Introduction
A pyramidal composite of 37 figures standing 18 metres high, Manila’s People Power Monument (Figure 1) commemorates the events of the 1986 People Power Revolution, in which over a million people descended onto the streets of the capital to call for an end to the 20-year-long dictatorship of President Ferdinand Marcos. Designed by Philippine sculptor Eduardo Castrillo and erected in 1993, the monument stands on the site at which the protestors converged and has since become the focal point of public and, more recently, local rather than national government-led commemorations. These take place annually from the 22 to 25 February to mark the anniversary of the revolution. While the People Power Revolution was not in itself a violent conflict, what is commemorated on its anniversary is not simply the People Power movement but the many thousands of people who were killed or disappeared during Marcos’ rule. Indeed, even though the mass protest ended peacefully, for many who participated that was not a guaranteed outcome. One person who was there told me that she and her husband went with nothing in their pockets as they were ready to die. She said, ‘the tanks were there, and we were praying and singing, and that was the first time when I really really sang our national anthem… Really sang… because the end is ang mamatay nang dahil sa iyo [I am willing to die]’.Footnote 1 More recently, these annual commemorations have served another purpose, with crowds gathering both to remember and to protest against contemporary human rights abuses and other perceived violations of freedom and democracy. In the past few years these have centred on the return of the Marcos family to power, following the 2022 election of Ferdinand Marcos Jr. to the presidency. From 2023 to 2025, these protests have gained a marked urgency, as the Marcos Jr. Administration has chosen not to declare the anniversary of the People Power Revolution as a public holiday, diminishing its national significance. Furthermore, the Marcos family have used social media to lessen the importance of the commemorations, with the president and his sister, Senator Imee Marcos, each releasing statements on the anniversary of the People Power Revolution in 2023 that elide the realities of their father’s regime. Senator Marcos stated that ‘the truth of EDSAFootnote 2 is that we owe millions of Filipinos still living in squalor and insecurity, ignorance and hunger the promise of change’; while Marcos Jr. referred to 1986 as ‘those times of tribulation’ and calls for the populace to ‘come together as one’.Footnote 3 In 2024 and 2025 there was no statement from the family.
People Power Monument (1993). Artist: Eduardo Castrillo. Photo: The author. 1828x1219mm (72 x 72 DPI)
Figure 1 Long description
The image shows the People Power Monument located in Manila. The monument features a pyramidal composite of figures, symbolizing the 1986 People Power Revolution. The structure is elevated on a platform with steps leading up to it. Surrounding the monument are landscaped areas with trees and shrubs. The monument serves as a commemoration of the peaceful protest against the dictatorship of President Ferdinand Marcos, highlighting the collective strength and unity of the people during the revolution.
However, the Marcos family’s refusal to acknowledge the realities behind the People Power Revolution, and their use of digital spaces to do so, is contested by narratives of protest and remembrance, with images of the People Power Monument used on social media as a touchstone for dissent. This special issue seeks to examine the ways in which memory and digital media are used to anticipate the future rather than reimagine the past, and likewise this article analyses the ways in which digital memory work around the People Power Revolution functions as a means both to reconstruct the past and to envision a better future. The article is divided into four parts: the first analyses recent literature on monuments and commemoration; the second gives an overview of the historical context in which the People Power Revolution took place, the third discusses the evolution of People Power commemoration and the ways in which the Marcos family has used the digital to lessen its significance, and the fourth analyses how the People Power Monument is used in the digital space to both support the Marcos family, as well as to ‘fight for corrections’.Footnote 4
Sites of protestation and resistance
Many scholars have analysed the changes in the memorial landscape, which accompanied the huge global shifts in power that took place over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These changes resulted in occupied territories as well as the creation of new nation states, and several historians have examined how the construction and removal of monuments has been used to both colonise and decolonise the landscape.Footnote 5 Indeed, Frank and Ristic have observed that in reinforcing a particular history and identity to the exclusion of particular groups, monuments themselves function as an occupying force.Footnote 6 Other historians have explored the impact of tourism and foreign aid on the memorialisation of particular historical events in Southeast Asia.Footnote 7 Some have examined official versus vernacular memory and localised contestation of state-sponsored memorialising.Footnote 8 Yet others have assessed how changes in government and political regimes have altered the way in which memorial spaces are used and perceive.Footnote 9 Finally, some scholars have examined how colonial memorialising has resulted in the eradication of Indigenous histories from official memory.Footnote 10
In the Philippines many historians have examined the proliferation of monuments to national hero José Rizal during US colonial rule (1898-1946). Delmendo asserts that Rizal was favoured for commemoration by the US-run Philippine Commission due to his peaceful avocations and that Rizal’s image was not expected to incite any violent uprisings.Footnote 11 Mojares similarly assigns the promotion of Rizal to the colonial regime and views the monuments erected in his name as examples of civic nationalism or a reduced national identity.Footnote 12 Similarly Morley asserts that the US looked to foster Philippine nationalism and thus consolidate their own colonial rule through Rizalian unification, which involved the commemoration of Rizal’s death at monuments erected to Rizal across the country, as part of an invented tradition.Footnote 13 Likewise Quibuyen maintains that the ‘neocolonial state, under the “tutelage” of America, invented an official nationalism that quickly put up mute statues for its dead heroes to make sure that they, as Benedict Anderson aptly puts it, ‘are seen and not heard’.Footnote 14 Kramer has also examined how Rizal was used by both Americans and Filipinos to advocate for their political agendas, stating that President Theodore Roosevelt used Rizal in his speeches to illustrate how the United States was carrying out Rizal’s hopes for his country.Footnote 15
Scholars have also analysed the post-Second World War Philippine memoryscape. Quibuyen notes the contrast between the public focus on the atrocities committed by the Japanese during the Second World War compared with those carried out by the United States during the Philippine-American War and argues the latter is a consequence of the US influence over collective memory as opposed to the differences in time period.Footnote 16 Similarly in his comparative study of Second World War monuments in the Philippines and South Korea, Linantud argues that while the Japanese and Philippine governments have promoted reconciliation between the two nations, ‘public memories of Japan as a brutal enemy and occupier… haunt the entire region’.Footnote 17 Likewise, Yonetani and have examined how Second World War monuments in Okinawa and Hokkaido respectively, demonstrate an alternative to the national narrative of the war in Japan. They assert this illustrates the need for regional Japan to localise its framing of the war, which Seaton argues helps the regions avoid national accountability.Footnote 18 Other historians have examined the nationalism that emerged in the post-independence years, which sought to depict the US colonial period as part of the country’s ongoing fight for freedom, initiated by the Philippine Revolution.Footnote 19 More recently Mason and Istvandity have examined the use of Rizal to elide the colonial continuum that followed his execution and the beginning of the Philippine Revolution. They assert that the ‘authorised heritage discourse’ presented at the historic sites of Intramuros and Fort Santiago in Manila frames the martyrdom of Rizal as the birth of the modern Philippine state.Footnote 20 Contrastingly CuUnjieng Aboitiz has sought to expand this binary construction of Philippine nationalism through an exploration of the Pan-Asianism that preceded and persisted throughout the colonial and postcolonial period.Footnote 21
Despite recognising these counter narratives, the studies above do not examine the presence of a multitude of memories at particular memorial sites. Distinctly from this, Emde has sought to identify the personal connections and memories made at sites of memory, applying White’s quadripartite of ‘practice, emotionality, politics and materiality’ to her analysis of two sites in Cambodia, used by the Khmer Rouge to torture and kill opponents of the regime.Footnote 22 White argued that the elements of the quadripartite interact when individuals visit places that facilitate the remembrance of the past, enabling personal experiences to emerge.Footnote 23 Emde uses the personal recollections gathered at the two sites to support this, arguing that these interactions create “polyphonic memoryscapes” in which multiple memories exist, collide and are created.Footnote 24 Emde asserts that these individual connections transform the memorial place into personal space. This article examines this concept of personal space at the People Power Monument and the extent to which individuals reconceptualise the space through their personalisation of the memorial site.
Memory studies and the digital
Memory Studies will provide much of the conceptual framework for this article. Halbwachs first introduced the concept of collective memory in 1925. He conceived the idea that memories cannot be maintained or accessed by an individual alone but through the various social groups within which they operate.Footnote 25 Nora too identified frameworks of memory in his concept of lieux de mémoire, which he defines as sites where ‘memory crystallises and secretes itself’.Footnote 26 These can be spatial, for example a monument or temporally specific, for example a remembrance day. Erll advocates a shift from Nora’s concept of sites of memory and Halbwach’s collective memory which she sees as bound within a container-culture to ‘travelling memory’: memory that exists across and beyond cultures and must be continually in movement both intellectually and physically in order to survive.Footnote 27 This article draws on Erll’s concept of travelling memory to examine how the digital space, and social media in particular, enables the People Power Monument to exist outside of its physical site, and to what extent its movement across digital spaces in the form of images, photographs, and textual references, informs and shapes the ways in which the People Power Revolution is remembered.
Assmann established the concept of the canon and the archive to describe how cultural memory is perpetuated.Footnote 28 The canon refers to those aspects of memory that are actively promoted and maintained, for example, the objects that are selected for display in museums and the aspects of a nation’s past that are written about or depicted in art. In contrast, the archive (or what she terms ‘passive cultural memory’) are those objects or facts that are retained but not displayed or discussed, literally what is stored in archives.Footnote 29 Nora identified a similarly hierarchical nature to memory-making in his perception of a struggle between memory and history.Footnote 30 This theory has been applied to the way in which heritage sites have been used to foster particular memories and more specifically, how monuments have been used to foster a shared identity or to memorialise an event or person in a particular way. For example, Johnston and Ripmeester conducted a series of interviews with the residents of a small Canadian city to gain an insight into the extent to which they engage with an 1885 monument to a fallen Canadian solider. They discover that while most respondents cannot identify the subject of the monument or even the war to which it refers, they associate the monument with particular qualities, such as honour and good citizenship. Likewise in their assessment of Hong Kong’s official heritage sites, Teather and Chun argue that while these sites act as a conduit for memory, Hong Kong Chinese identity is more connected to relationships and social events.Footnote 31 However, while Taylor has similarly identified a dichotomy in the memory-making process, which she has defined as the archive (memory stored in texts) and the repertoire (performative memory), she perceives these to exist equally, without one dominating the other.Footnote 32 Yet, in her examination of the collective memorialising of mafia victims, Jerne argues that performative memory is in itself textual. She uses the term crowding to encapsulate participants’ experiences of seeing and standing in close proximity to the families of mafia victims, which she states is a fundamental part of the commemorative act.Footnote 33 Likewise monuments, and their digital counterparts, are both textual and performative. They are intended to be read or interpreted, and they engender performance, both through commemorative ceremonies that take place around them and the ways in which they shape the public’s interaction with the space in which they stand. To encapsulate this multifaceted commemorative space, this article uses the term memoryscape. Muzaini has defined the memoryscape as ‘the various ways in which recollections of the past are translated in, over and through space’.Footnote 34 Likewise Emde has argued that Halbwach’s concept of collective memory belies the contested nature of memory, describing former Khmer Rouge sites in Cambodia as ‘polyphonic memoryscapes’ in which multiple memories exist, collide and are recreated.Footnote 35 This article approaches the People Power Monument as a polyphonic memoryscape whose existence transcends its physical site into a digital space and across which multiple narratives and remembrances intersect and collide.
While many scholars have analysed these often competing narratives, examining official versus vernacular memory and localised contestation of state-sponsored memorialising, there has been little assessment of reproductions of real-world monuments in the digital space.Footnote 36 Indeed examination of People Power commemoration has focused on its monumental commemoration, analysing the Epifanio de los Santos Avenue (EDSA) Shrine and the Bantayog ng mga Bayani [Monument of Heroes].Footnote 37 However, there has been significant analysis of how digital monuments, so-called as they serve as stand-alone commemorations, such as YouTube videos and memory-sharing groups on platforms such as Facebook, enable different forms of diasporic memory practice.Footnote 38 These practices facilitate what Hirsch has termed affiliative postmemory by enabling the postgeneration, that is those that did not personally experience the historical event to ‘weave themselves into the story’.Footnote 39 Clarke, Parish, Winfield and Lecrivain have argued for analysis of digital affiliative postmemory to go beyond the textual, to the real-world practices associated with these online sites.Footnote 40 Indeed Bräuchler has observed that ‘Remembering a conflict has become a multi-scalar, multi-sited, multi-temporal and multi-stakeholder process’.Footnote 41 Yet, as noted in the concept paper, this multilateral process has led to the blurring of boundaries between private and public, individual and collective, official and vernacular ways of remembering. This is particularly evident in the commemorative selfie which enables the taker to insert themselves into the official narrative. Feldman and Musih argue that the production, reproduction and dissemination of selfies at Auschwitz serve as an ‘expression of agency’ that reinserts the visitor back into the usually faceless images of the site, while facilitating a connection for ‘a digital generation with only distant links to the Holocaust’.Footnote 42 This article applies Feldman and Musih’s analysis of the selfie as facilitating ‘identification, empathy, and corporeality’ and Jerne’s observations of crowding in its examination of photographs taken at the People Power Monument. It analyses the ways in which photographs and selfies are used by commemorative attendees and protestors to reimagine and reconnect with the past.Footnote 43 It asks what difference the digital makes to the commemoration of the People Power Revolution, how the digital facilitates a connection to the revolution for the postgeneration and how the digital is used as ‘a space in which the right to memory is exercised… to reinforce the discourse of the duty to remember… to manifest emotions’.Footnote 44 To analyse the ways in which the People Power Monument is engaged with digitally and physically I consulted newspaper articles online from a number of Philippine media outlets and examined social media posts on X, Facebook and Instagram from February 2022 to February 2024, using the following hashtags: #PeoplePower, #PeoplePowerMonument, #EDSA36 #EDSA37, #EDSA38. I selected these sites as all posts are archived, thus enabling posts to be analysed over a number of years. To understand contemporary perceptions of the People Power Monument as well as gain an insight into alternative memorialisations of the People Power Revolution, I conducted interviews with a number of people and groups who participate in People Power commemorations both in person and online.
Martial law and the rise of people power
Before examining these digital commemorations, I will first give a brief overview of Ferdinand Marcos’ presidency, the period of Martial Law and the key events that led to the People Power Revolution. Ferdinand Marcos succeeded Diosdado Macapagal as president in 1965. He came to office with the campaign slogan ‘This nation can be great again’, promising an end to the charges of corruption that had been levelled at the previous administrations.Footnote 45 His first term was marked by the expansion of the office of the presidency, deploying the military to implement various programmes and thus bypassing Congress. He also sought to increase agricultural productivity, which he funded through additional borrowing from foreign nations, including the United States, as well as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. However, while Marcos’ first term saw significant infrastructural development, it was also marred with corruption, as ‘officials took kickbacks from construction companies owned by Marcos supporters’.Footnote 46 Despite this, Marcos was re-elected in 1969, the first president to win a successive term since Manuel Quezon (in office 1935–1944). Yet this re-election was perceived by many as having been won through a combination of bribery, fraud and intimidation, resulting in mass protests, known as the First Quarter Storm, which saw demonstrators attack the US Embassy and attempt to storm Malacañang Palace, the residence of the Philippine president, in January 1970.Footnote 47 Characterising the growing unrest as a communist insurgency, as many student protestors were members of the newly formed Communist Party of the Philippines, Marcos imposed martial law on the nation in 1972.Footnote 48 In 1973 Marcos oversaw the passage of a new constitution, which gave him greater powers and shifted the government to a parliamentary system, making him both president and prime minister. Indeed, Marcos had complete power over legislation, which he used to issue ‘1,941 presidential decrees, 1,331 letters of instruction, and 896 executive orders’ over the Martial Law period.Footnote 49
Throughout the Martial Law period, US military assistance increased, in part due to Marcos’ threats to renege on the 1947 Military Bases Agreement, as well as security concerns over the Communist Party of the Philippines and the rising Muslim-Christian conflict in Mindanao.Footnote 50 However, while Marcos discussed ending the Military Bases Agreement, ultimately he protected US interests: sending troops to Vietnam, allowing US nuclear warships to dock at Subic Bay Naval Base and allowing US planes carrying nuclear weapons to land at Clark Air Base; all while reassuring the United States that martial law would not interfere with the bases.Footnote 51 Several scholars have also noted that despite US President Jimmy Carter’s focus on human rights, the Marcos administration continued to receive substantial military aid and loans, while martial law sanctioned torture, extrajudicial killings and the suspension of habeas corpus.Footnote 52 According to Amnesty International, around 70,000 people were imprisoned, 34,000 were tortured, and over 3,200 people were killed in the nine years after Marcos imposed martial law.Footnote 53
Following the assassination of Marcos’ main political opponent Benigno ‘Ninoy’ Aquino Jr. as he exited a plane in Manila on 21 August 1983, political, business and remaining public support for Marcos began to wane. The military, formerly a strong supporter of Marcos, also became frustrated with growing corruption and favouritism. Additionally, the Catholic Church, which had always been a critical collaborator in order to maintain its autonomy, began to turn against the president as criticism from the clergy following Aquino’s assassination forced the Church’s hierarchy to speak out. Marcos finally called a snap election in February 1986 in which Corazon Aquino, the widow of Benigno Aquino, stood against the incumbent. After refusing to accept Aquino’s victory, Marcos requested parliament to declare him re-elected on 15 February 1986.Footnote 54
On 22 February 1986 the organisation, Reform the AFP (Armed Forces of the Philippines) Movement (RAM), with its leaders Defence Secretary Juan Ponce Enrile and AFP Vice Chief of Staff Fidel V. Ramos, launched a coup. However, the attempt failed and the group retreated to two military camps along EDSA.Footnote 55 Cardinal Jaime Sin of the Catholic Church and Aquino supporters called on the public to protect RAM from the president’s military forces. The resulting public demonstration, with over a million people coming out to EDSA, became known as the People Power Revolution.Footnote 56 By 24 February the majority of the armed forces, as well as the Manila Police Force, had defected from the president, and this together with the final withdrawal of US support by President Ronald Reagan, forced Marcos and his family to flee. They were taken aboard two US helicopters and flown to Clark Air Base, where a military jet then transported them to Hawaii. Aquino was inaugurated as the eleventh president of the Philippines on 25 February 1986.Footnote 57 Marcos remained in Hawaii until his death in 1989.
The Marcos family and their supporters contest and obfuscate this documented record of human rights abuses, as well as Marcos Sr’s plunder of the Philippine economy, depicting the Martial Law era as a Golden Age, a period of unprecedented economic growth, peace and infrastructure development, while omitting the $10 billion in ‘ill-gotten wealth’ and the collapse of the Philippine economy by the mid-1980s.Footnote 58 Likewise the 1986 People Power Revolution is portrayed not as a democratic uprising, but as a conspiracy by the elite (the Yellow or Dilawan movement), the United States and biased media to unfairly oust a visionary leader.Footnote 59 While the digital space has been used to propagate these counternarratives, Tigno, Ducanes, Rood and Licudine have also argued that survey and voter data reveal that positive impressions of Marcos Sr’s regime emerged soon after the family’s exile from the Philippines in 1986. They say that while significant People Power crowds were heavily concentrated in Manila and Luzon, Marcos Sr. still had a considerable reservoir of loyalist support, particularly among his voter base in the north. Tigno, Ducanes, Rood and Licudine argue this persistence of positive memory must be considered alongside social media as an explanation for the family’s political resurgence.Footnote 60
Commemorating people power and the construction of the People Power Monument
The People Power Revolution has been commemorated annually since the first anniversary, with President Aquino describing the inaugural commemoration as a day of thanksgiving for freedom ‘araw ng pasasalamat. Magpasalamat tayo sa ating Kalayaan. [Thanksgiving Day. Let’s be thankful for our freedom.]’.Footnote 61 Yet as with the rhetoric surrounding other government-led days of national remembrance, she also used it as an opportunity to nation build and to articulate the goals of her administration:
We have restored freedom in this country. Now we have to continue with the same People Power spirit of selflessness and dedication in order to achieve our other goals, our economic goals. Let us dedicate ourselves to these three economic goals: alleviation of mass poverty, generation of employment and equitable sharing of the fruits of development.
President Aquino commissioned the construction of a monument in order to ‘preserve and immortalise in a permanent commemorative mark the noble ideals of the February 1986 EDSA People Power Revolution and the peaceful means by which it was pursued to restore democracy in the Philippines’.Footnote 62 Created by Manila-born artist Eduardo Castrillo (1942-2016), the People Power Monument was inaugurated on the seventh anniversary of the People Power Revolution in 1993. The monument is located on the corner of EDSA and White Plains Avenue in Barangay Camp Aguinaldo, Quezon City, at the site on which the protestors converged in 1986. Standing 18 metres high, the monument comprises 37 marble figurative sculptures, rising in tiers towards a pyramidal apex. The first tier is composed of figures of men and women with arms linked together, representing those who blocked the government tanks. The second tier depicts other people who joined the protest—a man holding a sign with the Tagalog word Laban Footnote 63 [Against], a priest with the image of the Virgin Mary, nuns offering food to soldiers, a musician playing the guitar, and a rebel soldier. At the apex stands an enormous female figure with arms outstretched. She is said to be Inang Bayan or motherland.
Castrillo’s daughter Ovvian Castrillo has stated that her father wanted the monument to convey the forgotten country and show those who are not typically memorialised in stone. She said that at the time of its creation her father received many requests to be depicted in the monument and that he would often humour these entreaties by pointing to a figure in the final version and say ‘That’s you,’ but in reality Ovvian affirms that no figure is based on any one person.Footnote 64 The monument’s depiction of a crowd of anonymous faces, connects to the memories of those who were there. One veteran has commented:
The People Power Revolution was a convergence, all different kinds of Filipinos, multi-sectoral Filipinos so we had a religious, and the lay, and the businessmen and the poor and the rich. So that’s why it’s really really people-led. There was no particular person right. We didn’t have an Andres Bonifacio. We didn’t have Rizal.Footnote 65
This reference to two significant Philippine heroes reflects the monument’s distinction to other national monuments, in particular the Rizal Monument in Rizal Park Manila, dedicated to José Rizal, who was executed by the Spanish colonial government in 1896, and the Bonifacio Monument in Caloocan, Manila, in honour of Andres Bonifacio, who led the Philippine Revolution against Spain towards the end of the nineteenth century. This may explain why the People Power Monument is the site on which crowds descend both to commemorate the People Power Revolution and to protest against human rights abuses and other perceived violations of freedom and democracy. Most recently demonstrators have converged to protest the extrajudicial killings sanctioned by President Duterte (in office 2016-22), the reburial of President Marcos in Libingan ng mga Bayani (Philippine Heroes Cemetery) in 2016, and the return of the Marcos family to power following the election of Ferdinand (Bongbong) Marcos Jr to the presidency in 2022.Footnote 66
Yet while the monument remains a focal point for many, since his election as president, Marcos Jr. has sought to lessen the significance of the People Power Revolution. In 2023 he moved the date of commemoration from Saturday 25 to Friday 24 February, creating a public holiday on the Friday in order: ‘To enable our countrymen to avail of the benefits of a longer weekend pursuant to the principle of holiday economics’.Footnote 67 While Marcos Jr. sent a wreath and issued a statement on X offering his hand in ‘reconciliation to those with different political persuasions to come together as one in forging a better society’, Marcos did not attend the official commemorations, instead visiting his father’s home province of Ilocos Norte to celebrate a local festival.Footnote 68 In 2024, for the first time the anniversary was not declared as a public holiday and no statement was released from Malacañang. Indeed the only public remark made by the family on 25 February was by Marcos’ wife, Liza Araneta Marcos, who simply posted a photograph of the family and wished her Instagram followers a ‘Happy Sunday’.Footnote 69 In 2025 there was again no statement from the Palace and Proclamation No. 727 declared EDSA a ‘special working day’, reducing the opportunity for those working to attend commemorations, further minimising the significance of the day.Footnote 70 Despite the Palace maintaining the President was not trying to hinder commemorations, there were reports of a more subdued anniversary at the People Power Monument on 25 February 2025.Footnote 71
This attempt to reduce the significance of the People Power Revolution, and the use of social media to do so, connects to a wider digital campaign by the Marcos family, Marcos supporters and indeed former President Rodrigo Duterte, to, in the words of Deirdre McKay ‘undermine the liberal memory paradigm and its public consensus that the martial law era marked a nadir in Filipino human rights’ and instead portraying the Marcos years as a golden age for the Philippines.Footnote 72 Indeed Marcos Jr. has sought to emphasise his father’s positive leadership, using social media in particular during his election campaign to depict the Martial Law era as a time of unprecedented peace, discipline and economic prosperity, while portraying the Marcos family as victims of a biased mainstream media and political rivals.Footnote 73 He also questioned the evidence behind Amnesty International’s statistics of how many people were imprisoned, tortured and killed during the Martial Law era.Footnote 74 Coordinated posts were used to claim that only criminals were arrested during this period and that the Philippines was the second-richest country in Asia after Japan. In reality, the economy was in a tailspin by the 1980s, characterised by hyperinflation and extreme poverty.Footnote 75 Mendoza has argued that Tik Tok in particular was instrumental to the success of Marcos’ 2022 election campaign. Like other platforms it was used to glorify the legacy of Marcos Sr., while romanticising the Marcos family, and portraying Marcos Jr.’s son, Sandro Marcos, as a celebrity. Mendoza states that TikTok’s algorithm and features, such as short-form content, personalised ‘For You Page’, and easy video sharing, made it a powerful tool for spreading pro-Marcos narratives, while its weak content moderation policies allowed the proliferation of disinformation, which played a significant role in shaping public perception.Footnote 76
The Marcos family’s rehabilitation was cemented through Duterte’s highly contentious reburial of Marcos Sr. in Libingan ng mga Bayani (Philippine Heroes Cemetery), and this in part paved the way for Marcos Jr’s own successful campaign for the presidency in 2022. In the days following Marcos Jr’s victory, more than 1,000 scholars signed a statement ‘in defense of historical truth and academic freedom’, shared widely across social media:Footnote 77
The presumptive electoral victory of Ferdinand Marcos, Jr. and Sara Duterte, signals an intensified struggle over historical knowledge and pedagogy, the erasure of traumatic personal and collective memories of plunder and human rights violations under Martial Law, and unbridled myth-making about a so-called ‘Golden Age’ presided over by the conjugal dictatorship of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos.Footnote 78
On the anniversary of the People Power Revolution in 2023 the president’s sister, Senator Imee Marcos, visited her father’s tomb and released a statement on Facebook that again served to elide the realities of the Martial Law period, commenting:
Bagama’t ang aking pamilya ay hindi kailanman kinapos sa paghiling ng kapayapaan, paghilom, at pag-usad; ang laman ng aking panalangin ay diskusyon para sa pagninilay sa kasaysayan, pagkakataong maibahagi ang kwento ng aming karanasan, at paglalahad ng katotohanan, na kung tawagin ay demokrasya.
[My family never fell short in seeking peace, recovery, and progress; my prayers include discussion on reviewing history, and a chance for us to share our experience, and tell the truth, which we call democracy].Footnote 79
These social media posts reveal a significant digital memoryscape around the People Power Revolution and Martial Law period, which is continually in flux as memories and narratives are shared, negotiated and contested. The following section examines this space, focusing on the ways in which the People Power Monument has been utilised in the digital sphere to both commemorate and facilitate a connection with the People Power Revolution for the postgeneration.
Digitising the People Power Monument
A frequent photographic trope of the People Power Monument shared on Facebook, X and Instagram, are selfies or photographs of people standing in front of the monument with fists raised, mirroring the stance of the figures depicted. These are posted alongside statements such as ‘With people united, darkness cannot reign forever’ (Figure 2), ‘Ipinagbubunyi natin ang kabayanihan ng mga mamamayang nagpalaya ng bansa mula sa isang diktador. [We celebrate the heroism of the people who freed the country from a dictator]’, and ‘As we commemorate the anniversary of EDSA People Power I, let us continue to uphold the values of solidarity, and collective action in our fight for freedom, social justice and human rights’.Footnote 80 The mirrored stance framed within the photograph, the collective ‘we’ and the emphasis on cooperation, all serve to foster a connection between the subjects of the photograph and those depicted within the monument. This reflected physicality recalls Jerne’s observation of the necessity of proximity to remembrance. She notes, ‘It is with (many) other bodies that we both affect and are affected by the way we celebrate the past and the future’.Footnote 81 While Jerne’s observations relate to being within the immediate proximity to real survivors of an event, in this case the framing of the photograph functions in much the same way, bringing protestors together with those memorialised in stone to project one contiguous march for democracy. Likewise, the photographs serve to undo what Hirsch has termed ‘the finality of the photographic take’ and in so doing ‘reactivate’ the memory of People Power by ‘reinvesting [it] with resonant individual and familial forms of mediation and aesthetic expression’.Footnote 82 For Hirsch, the survival of historic photographs facilitates a connection with the past. At the People Power Monument, it is the taking of photographs that fosters this link. As Feldman and Musih have observed with the taking of selfies at Auschwitz, these photographs serve as expressions of agency and underline the significance of the body in bearing witness to the past.Footnote 83 Indeed, it is clearly important to many attending commemorations at the People Power Monument, that they can photograph themselves at the site. One X user commented:
These cops STOPPED me from my first attempt to have a photo taken at the People Power Monument yesterday… just because dala ko yung original 1986 Inquirer issue. Bawal daw kasi ang placard. Placard a ba ang lumang diyaryo? [Placards are not allowed. Is the old newspaper a placard?]’.Footnote 84
@Katribuphils X post Feb. 25, 2023
Figure 2 Long description
A large group of people is gathered in front of a monument, holding banners and flags. The banners display messages related to the commemoration of EDSA37. The scene includes a mix of men and women, some seated and others standing, with a backdrop of a clear sky. The text above the image mentions a joint statement by several organizations on the commemoration of EDSA37, emphasizing unity and remembrance of the lessons of EDSA.
Possibly the aesthetic of the monument with its depiction of an anonymous collective, encourages such selfies and collective photographs, indeed for many commemorative participants their presence in the photograph is an important part of the process of remembrance. By inserting themselves into the frame, they become part of the People Power collective and serve as witnesses to both to its historic success and its ongoing relevance as they continue to ‘fight for freedom, social justice and human rights’.Footnote 85
The X user attempting to photograph themselves carrying the 1986 Inquirer issue, reveals that it is not just bodies but objects too that are used to serve as testimony to the People Power movement. Another X user posted an image of a small exhibition of signs which have been printed on cut outs shaped like the soles of shoes, referencing former First Lady Imelda Marcos’ infamous shoe collection. Printed onto the cut outs are slogans reading ‘Sapatos ni Imelda, Pera ng Bayan! [Imelda’s Shoes, People’s Money!]’, ‘Justice for Martial Law Victims’, ‘#NeverAgain to DICTATORSHIP’. Alongside the cut outs is a graphic illustrating the numbers of shoes owned by the former First Lady, equating the price of each pair to the minimum wage earned by ‘140 workers’. The words posted alongside the photograph read, ‘LOOK: We set up a mini exhibit beside People Power Monument to highlight Marcos family’s obscene wealth, sins to Filipinos’.Footnote 86 Similarly, another X user posted an image of a funeral wreath beside the People Power Monument, around which a ribbon is wrapped containing text that reads: ‘Huwag Pumayag Patayin Muli /ANG DEMOKRASYA [Don’t allow democracy to be killed again]’. The X post alongside the photograph reads: ‘“The Marcoses are serial killers of democracy. They did it before under their father’s Martial Law. They’ll do it again with the son’s troll armies and fake news peddlers.” #NotTheLastEdsa #NeverAgain’.Footnote 87 Like the photographs of people, the insertion of objects into the physical space of the monument personalises the site, which as Emde has argued, transforms the memorial place into personal space, fostering a connection between the commemorative attendees and the historical event.Footnote 88 At the same time the taking and sharing of the photograph on social media renders this display permanent, creating what McKay has termed a digital object, which she defines as an image that has symbolic importance for the user that has shared it.Footnote 89 Like the X user noted above attempted to do, other commemorative attendees have posted photographs of themselves holding historical newspapers from the time of the People Power Revolution, proclaiming President Marcos’ fall from power (Figure 3).Footnote 90 The newspaper historicises the photograph, transforming it into a digital artefact, which when shared on social media, serves to contest the myth of the Golden Age of Marcos rule propagated by the Marcos family. The digital artefact is perceived as tangible evidence, or in the words of one post ‘historical truth’ of the Marcos family’s ‘sins to Filipinos’ and the downfall of the Marcos regime.Footnote 91
@projectgunitaph Instagram post Feb. 25, 2024
Figure 3 Long description
Karl Patrick Suyat is holding an archival copy of a 1986 newspaper with the headline 'Marcos flees'. He is attending a wreath-laying ceremony at the People Power Monument, marking the 38th anniversary of the EDSA People Power uprising. The background shows a group of people gathered at the event. The Instagram post includes hashtags: #EDSA38, #DefendHistoricalTruth and #BuhayAngEDSA.
Yet this transformation of the monument into digital artefact is also used as means to express support for the Marcos family. On 7 December 2024 Marcos supporters gathered at the People Power Monument, expressing their support for the Marcos administration while posing for photographs in front of the monument carrying signs reading ‘WE STAND AND PROTECT BBM’.Footnote 92 These demonstrations took place at the culmination of a year that saw heightened tension between the President and the Duterte family, following a public exchange of drug use allegations between Marcos and former President Duterte, and the revelation in November 2024 that Vice President Sara Duterte would have President Marcos, his wife and the Speaker of the House of Representatives assassinated if she were to be killed.Footnote 93 Indeed supporters of former President Rodrigo Duterte and his daughter, Vice President Sara Duterte also gathered on 7 December at the nearby EDSA Shrine. The choice of the People Power Monument as a focal point for gatherings in support of Marcos signals its recognised association with the Marcos family, yet shows this association is fluid. Like the protestors, these supporters use the digital photograph to frame themselves alongside the People Power collective depicted in the monument. Yet this time the image generated is one of support for Marcos. Rather than signifying the downfall of the Marcos family, the monument is utilised to focus on the People Power movement itself, which in the eyes of the Marcos supporters gathered, can be co-opted to any end. These digital artefacts are shared as testimony, as truths used to both contest and uphold the Marcos regime.
Edited photographs of the People Power Monument are also shared on social media to represent the People Power Revolution and are often used in the place of, or alongside, photographs from the period. One X user posted an image of the People Power Monument superimposed onto historical photographs showing people on the streets at EDSA, stating ‘Let’s remember the true heroes of this 38th EDSA People Power Revolution Anniversary’.Footnote 94 Likewise another user shared an image of the monument alone, stating, ‘Honor those unsung heroes whose victorious deeds speaks louder than any praise’.Footnote 95 In these cases there is no personalised element to the photographs, the image of the monument is perceived as a representation of the People Power Revolution and is used to commemorate all who participated. Indeed, an exhibition at the University of the Philippines Diliman to announce the university’s plans for a Freedom Memorial Museum on the site, uses an image of the monument alongside photographs from 1986, as part of the display. The photograph of the display has been shared by the Human Rights Violations Victims’ Memorial Commission who wrote to ‘welcome the forthcoming Freedom Memorial Museum at UP Diliman. This museum will serve as a sacred space for reflection, education, and remembrance, ensuring that the stories of courage and resilience are never forgotten.’Footnote 96 These images of the People Power Monument are perceived to represent the heroes of the People Power Revolution, and function, as Hirsch observed with the historical photograph, to reanimate the past.Footnote 97 As one of my interviewees commented:
I think it’s very powerful for people to see those images side by side, the People Power Monument and then actual Martial Law survivors, Martial Law veterans. Somehow it creates that imagery, the monument itself really symbolises actual individuals, actual defenders, actual experiences of how people fought during their time.Footnote 98
This perception of the monument as photographic record is particularly evident when the image of the monument is elevated above the historical photograph on social media remembrance posts. Several users have shared images of the People Power Monument colourised and superimposed onto a faded photograph depicting people on the streets of EDSA, with calls to remember ‘the EDSA People Power Revolution that overthrew the Marcos dictatorship and restored our country’s democracy’ and ‘#NeverForget’.Footnote 99 One X user posted a photograph of themselves taken in Taiwan on the anniversary of the People Power Revolution, in which they are holding a placard with an image of the People Power Monument superimposed onto a Ukraine flag. The X post reads: ‘Today, we, Filipinos in Taiwan, #StandWithUkraine and resist our oppressors together & fight once more for our democracy. Down with Putin & Marcos’.Footnote 100 Like the photographs and selfies shared by users at the site of the People Power Monument, these bespoke images of the monument serve as evidence of the People Power movement that when shared on social media by what Erll has termed carriers or those who practice inherited forms of remembering that have their base elsewhere, function as travelling memory, fostering a multitude of connections across nations and time.Footnote 101 Whereas Hirsch saw the photograph as mediating or diffusing ‘the impact of trauma’, the image of the People Power Monument serves to bring the People Power movement into the present, reinforcing and bolstering contemporary fights for democracy.Footnote 102
Images of the People Power Monument are not the only digital content shared and created to commemorate the People Power Revolution. One Facebook user posted an image entitled ‘Anatomy of a Facist’, which depicts mask-like faces of Marcos Sr; Marcos Jr; Duterte and Sara Duterte, with a representation of blood spatter behind them. The graphic contains the words murderer, thief, and dictator, with arrows between the words and each figure, suggesting the similarities between the four depicted parties. The post reads, ‘As we commemorate the EDSA Revolution, SnT [Scientists and Technologists] urges our fellow freedom-loving Filipino scientists, academics, researchers, engineers, STEM students and educators to oppose yet another attempt to revise history and reinstate fascist Marcos regime’. It also mentions the scientists that were victims of Marcos Sr’s rule and the ‘unscientific policies’ under the Duterte administration.Footnote 103 Like the personalised approaches to the People Power Monument graphic, these specifically created digital objects facilitate personalised messaging around the commemoration of the People Power Revolution. Indeed, the diagrammatic depiction connects to the scientific community it targets, and the image was shared widely on social media by various university science and technology departments. This gives greater weight to its function as digital artefact, as evidence of the offences committed by the four people depicted. Yet while they do not use an image of the People Power Monument, it is ever present, as the post calls readers to attend commemorations at the monument on 25 February.
However, the monument does not speak for all those who commemorate the People Power Revolution. There are many posts that make no mention of the People Power Monument or use its image. One X user posted an image of a forum entitled ‘Preserving and Defending the Memory of EDSA People Power and the Horrors of Martial Law’.Footnote 104 Another Facebook post shares images of key sites and monuments in Cebu that saw ‘resistance against Martial Law’, stating that ‘People Power was never a Manila-centric action. Cebu was among the places outside Manila that played a major role in the nationwide movement to resist Martial Law. Let us remember - and #NeverForget - the heroism of many Cebuanos who fought to end the Marcos dictatorship’.Footnote 105 Similarly another interviewee describes how at the time when Marcos Jr was running for Vice President in 2015-16 they were involved in protest movement, as part of which they created memes, shared on social media, which depicted a red bow tie that Marcos Jr had worn during a party on board the presidential yacht just prior to his father’s downfall. The interviewee stated that often Marcos Jr is depicted as an innocent bystander during his father’s rule, and so the red bow tie was intended to serve as a reminder of ‘how callous his family was and that they partied lavishly while they plundered the Filipino people who were starving in the 80s’. The interviewee described how they brought the meme into ‘the open’, as the group wore red bow ties and tailed the then Vice-Presidential candidate Marcos Jr when he visited Cebu City. Like the images of the People Power Monument, this meme was shared on social media, and functioned as a reminder ‘of their [the Marcos family] atrocities’.Footnote 106 Social media opens a space for such digital artefacts to be shared, creating a multimodal memoryscape in which a multitude of truths exist to both evidence and obfuscate the atrocities committed during the Martial Law period.
Conclusion
Despite the Marcos family’s attempts to diminish the significance of the People Power Revolution, the anniversary of the 25 February remains important, and crowds continue to gather at the People Power Monument on this date. However, it is the digitisation of the monument that seems particularly siginificant for many commemorative attendees as a means to reimagine and reconnect with the past. The taking of selfies enables attendees to position themselves alongside those depicted within the People Power Monument, which, as Feldman and Musih observed, underlines the significance of the body in bearing witness to the past.Footnote 107 Yet the incorporation of newspapers, objects and signs further personalises the images, producing unique digital testimonies that are used to both contest and uphold the current Marcos administration. Hirsch saw the photographic image as a means to mediate the past, and similarly the photographs of the People Power Monument are utlised to evidence the historical truths held by those that share them. The personalisation of the digital space around the People Power Monument also recalls Emde’s ‘polyphonic memoryscape’, in which multiple narratives and remembrances ‘fight for corrections’ to uphold their truth.Footnote 108
While the People Power Monument remains a meaningful touchstone for remembrance, other digital artefacts are equally important to commemoration and to contesting Marcos family rule. They too serve as evidence of the crimes and atrocities committed by the family. Yet it is also important to note the significance of physical and in-person commemoration and participatory events. For Commemorator 2 the meme needed to exist in ‘the open’ and many of the digital artefacts evidence the photographer’s in-person presence at the People Power Monument, or in the case of the Taiwan-based user, holding an image of the monument while at an in-person rally. Muzaini and Yeoh have referred to this as ‘locational emplacement’, which they define as the ‘meaningful experience[s]’ visitors gain from the ‘emotional resonance’ of a site ‘exactly or near where historical events took place’.Footnote 109 As one interviewee commented:
Even if you are far away from the monument itself, you still remember what [the People Power Monument] means, or what the EDSA commemoration or what Martial Law meant for the Philippines, and why we as much as possible try to advocate for awareness towards that and to also never forget.Footnote 110
