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MANILA, Philippines — Former Sen. Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. appears on the cusp of victory on Monday’s presidential polls, with his seemingly unassailable lead fueled by a decades-long misinformation campaign to revamp the family brand.
The clan’s comeback from pariahs in exile to the peak of political power has been built on a relentless barrage of fake and misleading posts on social media.
Pro-Marcos pages have sought to rewrite the family’s history, spreading fallacies about everything from the patriarch’s dictatorship to court rulings about the billions of dollars stolen from state coffers.
The Agence France-Presse’s (AFP) Fact Check team has debunked many of the myths swirling around the Marcoses.
Here are some of the most shared:
Pro-Marcos pages have long sought to portray Ferdinand Marcos’ dictatorship as a “golden age” of peace and prosperity, rather than a violent and corrupt regime that left the country impoverished.
One claim that the Philippines was the second-richest country after Japan during the Marcos regime was posted in March 2020, on the Facebook page DU30 MEDIA Network, which pretends to be a legitimate media outlet.
It was shared about 300 times.
AFP fact-checkers consulted experts who said the economic data from the Marcos years told a very different story.
The Philippine gross domestic product actually went from being fifth in Asia at the start of the dictator’s rule to sixth by 1985, as the country languished in a deep recession.
Another post on the Facebook page Bangon Bansang Maharlika in October 2020, claimed that the elder Marcos and 19th-century Filipino patriot Jose Rizal set up the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. It was shared nearly a hundred times.
Both institutions were created in 1944, five decades after Rizal’s death in 1896 and 20 years before Marcos was elected president.
The country’s Supreme Court said in 2003 that the legitimate income of Marcos and his wife Imelda during their 20 years in power was $304,372.43.
Yet more than $658 million was found in their Swiss bank accounts, which the court ordered to be handed back to the government.
It was a fraction of the $10 billion estimated to have been plundered from state coffers during the regime.
But a Facebook account named Ghee Vin Walker posted a claim in 2018 that no court had ever ruled the Marcoses had stolen money from the treasury.
It was shared nearly 9,000 times.
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