[DECODED] 2016 nostalgia and the internet’s selective memory

2026-01-28 - 10:11

How do you remember 2016? I have seen multiple posts on my feed reminiscing about it in the past weeks. Some even call it “the last good year” — a nostalgic idea of a past seen as simpler, more organic, and, well, fun. I checked Google Trends (Philippines) and saw that searches for “2016” did spike in January this year, peaking on January 16. I remember 2016 quite differently. It was the year that large-scale propaganda and narrative wars started unfolding on social media. It was also when Rappler CEO and The Nerve Head of Global Strategy, Maria Ressa, started sounding the alarms on the role of Big Tech algorithms in eroding democracy. It has been 10 years since, and not only do the struggles remain — they are now unfortunately exacerbated by a new technological force: artificial intelligence. So, no, I don’t think 2016 was the “last good year.” Based on everything that The Nerve and Rappler have documented in the last decade, I see 2016 as the start of information integrity collapse. In the Philippines, 2016 was the year Rodrigo Duterte took office. It didn’t have a name then, but what followed would later be recognized as “coordinated inauthentic behavior,” or the organized use of fake and manipulated online activity to shape public opinion. Although it would only be fully exposed years later, 2016 was also the year Cambridge Analytica’s methods were deployed in political campaigns, most notably in the US. Whistle-blower Christopher Wylie would later describe the Philippines as the firm’s “petri dish,” or one of the earliest sites of what would become a global experiment in algorithmic political persuasion. In the US, 2016 was the year that Donald Trump was first elected as president. He returned to office in 2024, to an already broken information ecosystem. The Nerve published a report in October 2024 discussing this in detail, from the narrative manipulation, information cascades, and disinformation networks during the 2024 election cycle. Last week, we released another report on the anniversary of Trump’s second term, this time analyzing the weaponization of executive power, digital media, and political mobilization. DOWNLOAD THE REPORT HERE “We publish this retrospective to name the dynamics that brought us to where we are today. We did this research not to take a partisan position, but to expose the forces shaping our collective reality. Having lived through the collapse of an information ecosystem before, we know that understanding the mechanism is the first step to resisting it,” Maria wrote in the preface of our latest report. Elsewhere, 2016 was also a political turning point. In the United Kingdom, the Brexit referendum resulted in a vote to leave the European Union. In an earlier report published in July 2025, we examined how anti-immigrant narratives continued to circulate and intensify in the years that followed, and how a long-running anti-immigrant campaign helped fuel the Southport riot in 2024. DOWNLOAD THE REPORT HERE If anything, I think that the best thing we can take from this 2016 nostalgia becoming popular on social media today is the reminder that there are still a lot of things broken in a world that has become increasingly polarized. Many of the problems we faced in 2016 are still unresolved, and some of them appear to be repeating themselves, only in different places: On January 24, US immigration agents killed a US citizen in Minneapolis, with the Trump administration insisting that the victim fought back. This is reminiscent of the “nanlaban” narrative that the Duterte administration peddled back in 2016, aided and amplified by unchecked social media dynamics. So, if you ask me what I miss the most from a decade ago? It might just be a well-functioning democracy and a world where Big Tech was not yet so emboldened to push the boundaries of what it could get away with. – Rappler.com The Nerve is a data forensics company that enables changemakers to navigate real-world trends and issues through narrative and network investigations. Taking the best of human and machine, we enable partners to unlock powerful insights that shape informed decisions. Composed of a team of data scientists, strategists, award-winning storytellers, and designers, the company is on a mission to deliver data with real-world impact.