Disinformation intensifies worldwide

BANGKOK – Disinformation is undermining democracy. 

This was the declaration of around 1,000 activists who attended the International Civil Society Week (ICSW) 2025 at the Thammasat University in Bangkok, Thailand.

“Disinformation is an industry,” DAKILA co-founder Micheline Rama told Bulatlat. “There is a network and there are architects behind it.”

Rama joined the ICSW 2025, hosting several sessions on narrative-building. Aside from being the co-founder of DAKILA, a group of artists and activists advocating for human rights, she is also a senior researcher of the Generative AI Network (GAIN).

“It is more of creating this atmosphere of confusion, some of it is helplessness, and some of it is creating a social divide — pitting groups and people against each other,” Rama said.

The Philippines was considered “patient zero” of networked disinformation. In a separate Reuters research piece, journalist Regine Cabato wrote: “The Philippines was widely seen as a precedent and branded a testing ground – a ‘petri dish’ – for disinformation tactics that would be exported around the world.”

Targeted attacks

In Indonesia, disinformation becomes a precursor to online abuse and targeted attacks against activists and human rights defenders. 

“Activists are being branded as western puppets,” said Paramita Mohammad, CEO of Indonesia-based Communication for Change (C4C), in an interview with Bulatlat. “After that, we saw their accounts being hijacked. Pages of civil society organizations suddenly post online gambling. Activists are subjected to hacking, doxing, and mass bullying.”

Southeast Asia has become a hotbed for digital repression, not only in terms of disinformation but also in terms of heightened attacks against activists in the digital space. 

In the Philippines, red-tagging — branding individuals and organizations as communist armed revolutionaries — is prevalent. Last year, the Supreme Court of the Philippines said that red-tagging is a threat to life, liberty, and security of an individual or an organization. But the practice has persisted.

In a three-month sampling of Bulatlat’s social media account comment section, AI analysis shows that most of the accounts that engage in red-tagging and online abuse appear to be low-trust or low-legitimacy profiles. Common indicators include very few friends or followers (1-99 friends bracket), locked profiles, or new/sparse profiles. Most of their posts revolve around accusing activists of being armed rebels and equating human rights defenders with criminals. Another trope of vilification is to blame activists and victims for violence committed against them (e.g. enforced disappearance, extrajudicial killings).

Red-tagging is a form of disinformation and hate speech. It aims to manipulate information with an intention to harm and mislead people. A survey from international organization Global Witness found that four online platforms where the threats commonly occur are either owned by Meta or X.

“We break down and it’s traumatic. It is not a normal thing to be facing at our age,” said Hailey Pecayo in the 2024 report of Amnesty International Philippines, highlighting her experience as a young human rights defender (HRD) who at the age of 19 already faced terror charges for doing humanitarian work.

Pecayo is spokesperson of Southern Tagalog-based human rights organization Tanggol Batangan, running rapid response missions, documenting local human rights violations, and joining protests. In July 2022, she went to visit the family of a nine-year-old girl Kyllene Casao who was allegedly killed by elements of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP).

The military disputed the allegation, retaliating against Pecayo and other HRDs. They accused Pecayo of being part of the New People’s Army (NPA) and they filed charges against her. When the complaints became public, she was repeatedly red-tagged by a pro-government TV station Sonshine Media Network International (SMNI) and other troll pages on Facebook.

Read: Online red-tagging leads to threats, state violence – report

Amnesty also found out that the violence also extends to their family, peers, and immediate community.

Widening polarization

In Romania, disinformation is widely used to widen the polarization of leading political figures and parties.

“Disinformation was at its peak last December when we had our presidential elections,” said Daria Ienea of Station Europe, a non-government organization working on intersection of youth and technology. 

Later on, the Supreme Court of Romania annulled the results of the first round of the presidential elections when far-right populist Calin Georgescu emerged as a front-runner. “Declassified intelligence reports” allege a coordinated social media campaign across Telegram, Facebook, and Tiktok benefit the said candidate.

“The polarization translates into the young generation. They have access to these platforms and the internet,” Ienea said. “There’s this narrative that is delegitimizing the works of activists and civil society.”

The situation mirrors how the disinformation dictates the elections in the Philippines. President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. is rated as the top beneficiary of disinformation in the Philippines in the 2022 elections while his major opponent Leni Robredo was the biggest victim during the timeframe, according to Vera Files.

In 2016, Oxford Internet Institute discovered that Rodrigo Duterte spent Php 10 million to hire a troll army to his advantage in the presidential elections. He won and his regime is known for thousands of extrajudicial killings in the war on drugs and his counterinsurgency warfare. He is now being tried at the International Criminal Court for alleged crimes against humanity.

Even beyond the elections, the dangers of disinformation worsen. The country’s disinformation and harmful content surged over the past year due to widening political rift between President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. and Vice President Sara Duterte, according to Digital News Report 2025 of Reuters Institute.

Pro-Duterte pages have also been using disinformation to discredit the victims of extrajudicial killings (EJK) and their families. Extracted messages from Bulatlat’s random sampling show recurring themes of blaming, shaming, dehumanizing, and delegitimizing bereaved families of EJK victims. Some examples are “Tanggapin nyo addict anak nyo” (Accept that your son is addict); “Ayusin mo yung mga salaysay mo nay” (Fix your narrative, mother); and “Pinagkakakitaan pa ninyo ang mga patay na” (You are exploiting the dead for money).

“Like a canary in the coal mine, it was already tested on us before it was rolled out to the global audience. It renders us more vulnerable but it also tells us that Filipinos are technologically advanced,” Rama said.

AI and the digital evolution

Disinformation is becoming more easier to distribute not only because of its nature to exploit emotions but also because of its rapid creation and distribution now due to artificial intelligence (AI). 

Rama said that it is another tool that “makes it easier to spread disinformation that gets hidden under detection tools.” She added that it is an arms race in the sense that AI is also being used to determine whether an information is spam or harmful content.

Sen. Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa and Davao City Mayor Sebastian “Baste” Duterte shared an AI-generated video depicting two male students explaining their opposition to the impeachment of Vice President Sara Duterte.

A report by Al Jazeera exposed how AI-generated videos are being used to discredit victims of human rights violations. Sheera Escudero who lost her 18-year-old brother during Duterte’s so-called war on drugs was shocked to find an AI-generated video of her brother circulating on Facebook and accusing her of lying. The manipulated video was posted by a pro-Duterte micro-influencer.

In June 2025, OpenAI banned Philippine-based accounts for using ChatGPT to generate massive amounts of social media content in favor of Marcos Jr.

“AI is being used to create a video that looks appealing, easier to digest,” Rama said. “AI does not automatically mean fake or disinformation, but it is being used to package disinformation to make it more appealing or viral.”

Deepfakes are images, videos, or audios that have been created using artificial intelligence. It is often used to extract and swap faces. This year, a study notes that deepfakes could have devastating impacts on public trust and safety as it can be used to spread disinformation, manipulate public opinion, and extort individuals.

“Furthermore, the potential weaponization of deepfakes goes beyond isolated instances of misinformation. State actors or powerful organizations with advanced AI capacities can manufacture doubt, confusion, or character attacks with minimal accountability, particularly in fragile democracies or conflict zones,” the study stated.

Commitment declaration

“One thing that is being pushed, both in terms of narratives and in terms of technology, is the dehumanization of the people,” Rama said. “It is easier today to villainize a supporter or a certain population as non-human.”

Both the governments and the international institutions (e.g., United Nations, ASEAN, and European Union) are called to combat disinformation and improve AI governance in a collective declaration of hundreds of activists in Bangkok. The youth, in a separate manifesto, also called for similar demands.

United Nations Special Rapporteur on freedom of expression Irene Khan expressed concerns about the excessive market power of big social media platforms, stating that frontal attacks are “emboldened not only by authoritarian states but also Big Tech.”

“Against a rising tide of hate and lies on social media, companies have rolled back their policies and tools to combat disinformation and hate speech. When large digital platforms reject international human rights norms, they undermine their own legitimacy and effectiveness as global companies,” Khan said.

While the accountability for the proliferation of disinformation and threats to freedom of expression rests on state and non-state actors, activists have been asserting the need for community engagement in the current information warfare. 

For Rama, the best antidote to dehumanization is connection with the community. “Fact-checking can help, media literacy can help, but having those social ties that allow you to ground your interpretation of the world and have access to varying perspectives can be really helpful in terms of the context that we are in.”

In a Bulatlat column, Mong Palatino also debunked the idea that fact-checking should be done by experts, journalists, or a group of literate individuals because it must be embraced by the public. “No less than a mass movement is the best antidote to disinformation victimizing the poor. If we are immersed in the communities we serve, our political education often starts by learning the conditions of the masses.” (DAA)

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