Statement: The profitable task of being a pro-Marcos social media influencer within the Philippines

A SELF-SUSTAINING BUSINESS MODEL

The run-up to the presidential election noticed an important build up within the selection of pro-Marcos pages, content material creators, and posts in quite a lot of social media platforms – indicating the monetary positive aspects available in a it appears that evidently self-sustaining trade fashion: Marcos partisans devour pro-Marcos content material, which financially rewards social media vloggers masking the ones subjects, which pushes such influencers to check out to enlarge their social media achieve.

Their posts are a mix of ancient distortion, the unfold of disinformation narratives, and whitewashing of the dictatorship from 1972 to 1986. Those posts centered folks’s feelings and have been designed to solicit sturdy reactions that may additional power engagements.

Extra novel, alternatively, is the “celebrification” of the Marcoses on social media. Vlogs frequently feed to the general public the circle of relatives’s private tales, day by day lives and “unfiltered” personalities – an manner that isn’t disinformation in line with se, and due to this fact evades fact-checking projects.

The Marcoses’ project into “way of life” vlogging is aided via their now unmitigated get admission to to prime profile politicians, overseas heads of state, and world occasions which unquestionably make for attention-grabbing “authentic content material” as claimed via influencers.

The Marcos circle of relatives’s social media technique has long gone past disinformation and ventured into affect operations. Efforts to counter those posts have had little impact, which means that the social media panorama itself has modified and that the emphasis of the opposition on “pretend information” is changing into corresponding to combating the day prior to this’s struggle.

Marcos Jr received the election with greater than 31 million votes. Months after probably the most divisive elections up to now, trending projects on social media endured to mirror the polarisation that used to be provide throughout the marketing campaign, as observed within the calls to boycott manufacturers and personalities related to the Marcoses.