THE REAL GOAL OF NAIA NAME CHANGE

Is the proposal to change the name of the country’s main (but by no means only) international airport a distraction? Yes. And no. It draws attention away from important matters (although, as I have written before, this is much less a problem than many of us think; we are learning how to keep many provocations in mind). But it is also a crucially important matter in itself; it is worth paying attention to.

Why? Because revising the country’s history is part of Dutertismo’s long-term project.

“Tracking Digital Disinformation in the 2019 Philippine Midterm Election” is an important study conducted by Jonathan Corpus Ong, Ross Tapsell, and Nicole Curato. Among other findings, they identify four “dominant disinformation narratives” that politicians used (“mobilized”) during the campaign. As I write in a forthcoming country report on disinformation, these narratives in fact predate the elections; Ong, Tapsell, and Curato are right to focus on those overarching stories that figured prominently in the campaign and the elections.

I have a problem with their fourth narrative, which they define as “anti-china extreme speech.” I agree that it was a dominant narrative of opposition campaigns, and that, to quote their report, it sometimes “slipped into racist expressions against Chinese people.” This is abhorrent, but we are talking about hate speech, not disinformation.

They write: “Throughout the campaign, the opposition consistently stoked nationalist fervour and anti-china anger to mobilize their base. While there are good reasons to raise alarm over the administration’s policy on China, the worrisome aspect of this narrative is its tendency to mobilise racist rhetoric for political gains.” Again, it’s not disinformation per se, but the possibility, the “tendency,” of hate speech, which has its own challenges. Their two examples of social media accounts going racist and their lone example of an opposition campaign speech do not in fact offer any proof of disinformation.

It seems to me the authors wanted to balance the scale, and ended up offering an example of false equivalence.

But the first three dominant themes they defined were genuine narratives of disinformation. The first was the antiestablishment narrative: “In the 2019 race, Duterte’s angry populist narrative is reinforced in digital propaganda and weaponised to attack senatorial candidates that are associated with the ‘establishment.’” That the support for Mr. Duterte came in part from other sections of the establishment was clear on election day (for instance, half of Class ABC voted for him) and confirmed in subsequent scholarship.

The third theme was the continuing attack on mainstream media. (Hello, ANTIABS-CBN congressmen! You are certainly earning your keep.) “In the 2019 elections, state-sponsored propaganda, as reinforced by digital disinformation, continued to attack media and scientific institutions by accusing them of media bias and ties to foreign funders.” The demonization of Rappler and ABS-CBN, the attacks on the Inquirer and the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism and alternative media like Bulatlat, the personal insults against Ellen Tordesillas, Maria Ressa, and other journalists—these were all driven by false accusations of media bias.

It is the second dominant narrative the authors identified, however, that explains the sudden zeal of administration congressmen to rename the Ninoy Aquino International Airport (Naia). “We observed a resurgence of historical revisionist posts that romanticized the accomplishments of the late dictator President Ferdinand Marcos (1965-1986),” the scholars write. Historical revisionism is the other dominant disinformation narrative—and it is not limited to the 2019 midterm elections.

House Bill No. 7031, filed by President Duterte’s son Paolo, House-speaker-in-waiting Lord Allan Velasco, and Eric Go Yap, seeks to change the main airport’s name to “Paliparang Pandaigdig ng Pilipinas” or the International Airport of the Philippines—an absurd name, given that the country has many other international airports, and a risible plan, given that changing the branding of the main airport into a generic name, during a pandemic, would cost millions of dollars and consume government resources.

But the main point of the proposal is not the proposed name, but the name that will be removed. Ninoy Aquino was assassinated at the airport in 1983, the beginning of the end of the Marcos regime. And the Duterte administration is invested in rehabilitating the Marcoses; one of the main means of rehabilitation is the revising of history.

In my country report, I identify four overarching disinformation themes used by the Duterte administration. The fourth is stark (and also profoundly untrue): “Edsa was a failure.”

That’s the real message in the proposal to erase Ninoy Aquino’s name from the main airport. Even those who do the devil’s work in disinformation know that the medium is the message.