Global Disinformation Campaigns Escalate in Scope and Impact

Global Activists Warn: Disinformation Industry Undermining Democracy

Nearly 1,000 activists gathered at Bangkok’s Thammasat University for International Civil Society Week 2025, united by a common concern: the systematic undermining of democracy through organized disinformation campaigns.

“Disinformation is an industry,” explained Micheline Rama, co-founder of DAKILA, a Philippine human rights advocacy group comprised of artists and activists. “There is a network and there are architects behind it.” Rama, who also serves as a senior researcher at the Generative AI Network, led several sessions on narrative-building during the conference.

According to Rama, modern disinformation tactics create “an atmosphere of confusion, helplessness, and social divide—pitting groups and people against each other.” The Philippines has earned the dubious distinction of being labeled “patient zero” for networked disinformation, with Reuters journalist Regine Cabato describing the country as “a testing ground—a ‘petri dish’—for disinformation tactics that would be exported around the world.”

Across Southeast Asia, digital spaces have become increasingly hostile for activists and human rights defenders. Paramita Mohammad, CEO of Indonesia-based Communication for Change, told Bulatlat that activists in her country are routinely “branded as western puppets” before facing more severe digital attacks. “We saw their accounts being hijacked. Pages of civil society organizations suddenly post online gambling. Activists are subjected to hacking, doxing, and mass bullying.”

In the Philippines, the practice of “red-tagging”—falsely labeling individuals and organizations as communist armed revolutionaries—remains widespread despite the Supreme Court declaring it a threat to life, liberty, and security. A three-month analysis of social media comments targeting Bulatlat, an independent news outlet, revealed coordinated harassment primarily from low-trust or low-legitimacy profiles with few followers and sparse posting histories.

These digital attacks often carry real-world consequences. Nineteen-year-old human rights defender Hailey Pecayo faced terror charges after documenting alleged military violence against civilians. Following her humanitarian work, she was publicly accused of being part of the New People’s Army by pro-government media and repeatedly targeted online. Amnesty International reports that such harassment frequently extends to activists’ families and communities.

The digital disinformation crisis extends well beyond Southeast Asia. In Romania, Daria Ienea of Station Europe described how disinformation reached “its peak last December during presidential elections.” The Supreme Court of Romania ultimately annulled first-round results after declassified intelligence reports allegedly revealed a coordinated social media campaign benefiting a far-right populist candidate across multiple platforms.

“The polarization translates into the young generation. They have access to these platforms and the internet,” Ienea explained. “There’s this narrative that is delegitimizing the works of activists and civil society.”

Similar patterns emerged during Philippine elections, with President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. identified as the top beneficiary of disinformation during the 2022 campaign, according to fact-checking organization Vera Files. His predecessor, Rodrigo Duterte, reportedly spent 10 million pesos to hire a “troll army” during his 2016 campaign—a presidency later marked by thousands of extrajudicial killings during his “war on drugs.”

The rise of artificial intelligence has dramatically accelerated both the creation and distribution of disinformation. Rama describes an “arms race” where AI tools are used to both spread and detect harmful content. High-profile examples include AI-generated videos shared by Philippine politicians, including Senator Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa, to discredit political opponents.

In a particularly disturbing case reported by Al Jazeera, Sheera Escudero—whose 18-year-old brother was killed during Duterte’s drug war—discovered an AI-generated video of her deceased brother circulating on Facebook, falsely accusing her of lying about the circumstances of his death.

The scale of AI misuse prompted OpenAI to ban Philippine-based accounts in June 2025 after discovering systematic use of ChatGPT to generate pro-Marcos social media content. Researchers warn that deepfakes—AI-generated media that can convincingly swap faces or create fictional scenarios—pose increasingly severe threats to public trust, particularly in fragile democracies.

“One thing that is being pushed, both in terms of narratives and in terms of technology, is the dehumanization of people,” Rama noted. “It is easier today to villainize a supporter or a certain population as non-human.”

Participants at the Bangkok conference issued a collective declaration calling on governments and international institutions to combat disinformation and improve AI governance. UN Special Rapporteur Irene Khan criticized major social media platforms for rolling back policies aimed at combating disinformation and hate speech, stating that “when large digital platforms reject international human rights norms, they undermine their own legitimacy and effectiveness as global companies.”

While experts acknowledge that fact-checking and media literacy are important tools, many activists emphasized community engagement as the most effective response. Rama concluded that “having social ties that allow you to ground your interpretation of the world and have access to varying perspectives” remains the most powerful defense against the dehumanizing effects of coordinated disinformation campaigns.