Consuming Digital Disinformation: How Filipinos Engage with Racist and Historically Distorted Online Political Content

Summary

INTRODUCTION

In this report, we argue for the importance of paying attention to individuals and their actual engagement with digital disinformation content. This endeavour is a crucial component for crafting more effective counter-disinformation efforts, especially at a time when online information disorder is exponentially growing and constantly evolving.

Much of the recent research on the rise of digital disinformation has focused on characterizing its production. There is a burgeoning set of journalistic and academic works cataloguing different social media manipulation tactics in Western liberal democracies, like coordinated bots swarming UK Twitter and apps feeding into psychographic targeting on US Facebook (Bastos and Mercea 2017; Hutton 2021; Marwick and Lewis 2017; Wylie 2019). Other works similarly taxonomize fake news and political trolling production in non-Western contexts, as in the strategic distraction initiatives of China's “Fifty-Cent Army” and the

anti-Western Twitter operations of Russia's troll army (Martineau 2019; Wardle and Derakhshan 2017; Jing 2016; King, Pan, and Roberts 2017). There is also a growing number of studies looking at the Southeast Asian context particularly, from cyber troops in Thailand to online buzzers in Indonesia (Hui 2020; Sastramidjaja and Wijayanto 2022; Sombatpoonsiri 2018).

The works mentioned above are valuable. Collectively, they reveal how the rapid spread of digital disinformation the world over has been fuelled not only by the toxic convergence of socio-structural and technological developments in the digital and creative industries, but also by the interlinked labour conditions of creative and digital workers across the world. The insights of these works about both the patterns and the granularities of fake news and political trolling operations have been crucial in informing counter-disinformation initiatives of governments, big tech companies, and the third sector (Wasserman 2022).

That said, too much focus on the production of digital disinformation can inadvertently cement a techno-deterministic view of this phenomenon. Techno-determinism is a long-debunked but still persistent view that overinflates the power of technologies to determine the course of society (Livingston 2018).

In relation to digital communication, it assumes that media technologies are more powerful than media users who are thought to have little agency.