Disinformation in the Global South

Herman Wasserman, Dani Madrid-Morales, Herman Wasserman, Dani Madrid-Morales

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781119715597
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Journalisme

A timely and incisive exploration of disinformation and its impact in the Global South

In Disinformation in the Global South, media and communicationsscholarsHerman Wasserman and Dani Madrid-Moralesdelivera uniqueand geographically diversecollection of perspectives on the phenomenon of disinformation as it manifests in the Global South.Inmanypartsofthe Global South, coordinated political disinformation campaigns, rumor, and propagandahave long been a part of the social fabric, even before disinformation has become an area of scholarship in the Global North.The way disinformation manifests in this region, and responses to it, can therefore behighly instructive for readers around the world.

Through case studies and comparative analyses, the book explores the impact of disinformation in Africa, Latin America, the Arab World and Asia. The chapters in this book discuss the similarities and differences of disinformation in different regions and provide a broad thematic overview of the phenomenon as it manifests across the Global South. After analyzing core concepts, theories and histories from Southern perspectives, contributors explore the experiences of media users and the responses to disinformation by various social actors drawing on examples from a dozen countries. Disinformation in the Global South also includes:

• A thorough introduction to Southern perspectives on national histories, theories of disinformation, and research methods in disinformation studies
• Global case studies of cultures of disinformation, including ethnographic insights into how audiences engage with disinformation
• Comprehensive explorations of responses to online and offline disinformation, including discussions of news literacy and the management of disinformation

A valuable resource for scholars of disinformation everywhere, as well as senior undergraduate and graduate students in courses covering transnational or global perspectives to communication studies, Disinformation in the Global South is also an ideal reference for anyone studying or working in media or journalism.

Section 1
Histories, Theories, and Methods

1
Contextualizing Fake News
Can Online Falsehoods Spread Fast When Internet Is Slow?

Edson C. Tandoc Jr.

Introduction

The global information ecosystem has been under serious threat from online falsehoods, and the COVID-19 pandemic has made this crystal clear. Like the novel coronavirus, falsehoods quickly spread online across countries, replicating themselves as they cross geographical and cultural boundaries. Inaccurate information about the virus’s origin, nature, and remedies spread swiftly (Brennen et al. 2020; Tandoc and Mak 2020). They did not just come from nameless, most likely bot, social media accounts or fly-by-night websites, but also from those supposedly in the know, such as top government officials who were in charge of responding to the pandemic: In the Philippines, the worst-hit among countries in Southeast Asia with more than 400,000 cases some ten months after it reported its first positive case on January 30, 2020, a presidential spokesperson said eating bananas can protect people from catching the virus (Luna 2020); a provincial governor debated with medical doctors about the efficacy of steam inhalation to kill the virus (Mayol 2020), and the president himself mentioned in his televised national address that people could try rinsing their used face masks with gasoline so they can reuse them (Esmaquel 2020).

Online falsehoods have real-life consequences. They can hurt the bottom line of businesses by damaging reputations and eroding consumer trust (Atkinson 2019). They have triggered angry mobs to attack innocent individuals (Frayer 2018). During the COVID-19 pandemic, online falsehoods have also harmed individuals, who believed in viral home remedies against the virus (Park 2020; Slotkin 2020). What makes some individuals susceptible to online falsehoods? Some studies sought to answer this question, and many of these focused on the role of individual cognitive processes, such as confirmation bias and analytic ability (Pennycook and Rand 2019; Shin and Thorson 2017). Others have scrutinized the role of social media platforms (Lee 2020; Neyazi 2020; Tandoc, Jenkins, and Craft 2019), while others have focused on the characteristics of fake news messages that make them effective at deception (Mourão and Robertson 2019; Naeem, Bhatti, and Khan 2020). But aside from these audience and message factors, certain structural contexts, especially in countries in the Global South, such as the Philippines, contribute to the spread of online falsehoods. Despite its slow internet speed, the Philippines is among the most active countries on social media (Gonzales 2019). It is also a nation facing a serious threat from the rise of fake news. What factors contributed to this problem? This chapter looks into these contextual factors – from internet access to cultural norms – and offers them for scholarly scrutiny.

A Web of Lies

Falsehoods have always plagued social life, but the digitization of many aspects of social life has also facilitated the easy and quick spread of falsehoods online. Fake newspapers and misleading broadcasts have deceived audiences in the past, but social media and messaging apps have accelerated and expanded the reach of inauthentic content. Falsehoods come in different forms online. Some distinguish between misinformation, which is the unintentional dissemination of erroneous information, and disinformation, which is the intentional creation and propagation of inaccurate information (Wardle 2017). An important distinction here is the intention behind the creation of a falsehood, one that is challenging to study from an academic point of view, as disinformation takes some of its power to deceive by hiding its real intention (Tandoc 2019). The intention of someone creating a falsehood – such as discrediting a rival business – might also be different from the intention of someone spreading the same false message – such as to warn loved ones. Others refer to fake news as a form of online falsehood that derives part of its power to deceive by mimicking the look and feel of real news (Tandoc, Lim, and Ling 2017). Falsehoods also come in the form of conspiracy theories, sometimes created for fun and sometimes created for propaganda, and online scams, which aim to deceive people for monetary gain.

Of these different forms of online falsehoods, fake news has taken the spotlight, rising to buzzword status following the 2016 presidential elections in the US that saw large-scale creation of fake news related to the presidential campaign, such as Pope Francis endorsing the candidacy of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton running an underground childhood sex ring. Subsequent important elections and referendums across many countries, from the UK to Taiwan, from Brazil to Indonesia, from France to the Philippines, were also marred by the spread of fake news (Avelar 2019; Chrisafis 2018; Mokhtar 2019; Wei 2020). Social media served as an important platform for fake news to spread, and platforms’ initial reluctance to police their spaces – refusing to be the arbiters of truth – later turned into actionable strategies that involved deleting questionable posts and accounts as well as tagging disputed posts (Frenkel 2018; Funke 2018). However, these have attracted criticisms of social media platforms single-handedly deciding who and what is allowed on their spaces.

The Philippines, whose citizens are among the most active social media users in the world (Gonzales 2019), figures prominently in fake news discourse. A quick check on Google Trends, which rates how often a search term is queried in relation to other terms, ranks the Philippines as among the top five countries when it comes to the popularity of fake news as a search term (as of November 2021). Like in many countries, the term “fake news” has been weaponized in the Philippines, with political supporters accusing the other side of spreading fake news (Lees 2018; Ragragio 2020). It has been used to discredit journalists by labeling them as purveyors of fake news (Lees 2018). And it has become a crucial part of political warfare.

The weaponization of fake news in the Philippines is often systematic and involves the mobilization of troll armies and the production of inauthentic content. Indeed, Filipino scholars have documented a seemingly organized industry for political propaganda through fake news (Mahtani and Cabato 2019; Ong and Cabañes 2019; Ragragio 2020): A client (usually a politician) approaches a legitimate public relations firm or practitioner for a campaign. Part of the campaign strategy is to work with a group of social media operators who manage networks of social media influencers as well as paid trolls who are then mobilized to post inauthentic messages and comments. This inauthentic content will organically trigger engagement from real social media users (Ong and Cabañes 2019). I have personally spoken with a content creator whose freelance work involves creating real content as well as fake product reviews and fake comments on important issues. These freelance content creators get paid per project (e.g., they disseminate inauthentic comments consistent with a set of talking points) and receive bonuses for fake comments with high audience engagement (e.g., a lot of likes or a lot of comments). Thus, inauthentic social media engagement has become an organized business (Malig 2020). A troll army usually swarms social media with the same comment or post (Malig 2020), and once in a while, some trolls forget to delete the instructions from their bosses, so their fake comment also includes the instruction to copy and paste.

On September 23, 2020, Facebook removed 57 accounts, 31 pages, and 20 Instagram accounts originating in the Philippines for “inauthentic behaviour” (The Straits Times 2020). This is not the first time that Facebook deleted accounts originating in the Philippines. In October 2018, Facebook also announced that it deleted a network of 95 pages and 39 accounts “for violating our spam and authenticity policies by encouraging people to visit low quality websites that contain little substantive content and are full of disruptive ads” (Facebook 2018). Some of the pages were named after the Philippine president. The accounts deleted in September 2020 were traced to the Philippine military and police, some of which had posted messages accusing some government critics of being Communists. The removal of these accounts led the Philippine president to berate Facebook and threaten to ban the social media platform (The Straits Times 2020).

On top of creating bogus social media accounts, those behind this scheme also rent dormant Facebook accounts. It has become common to see an angry and uncivil comment from a Facebook account whose “About” page includes a Bible verse – it is most likely a rented account. Facebook Pages, which are quite popular in the Philippines, have also been exploited for political propaganda. It has become commonplace for a Facebook Page to start as an entertainment page, devoted to a Korean boyband, for example, thereby attracting thousands of followers, only to suddenly change months later into a political page devoted to a specific politician (Occenola 2018). In one of the cases documented online, the page administrator admitted to selling the account to a new administrator, who now had thousands of followers as an immediate audience for political propaganda.

These inauthentic social media accounts are then used to disseminate bogus or misleading content. Using photos out of context has become a common strategy. For example, when critics decried a 28-million-peso (US$580,000) government project that dumped crushed dolomite rocks along a small part of the polluted Manila Bay to give it a white sand look, a post showing a photo depicting a beautiful view of a white sand beach went viral in September 2020, hinting that the criticisms were politically motivated and ignored the major improvement in the bay area. However, the photo used in the post was not that of Manila Bay but of a white sand beach in France (Vera Files 2020a). Around the same time, a Facebook post claiming that Gina Linetti, an Italian senator, referred to the Philippine president as “one of the best politician[s] I have ever met” also went viral. However, Linetti is not an Italian senator, and the photo used in the post was that of an American comedian (Vera Files 2020b).

A simple search on a search engine will reveal tell-tale signs that a post is inauthentic: a photo is reused across different posts, or a comment is copy-and-pasted by hundreds of social media accounts. In February 2020, after the Philippine government was criticized for its response to the initial stages of the COVID-19 outbreak, a Facebook post went viral narrating a sad story of a Chinese family being shunned by residents in an apartment. The post called for compassion and humanity, and many users started to sympathize – except that hundreds of Facebook accounts had posted the exact same message, obviously copy-and-pasted (San Juan 2020). A quick check online ...