by Pamela Gloria Cajilig
In a Philippine island that sits where the river meets the sea, a community of fisherfolk contemplate their future survival. Decades of poorly planned coastal development and governance have triggered a series of lingering, entangled, and totalizing flood disasters in this landscape that I have been visiting for the past four years as a disaster anthropologist. The lack of sustainable water sources has prompted groundwater extraction, which has caused the island to sink. Meanwhile, sea levels have increased due to fossil fuel-driven climate change, which has also intensified the destructive force of typhoons and storm surges. In neighborhoods caught between perpetual decay and repair, schoolchildren frequently slip and break their bones on alleys that are never dry. Families eat meals while holding umbrellas under the leaking roofs of their homes. Seawalls yield to polluted floodwater that corrodes the concrete of streets and houses despite the islanders’ continual depletion of their meager life savings during desperate and costly attempts to rebuild.
Still, the worst looms. The initial stages of a massive reclamation-based land development project, one of the largest in the country and initiated by a leading conglomerate, have aggravated multiple disaster risks. Illegal and wide-scale mangrove cutting for the project has removed natural protection from increased flooding, as well as spawning grounds for fish that are vital to coastal livelihoods. Heavy military presence in and around the construction site to deter protesters has displaced fisherfolk and prevented them from visiting their usual fishing grounds, with news reports further linking this presence to human rights violations against environmental defenders. Fisherfolk organizations, scientists, and conservation groups all decried the project as harmful, illegal, and unjust.
However, this development continues to gain public support and endorsement from the upper echelons of political power. In major news sites and TV channels as well as on social media, the conglomerate launched a savvy public relations campaign that relies heavily on maps of future plans and glossy architectural visualizations. The campaign taps into a deeply entrenched sense of national inferiority by advancing an urban imaginary that puts the Philippines, an economic laggard in Southeast Asia, on the map of international competitiveness. Although multiple scientists, communities and environmental groups have presented clear, substantial, and widely publicized evidence linking coastal reclamation with environmental degradation, the conglomerate continues to spread false narratives that tout the development as a silver bullet for urban blight and a future beacon of sustainability.
The Disinformation Collaboration Lab
With this personal backdrop of socio-ecological ruination, I participated in the three-day Disinformation Collaboration Lab in Bangkok, Thailand, which was organized by Numun Fund. Disinformation, generating and spreading misleading information with the intent to confuse others, critically impacts civil liberties. Given the gap in disinformation countermeasures in the Global South, the Lab gathered a diverse group of actors from across Asia, home to several authoritarian regimes. The goal was to initiate a concerted effort to resist disinformation based on feminist principles of sharing power, intersectionality, and pluralism. The Lab’s participants work across various facets and modes of disinformation, such as gender violence, identifying networks that manufacture disinformation, legislative and policy reform, Big Tech, community journalism, and with myself representing the environment and disaster.
Unlike the example I presented in which disinformation in the form of greenwashing appeared largely benign on the surface, many of the other participants tackle overtly violent forms of disinformation, such as hate speech. Regardless of the type of disinformation dealt with, our common ground has been commitment to center communities that are silenced and harmed by disinformation as a practice that furthers the enmeshed mechanisms of empire, capital, and the patriarchy. These communities include migrants, the LGBTQIA+ community, political prisoners, and those embroiled in religious and ethnic conflicts.
Disinformation: Technologies and Aesthetics
As early as Roman times, disinformation tactics were deployed to pursue and expand political dominance. In his claim to the Roman Empire, Octavian mounted a smear campaign against Antony that depicted him as a womanizing drunk and puppet of Cleopatra. Octavian’s propaganda took the form of short, biting slogans etched in coins, not unlike tweets. Even then, simple graphics enabled truth claims and ideological messages to resonate as true. Studies have shown how fakery relies on straightforward graphics. The big and bold fonts used to sensationalize tabloid news stories, the architectural visualizations mentioned in the introduction of this piece which insist that the reclamation project speaks for itself, and the online memes used by far right conspiracy theorists all index a naked truth. In contrast, the wordiness of professional journalism and fact checking tends to evoke the concealment of truth.
Over time, the technologies used to sow disinformation in response to conflict, regime change, and catastrophe have become increasingly sophisticated. The confluence of the Internet, social media, and AI in the 21st century has exponentially multiplied the risks of disinformation. Computational propaganda, composed of synthetic and fraudulent messages created by manipulating audio and video, spreads through algorithmic recommendations within market-oriented peer-to-peer networks. These networks further intertwine with more sinister assemblages, such as state-sponsored troll armies that enable the rise of the far right.
Truth and Trust
Within this volatile political and technological landscape, certain publics assess the authenticity or fakery of information based on their beliefs and feelings rather than truth claims. The spread of disinformation therefore thrives on messages that confirm fundamental beliefs and the policing of nuance, an essential requirement for dialogue, debate, dissent, and participation. In other words, disinformation relies on what postcolonial feminist writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie calls “the danger of a single story.” Many of our Lab’s discussions addressed the simplistic narratives that perpetuate the violence of disinformation and, by extension, the status quo:
Economic growth should happen at all costs.
Climate change is a hoax.
Transwomen are not women.
Homosexuals cause disasters.
Only terrorists are critical of the government.
To name just a few.
The challenge of quelling disinformation therefore not only entails undoing the military-media-industrial complex and the greenwashing industry. It demands an understanding of the powerful grip of false universalisms that often comprise disinformation. Very briefly, modernity’s celebration of individual triumph and private property over community and the commons has ultimately led to distrust in the authority of institutions (e.g., the church, the state) and their rules that have historically provided moral guidance. As a result of increasing freedom from institutions, we are compelled to turn to each other and experiment with newer forms of moral instruction (e.g., those offered by the self-help book industry, social media threads, celebrity and influencer channels, brand and lifestyle websites) for rules to live by and to alleviate our fear of the unknown.
Bearing the moral weight of individual freedom has resulted in deep and chronic anxiety over the ethical soundness of our decisions. In a fragile world soaked in crises, loss, and confusion, the moral simplicity of the truth claims that drive disinformation is particularly comforting to many. Potentially dangerous but morally uncomplicated and emotionally resonant single stories about others serve as a salve for the alienation and rootlessness of modern living. Here, those who feel morally vulnerable tend to view facts, particularly those enveloped in scathing “woke” discourses, as threats to moral stability.
Toward the Pluriverse
Where do we go from here? Our discussions in the Lab have identified critical ways forward, building on the work that participants are already doing. These include:
– understanding the specific actors and algorithms that produce and spread disinformation
– challenging business models that incentivize disinformation
– refining the mechanisms for monitoring hate speech
– advocating for innovative and more equitable policies and legislation, particularly with AI magnifying the global risks and effects of disinformation
– addressing the consequences of disinformation, such as supporting gender minorities who have been subjected to violent attacks and ensuring that perpetrators are held accountable.
Crucially, addressing disinformation requires recognizing the intricate nature of facts. French philosopher Bruno Latour underscores how scientific facts are networked. Facts are not simply “out there” speaking for themselves but are outcomes of messy, non-linear processes involving multiple actors (not unlike the nature of fakery). Latour argues that this networked notion of facts implies that bombarding the public with even more facts to counter disinformation likely results in the opposite effect. Meanwhile, the inadequacy of relying on fact checking alone as an overly individualistic approach to countering disinformation is a well-traveled terrain. Instead, restoring faith in facts and, by extension, restoring trust in the public institutions that generate them necessitates transparent discussions on the former’s complex architecture. This networked approach to subverting disinformation therefore shifts the conversation from “What do we know?” to “How do we know?”
Finally, we need a public sphere that is safe for difference. To cast doubt on single stories that lead to violence and extraction, we must create a pluriverse: a world where many worlds fit. Inspired by the Chiapas Zapatistas’ Fourth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle, a pluriversal world is where all beings (humans and non-humans) co-exist with dignity and peace by rejecting patriarchal values, racism, sexism, anthropocentrism, and various modes of discrimination. A vital complement to top-down and universal approaches to fighting disinformation, pluriversal tactics focus on local politics and local actors. These grassroots-level tactics are formulated while considering broader needs and building solidarity with others from the Global South who are also addressing similar issues within their own localities.
Many projects pitched during the Lab (which Numun Fund generously agreed to fund in principle) are geared toward a pluriversal world. The proposed Information Justice Caucus, among other objectives, aims to work with various interest groups to conduct targeted advocacy to influence laws and policies addressing information disorders. Meanwhile, the Building Communities of Trust project seeks to support community leaders by creating safe spaces for conflict-sensitive journalism and facilitation, and there is a proposed forum for linking community-based gender equality advocates with environmental and climate justice advocates. Further, a fellowship for tech founders from marginalized communities is envisioned to provide long-term resources for mutual aid to scale up ideas for resisting hate speech and disinformation. The project concept also integrates a feminist ethics of care by underscoring the psychosocial needs of youth advocates and founders whose daily work can be traumatizing.
Clearing a path toward a pluriverse that is unconducive to disinformation presents formidable challenges. In a pluriversal public sphere, everyone should have access to the full range of available discourses. However, the digital divide in the Global South persists, especially in rural areas. Simultaneously, the rise of authoritarianism and the class-segregated urban environments in many Asian megacities discourages participation, debate, and dissent in physical public spaces. Further still, spiraling environmental crises continue to render marginalized groups even more vulnerable to the workings of power. None of us from the Lab harbor any illusions that the work will be easy. What we collectively possess, however, is the capacity to aspire: a hopeful rejection of disinformation dystopia as a given future combined with knowledge (rough or otherwise) that is useful for creating maps and experiments to upend structural injustices that breed false and harmful claims.
Since the Lab ended, many emails, chat messages, and events have continued our conversations in Bangkok. Each exchange is vital to countering disinformation in and from the Global South. Each is a refusal of a future in ruins, each a portal to further possibilities for thwarting the forces that impede our peaceful and thriving co-existence with the Earth and with each other.
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