A legacy of untruths

Last week, The Washington Post published an article on the “accumulated untruths” claimed by former US president Donald Trump during his term. Based on a database compiled by the paper’s Fact Checker team, Trump had accumulated a total of 30,573 false claims during his presidency. The frequency with which he made false claims averaged six in a day during his first year, but this accelerated to 39 a day in his final year.

In short, the longer he was in power, the more frequently he made false or misleading claims in the news or on social media. The article was released after Trump was permanently banned from Twitter due to “incitement of violence” and was suspended from Facebook and Instagram, sparking debates about the protection of free speech versus the need to moderate dangerous content before it gets uncontrollably amplified. I suppose we can be thankful for small mercies, that President Duterte does not have Twitter or Facebook, although the gap is filled by an army of social media “trolls” who regularly haunt our social network timelines and comments sections. I wonder if the number of accumulated untruths or dangerous half-truths spoken by the President will exceed 30,000 too. Just four days ago, Mr. Duterte cast doubt on the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccines after a group of elderly who were inoculated with the shot died. “If you want to follow the experience of Norway, go ahead,” he said in his weekly address, despite the fact that investigation into the deaths is still ongoing, and despite the fact that medical experts have suggested that the relationship between inoculation and the deaths is not a causal one, and possibly related to the frailty of the population concerned.

This lack of understanding of nuance—the way that the President continues to make imprecise or misleading pronouncements with implications on public health—has been a stumbling block to the public’s understanding of the coronavirus, with both free agents and government outlets scrambling to correct misconceptions and to provide more context after the statements are made. Unfortunately, false presidential statements have not been confined to coronavirus-related news. I recall an instance two years ago when a fact checker site identified nine false claims in an 86-minute speech. More recently, the President was revealed to have been making statements about Vice President Leni Robredo based on false information surrounding responses to Typhoon “Ulysses,” causing yet more political division in an arena already suffering from a farcical lack of unity.

I also wonder how many untruths will be logged that were claimed, not directly by him, but by agents and agencies answering to his authority. While we, the public, were still reeling from the termination of the University of the Philippines-Department of National Defense agreement, a Facebook page called the “Armed Forces of the Philippines Information Exchange” (as well as a number of others) shared a list of UP alumni who “Became NPA” and who were dead or captured. As the post featured a quote from Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana, saying “We just want to protect UP and its students,” it could further paint the university as a hotbed of insurgency. The list, however, has been proven false, with at least eight people on the list alive and not affiliated to the NPA. Alexander Padilla, one of those named, countered the claims in a Facebook post and said that he is now anxious for himself and for those living who are still on the list, “whose lives are now placed in peril” due to the feared consequences of red-tagging. A message to Rappler from another member of the list, Marie Liza Dacanay, said that such actions should be considered “libelous and potentially endangering.” The fears are well rooted in this term’s history of extrajudicial killings and arrests of various targets, from casual social media users to protesters and political lobbyists.

Historians and political analysts continue to dissect Donald Trump’s presidency in the United States, with polls and commenters ranking his term among the lowest and calling it “aggressively bad.” The end of his term reminds us that it is a little over a year until the next Philippine presidential election, and that the legacy of our current administrative term looks poised to be similar to Trump’s—filled with destructive untruths, false news running unchecked and statements promoting brutality and violence.

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