One prominent form of historical distortion regarding the Marcos administration is the
denial or trivialization of its human rights violations and economic plunder, as well as the denial of the roles played by the rest of the
Marcos family and by various
Marcos cronies in the administration.
By Marcos family members Various Marcos family members who have stayed in the public eye since their return to the Philippines have denied the atrocities of the Marcos regime and have made various false claims regarding the dictatorship, such as assertions that the country was self-sufficient in rice and that the Philippines had the highest literacy rate in Asia. claims of Martial Law atrocities. Marcos used social media as a tool to distort history regarding his father's regime. This includes a 2012 interview with Jackie Dent of
The Sydney Morning Herald, where Dent recounts: "I put it to him that it has been documented that people were tortured, money was appropriated and a Hawaiian court has found against the family. He laughs. 'Well, that is one opinion and that is what the prosecutors would say,' he says." In the same year, Marcos dismissed calls for him to apologize for atrocities experienced by
human rights abuses during his father's administration commemorated the 40th year of the
proclamation of Martial Law, dismissing their calls as "self-serving statements by politicians, self-aggrandizement narratives, pompous declarations, and political posturing and propaganda." During his 2016 campaign to become
Vice President of the Philippines, he also attempted to dismiss the events, saying Filipinos should "leave history to the professors," prompting over 500 faculty, staff and history professors from
Ateneo de Manila University to issue a statement condemning the act as part of "an ongoing willful distortion of our history," and a "shameless refusal to acknowledge the crimes of the Martial Law regime." More than 1,400 Catholic Schools through the Catholic Educational Association of the Philippines (CEAP) later joined the call of the Ateneo faculty, followed by the Department of History of the
University of the Philippines Diliman, which released a statement decrying what they called a "dangerous" effort for Marcos to create "myth and deception."
By Imee Marcos Imee Marcos has also issued similar statements, which include her 2016 statement that she was "too young" to have any power during her father's administration (although she was already 30 years old when her father was ousted in February 1986), and her 2018 assertion that critics should just "move on" regarding the crimes and excesses of the martial law era.
By Marcos associates On September 20, 2018, Marcos Jr. released a
YouTube video depicting a "tête-à-tête" between him and
Juan Ponce Enrile, in which Enrile made a number of claims denying the unlawful arrests and killings of critics during the Marcos administration.
Educational system Under the Human Rights Victims Reparation and Recognition Act of 2013, the
Department of Education (DepEd) and the
Commission on Higher Education are mandated to teach human rights violations during the martial law dictatorship. However activists, history teachers, scholars, and students have noted a failure to teach the economic hardships, political repression, Marcos's plunder, and the murder and detention of victims during martial law. History teachers noted how Philippine history was removed as a junior high school subject under the K-12 curriculum. Some observers such as
Akbayan Youth have proposed the strengthening the educational system's teaching of martial law to address historical denialism.
Textbooks Philippine history textbooks might say little about martial law, exclude its abuses, or make false claims that extol life during the period. Youth group
Anakbayan criticized the K-12 program as well as DepEd's Learning Resource Management and Development System for modules that glorified the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos. In 2018, Senator
Risa Hontiveros criticized the DepEd for the existence of textbooks that supposedly either praise martial law or "whitewash the atrocities committed during the Martial Law years". Hontiveros said that "DepEd must take a more proactive role in fulfilling the mandate of integrating Martial Law atrocities in our curriculum and ensuring that our instructional materials are factual, up-to-date and error-free". The Congress of Teachers/Educators for Nationalism and Democracy called the DepEd order an attempt to "rehabilitate the dark history of the Marcos family."
Institutions, monuments, and museums == Organized disinformation efforts and use of troll accounts ==