One of the stories coming out of the recently concluded US elections is about how video footage of certain ballot counting practices have been edited in a way to present it out of context, with the ultimate goal of undermining the credibility of elections. Doesn’t that sound familiar?
In 2016, a video clip made the rounds of Philippine social media, claiming to be evidence that the vote counting machines were misreading the ballots. The comment appended to the video alleged that the person in the video declared that she had voted for Candidate A, but that the voting receipt showed a vote for Candidate B instead. As you can imagine, the video set the Internet on fire. In a matter of hours, it racked up thousands of views and provided fodder for people to swear up and down that the elections were rigged.
Fortunately, however, the video had audio—people chattering excitedly watching the vote counting machine being operated. While barely intelligible, it was possible to translate the words being said— they were speaking quite rapidly in a Mindanaoan dialect—and what they turned out to be saying was in fact the exact opposite of what the appended comment said. The people talking were actually excited because the machine read the ballot exactly as it had been marked.
Quite notably—and I’m sure someone will correct me if I’m wrong—no one in the media, whether mainstream or alternate, actually exerted any effort to translate what the people were saying in the video, and so we were treated to the spectacle of even news reports referencing a provably misleading video clip as potential evidence of election rigging.
The same thing happened in 2019 when a shoddily produced video purporting to show how the vote counting machines “could” misread the ballot. That video also got lots of traction before someone who happened to have had access to the local source code review for the counting machines eventually spoke up. Unfortunately, the truth-teller volunteered his knowledge too late to prevent big personalities from engaging in the usual wide-eyed, outraged, diatribes on television about how “the elections could be rigged”—all on the strength of a ridiculous video that looked like it had been created by a talented sixth grader with access to the school’s computer lab.
And the traction that false and misleading information gets with the general population isn’t the only thing about the recently concluded American elections that resonates with the Filipino political experience. The losing presidential candidate’s reactions to the results, for example, mirrors the reactions of many losing candidates in the Philippines.
Sadly, the one thing that isn’t very Filipino is the pushback the losing candidate is getting in the public discourse, particularly the media, where his claims and over-all rhetoric are being roundly criticized by others—even by those in his own party—as baseless, in poor taste, and ultimately corrosive of public confidence in the electoral process.
Instead, we see the disgruntled engaging in endless repetitions of baseless claims, even when those claims are patently and provably false. And as for those who really ought to know better? Well, they’re busy trying to “get both sides,” even to the point of giving utter nonsense a patina of legitimacy.
Will all of this happen again in 2022? You can bet on it. Despite these experiences, and despite all protestations about how media and information literacy is critical to fighting misinformation, I fear that too many people will still be slaves to the need to get the most views, to be the most viral, and to be the one to “break the news” of fraud. Which is why it is important for everyone who isn’t out to feed an audience—whether real, aspirational or imagined—to be active debunkers themselves, instead of waiting for some “authoritative source” to do the debunking for them. After all, the majority of these claims can be sorted out with a few minutes of googling and just some common sense.
Our elders used to remind voters to be vigilant—well, this is what vigilance looks like in the digital age. Vigilance today means you actively fight disinformation, and not just be aware of it; vigilance means calling out frauds and shysters and telling everyone about them, so no one else gets fooled; vigilance means being responsible for your own behavior online so that we’re not unwittingly contributing to the problem.
The elections of the Americans are over but the lessons we can glean from their experiences are still fresh. With any luck, we won’t have forgotten those lessons by the time people start to try pulling the wool over our eyes in 2022. Until then, I say again, be vigilant.
Image credits: AP/Aaron Favila