Authoritarians And Historical Revisionism

Around the world, authoritarian governments and movements are using propaganda and disinformation campaigns on social media to suppress the darker histories of their countries. These authoritarian movements aim to romanticize an extreme nationalist view of their countries' histories and to hide the human rights abuses and the mismanagement of the economy that past authoritarian and extreme nationalist movements are guilty of.

In the Philippines, the Marcos family has waged a years long disinformation campaign on social media to fool younger generations of Filipinos into believing that the Ferdinand Marcos dictatorship was a "golden age" while hiding the Martial Law Period's human rights abuses and the "crony capitalism" that destroyed the Philippine economy.

In Russia, the government is forcing schools to teach a sanitized national history that ignores the Soviet human rights abuses and massacres like Stalin's show trials, the Holodomor, the Great Purge of the late 1930s, the suppression of the Prague Spring.

In Hungary, the government uses educational and cultural institutions to teach a false xenophobic national heritage to manipulate the population towards Viktor Orban's extreme nationalist ideology.

In China, the ruling Communist Party is using schoolbooks, films, television shows and social media to write a version of Chinese history that excludes the crimes of Mao's Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward, and the 1989 Tienanmen Square Massacre.

In the United States, Donald J. Trump and his allies continue to push a false retelling of the 2020 election.