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In September 2018, Did a Marcos Lie Today? (DAMLT) went live online on Twitter and on Facebook. DAMLT, self-classified as an education website, is an effort by the Third World Studies Center’s Marcos Regime Research group to tell the truth about the Marcoses. Since the accounts became active, the social media accounts have been uploading material from various sources—including, but not limited to, declassified communications and assessments from the United States Department of State, studies by international financial institutions such as the World Bank, recently digitized records on Philippine guerillas (fake and genuine) from the United States National Archives, and recently accessible digitized versions of documents taken from Malacanang after the EDSA Revolution—to counter the lies that the Marcoses and their sycophantic followers kept regurgitating online or through mass media. The documents are at times uploaded unadorned, but were often incorporated into videos or transformed into memes—i.e., made palatable to the social media consumer. Or public history for those who have to navigate through tons of online clutter.

The project set out to examine the relationship of pro-Marcos disinformation disseminated online, the printed propaganda that preceded such disinformation, and, to a limited extent, the distorted memorialization of Ferdinand E. Marcos via physical museums and monuments. Our attempt to study these linkages started with gathering online disinformation in favor of the Marcoses as debunked by online fact checkers. Over a hundred distinct lies were gathered and entered into a database-in-progress. Concurrently, an attempt was made to understand the interconnections among those involved in the production of printed propaganda in favor of the Marcoses, with the intent of establishing links, if any, between “offline” and “online” propagandists. Network maps of these individuals/groups were constructed.

We found that 1) the heritage sites that the Marcoses built for their late patriarch in Ilocos Norte are built on propaganda books extolling Ferdinand Marcos’s greatness and that of his dictatorial regime; 2) the Marcoses, their loyalists, and other allies have been producing and reproducing propaganda all these years, with the intended effect of conferring a patina of well-researched scholarship to Marcos lies; 3) the verbiage produced by the pro-Marcos authors has a limited but important influence on the new forms of disinformation that pro-Marcos sites in social media are producing; and 4) the weak link between the current online disinformation and the supposed scholarly, or at the very least, journalistic reiteration of “Marcos truths” points to an important feature of Marcos propaganda production: the point is not to build on an existing lie or an outlandish claim but to saturate the audience with all sorts of information up to a point that the propaganda effort appears to be without an author, that the algorithm of the social media networks geared towards the new and the ridiculous hides the hands of the Marcoses themselves.

The study aims to definitively determine whether the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos profited from his involvement in the 1956 Reparations Agreement between Japan and the Philippines. The explores a bilateral anatomy of plunder—of how the Philippine dictator and his cronies, Japanese businessmen, and politicians colluded to loot Japanese war reparations—by revisiting the literature on kleptocracy, Marcos’s authoritarian rule, and issues of the reparations agreement, examining old and new sources that have recently become available (e.g., Philippine Reparations Commission reports, newspaper clippings, files from the Presidential Commission on Good Government, and declassified US intelligence reports), and consulting Filipino and Japanese scholars who previously worked on these subjects. Existing studies on Marcos and the reparations agreement did not reckon with the sources of information that this proposed research would like to examine, sources that will help untangle the complexities that the reparations agreement caused on both Japan and the Philippines. 

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  How the Marcoses handled an assassination attempt
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  Revisiting Bongbong’s 1981 ‘New Jersey Turnpike episode’
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  BBM’s fictional version of the Bicol River Basin Development Project
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  Imee’s murky identification with KB
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  The nearly forgotten shameful tourism program under Marcos Sr.
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  Bagong Pilipinas: Shallow, farcical
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  The failed bid of Marcos Sr. to do a Romualdez
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  Ilocos Norte governor gets P100M for failed tomato venture founded by uncle, President Marcos
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  Lies and Misrepresentations in Bongbong Marcos’s BBM Vlog 148
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  Marines tout the Bongbong rockets that went bust during Marcos Sr.’s regime
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  Imee’s half-truths on Self-Reliance Defense Posture
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  What is this Bagong Pilipinas?
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  Marcos lies still
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  A Marcos monument for a dubious wartime deed to rise in Ilocos Sur
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  Marcos Sr. and the April Fools affair
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  ‘Ecstatic’ loyalists await their share of the Marcos wealth but is it Fool’s Gold?
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  The Bongbong and Imelda Marcos deuterium dud
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  All Hail and Glory to the Marcoses!
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  The Duterte-Marcos Connection
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  The Marcoses: A History of Rejecting Election Defeats
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  Why is it named the Ninoy Aquino International Airport?
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  Duterte’s frequent absences a grim reminder of Marcos’ tricks to hide illness
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  How Marcos suppressed the truth behind Ninoy Aquino’s assassination
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  Of Forbidden Stories and Foreign Scrutiny: We Forum and the 1980 New York Times Story, ‘The House of Marcos’
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  The documents on Bongbong Marcos’ university education (Part 2 – Wharton School)
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  File No. 60: Debunking the Marcos war myth
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  File No. 60: A family affair
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  Success’ of Masagana 99 All in Imee’s Head
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  Who Should Filipino Workers Thank for the 13th Month Pay
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  The Documents on Bongbong Marcos’ University Education (Part 1 – Oxford University)
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  Senator Imee Lies About RITM in Pushing for SB1407

Atty. Edre Olalia (NUPL), Fides Lim (Kapatid), Fr. Benjamin Alforque, Jonathan de Santos (NUJP), and TWSC’s Joel Ariate discusses the human rights situation and prospects under the newly-seated Marcos administration. Organized by Move.PH, Karapatan, and the Ecumenical Voice for Peace and Human Rights in the Philippines, the webinar was streamed days ahead of the first Tate of the Nation Address of Ferdinand Marcos Jr.

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Reyes discussed online pro-Marcos historical distortion from around the early 2000s to Facebook at the Human Rights Violations Victims’ Memorial Commission’s online conference “The Martial Law Dialogues – Perceptions and Engagement with Post-EDSA Generations” held on February 24, 2022. In his talk, he attempted to answer these two questions:

• What are the antecedents of online pro-Marcos disinformation/ online pro-Marcos disinformation before the widespread use of social media in the Philippines?
• Can we blame social media primarily for the current proliferation of disinformation in favor of the Marcoses?

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Joel F. Ariate Jr. and Miguel Paolo Reyes presented the findings of the Marcos Regime Research group in the online conference “Where’s the Lie: Research Findings on Disinformation,” held online on December 9. 2020. The 3rd National Conference on Democracy and Disinformation was held virtually on February 22, 24, and 26 (the presentation was broadcast on February 24).

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Ariate and Reyes presented the findings of the UP Third World Studies Center’s Marcos Regime Research project The “Marcos Truths”: A Genealogy of Historical Distortions in the Rappler program On the Campaign Trail with John Nery: The Mechanics of pro-Marcos Disinfo. Ariate and Reyes are joined by communications professor Cheryll Ruth Soriano, who is also a part of the Consortium for Democracy and Disinformation. Streamed on December 15, 2021, Nery asked: How do Marcos disinformation campaigns work? And how will they impact the 2022 elections?

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Ed Lingao, Atty. Chel Diokno, Director Joel Lamangan, Kiri Dalena, and TWSC’s Miguel Paolo Reyes talks about the continuing violence, plunder, and divisiveness in Philippine politics in the online conference “Reality Check: Martial Law, Never again” streamed on September 19, 2020. The event was organized by Daang Dokyu in cooperation with Concerned Artists of the Philippines and Directos’ Guild of the Philippines.

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Joel F. Ariate Jr. Miguel Paolo P. Reyes, Larah Vinda Del Mundo, and Judith Camille Rosette presented their papers in the panel “Interrogating Historical Revisionism and the Marcos Regime: New Sources on Age-Old Lies” at the 2019 National Conference of the Philippine Historical Association held on September 19-21, 2019 held in NISMED, UP Diliman.