Disinformation (as distinct from historical revisionism)

False content produced and distributed deliberately, as distinct from an error someone repeats in good faith. It is the correct word for the narrative that carried the Marcos family back into national office in 2022, which the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism documented as the dominant misinformation stream of that campaign.

Keeping it apart from historical revisionism is the point of the entry. Revisionism in the scholarly sense means re-examining evidence and changing a conclusion, which is how history is supposed to work and is exactly what this course is asking you to do. Calling a fabrication “revisionism” hands it the standing of scholarship it never earned.

Source: Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism, “Marcos leads presidential race amid massive disinformation,” 8 May 2022, https://pcij.org/2022/05/08/marcos-presidential-elections-massive-disinformation/ , free. Jonathan Corpus Ong is the standing academic authority on Philippine paid disinformation architecture. Gap stated on the page: the distinction between disinformation and scholarly revisionism is attributed in the literature to the historian Ambeth Ocampo, in the phrase “barefaced lies and half-truths,” and this course has not located his original column. Attribute it to him only after finding it.

First used in: 1.8 · Four days, and then the same families came back