In the ephemeral world of social media, one where videos and vlogs regardless of the quality of their content go viral, and where our information landscape is so flooded that people cannot discern truth from fabrication, we struggle to agree on the basics of reality beyond what’s fed to us by algorithms. That long sentence is me trying to say, how can we agree on anything?
JC Punongbayan, brilliant young economist, columnist for Rappler, and someone I’ve had the pleasure of collaborating with before (there’s my full disclosure that I, as we all are, am biased in some way) has decided to bring the truth old-school: in print. After being confronted with the deluge of misinformation about the first Marcos presidency being a “Golden Age,” JC has literally written the book on it.
Before we proceed, a thought: isn’t it crazy that someone could write a book of over 300 pages just debunking falsehoods spread about the Marcoses?
The volume of lies abounds, and we know that it’s much easier to ramble on TikTok or YouTube and parrot made up stuff than it is to do the research. And when we say “do the research” here, that doesn’t mean more YouTube and stuff you’ve heard from elderly relatives. JC takes his passion for research here to give us a historical perspective through which we can understand and debunk the myths.
The book, entitled False Nostalgia: The Marcos ‘Golden Age’ Myths and How to Debunk Them, is structured as a series of essays, each one titled as a question to be...
A post claiming to list all the actions taken by the Home Minister in Kashmir in the last 10 days is going viral on social media. The posts list out 18 points, which include claims regarding citiz...