media outside the orbit of state and commercial intrusion.
References
References
[1] Moises Naim (2022) The Revenge of Power. How Autocrats are Reinventing Politics for the 21st Century. p. xv New York: St Martin’s Press.
[2] Guardian - Israel accused of violating deal with US on West Bank outposts.
[3] Bethan McKernan ‘Never like this before’ West Bank convulsed by violence. Guardian 28th February 2023.
[4] Naim (2022).
[5] Naim (2022), pp.247.
[3] Bethan McKernan ‘Never like this before’ West Bank convulsed by violence. Guardian 28th February 2023.
[4] Naim (2022).
[5] Naim (2022), pp.247.
Bibliography
Ruth Ben-Ghiat (2021) Strongmen: How They Rise, Why They Succeed, How They Fall. Profile Books
Maria Ressa (2022). How To Stand Up To A Dictator. The Fight For Our Future. London: W.H. Allen
Timothy Snyder (2017) On Tyranny. Twenty Lessons From The Twentieth Century. London: Bodley Head.
⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter.
