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From disinformation campaigns to influence operations: new campaign tactics and legacy media bypass in the Philippines

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Abstract
How has persistent disinformation affected political campaign strategies in the Philippines? Building on literature on political campaigns and marketing (Kreiss, 2018; McGregor, 2020; Penney, 2017; Rossini & Stromer-Galley, 2020; Rossini et al., 2021, Starbird, 2021; Wilson & Starbird, 2020), we discuss the operations and consequences of social media-driven political campaigns in national elections. We argue that longitudinal disinformation campaigns have created hyperpartisan information systems, where politicians' campaigns "preach to the choir" and avoid difficult questions from journalists and critics. Hyperpartisan information systems allow political camps to evade cross-examinations by veteran journalists on legacy media and sustain their ambiguous influence operations online. We show these by analyzing two aspects of the Marcos campaign in the 2022 Philippine presidential elections: their selective interview and debate choices with allied political influencers and partisan media outlets, and their movie and video satire collaborations with a famous online content creator and movie director. Taking off from our existing research on influence operations in the 2022 Philippine elections, we show that new strategies relying on political influencers have contributed to a splintered mainstream media and parallel public spheres. We argue that political campaigns have become increasingly difficult to hold accountable as a consequence of this shift. We outline the ways in which this presents an easily exploitable template for succeeding political campaigns in highly personalistic political systems.
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Date
2024
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