American lawyer Thomas Jones still recalls the scars of Filipino torture victims he interviewed for Amnesty International in the country’s detention centers in 1975 during the rule of the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos.

But Marcos, who oversaw widespread abuse and corruption during his 20-year tenure, denied the lawyer’s visit to the Philippines ever took place.

Decades later, the dictator’s claim – debunked by AFP and others – has resurfaced on social media sites popular with Filipinos.

Amnesty estimates that thousands were killed and tens of thousands tortured and imprisoned after Marcos declared martial law on September 21, 1972.

Under a law signed by former President Benigno Aquino in 2013, 11,103 victims of torture, killing, enforced disappearance and other ill-treatment were officially recognized and compensated.

Ahead of the 50th anniversary of the start of Martial Law on Wednesday, pro-Marcos posts have flooded Facebook and TikTok with false and misleading claims questioning Amnesty’s findings and downplaying the abuses.

AFP fact-checked several posts that included footage of Marcos reaching out to US media in 1982.

Marcos – father of current Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., who has defended martial law – accused Amnesty of relying on “hearsay” for its findings. And he falsely claimed the rights group “never” visited the country.

The clip resurfaced on TikTok in March after an anti-Marcos Senate candidate running in the May 9 election cited Amnesty for figures showing the horrors of martial law.

“Amnesty International (said) 3,257 were killed during the time of Marcos, 35,000 were tortured … 70,000 were imprisoned. It’s a record thing,” Luke Espiritu said in a debate.

Within hours of this livestream event, the Marcos footage was merged with the Espiritu video and shared on TikTok and Facebook.

It received more than 900,000 views, according to analysis by AFP’s Fact Check team.

One post drew more than 3,000 comments questioning Amnesty’s figures and describing the dictator as “a great leader destroyed by black propaganda”.

Jones said Marcos lied about the Amnesty visit and abuses of martial law, and decades later Filipinos were deceived by his son.

“People in the Philippines, they still don’t know the facts,” the 81-year-old told AFP from his home in Wisconsin.

Jones and a colleague interviewed Marcos, members of his cabinet and 107 inmates during their visit.

Marcos admitted that about 50,000 people had been arrested during the early years of martial law, while 71 inmates told them they had been tortured, Jones said.

Amnesty published their findings in 1976, concluding that “torture was used freely and with the utmost cruelty, often for long periods of time”.

The Marcos government denied that torture was “widespread” and said Amnesty’s report was “false, biased and unfounded”.

Josefina Forcadilla, 66, one of the detainees mentioned in the Amnesty report, recalls being interviewed by Jones and his colleague while in detention.

“I was initially hesitant to speak to them until they said they wanted to document what my family was going through at the time,” she told AFP.

Forcadilla was 17 when police searched her home in April 1973 looking for her older brother.

She said an officer slapped her ears, fondled her breasts and played Russian roulette with a gun while interrogating her about his whereabouts.

“I was in shock. I couldn’t cry. That’s when I knew her purpose was really to kill,” she said.

She and three other siblings were eventually arrested.

Her older sister was attacked and died in custody, while her brother was tortured and another sister gave birth in prison.

“My family can’t help but ask, ‘Why do Filipinos have short memories?'” she said.

In 1981, Amnesty returned to the Philippines to document human rights abuses since 1976.

In a 2018 statement, Amnesty said: “From 1972 to 1981, around 70,000 people were imprisoned and 34,000 tortured; over 3,200 people were killed.”

Marcos was ousted from power in 1986.

Rachel Chhoa-Howard, Amnesty Southeast Asia researcher, defended the human rights group’s estimates, saying they were “based on our own field missions and documentation in the 1980s and compared to other research of the time.”

But she said the true extent of the abuses may never be known “given the immense and pervasive violations during this time”.

Yet the truth of what is known is itself under attack.

Filipinos, concerned that martial law violence will be whitewashed or erased by the new Marcos government, have digitized books, films and articles documenting the brutality.

One group is Project Gunita, which is sifting through old newspaper and magazine accounts and posting them on social media to educate users who have been swayed by pro-Marcos misinformation.

“There’s no point in having our Google drives, there’s no point in having this database of information if it doesn’t get to the people who need to read it,” said co-founder Sarah Gomez.

Joel Ariate, a member of the University of the Philippines’ Marcos Regime Research Group, said denying Marcos’ atrocities “has become like a blood sport online.”

He said the key to combating misinformation about martial law is to repeat the truth “as much as the lies.”

Marcos Jr., who earlier this year said he hadn’t seen Amnesty’s numbers and didn’t know how they were generated, admitted last week that there had been “abuses” under martial law “like in any war.”

But martial law was “necessary” to defend the country against communist and Muslim uprisings, he told a local celebrity talk show host.

Carmelo Crisanto of the Memorial Commission for Victims of Human Rights Abuses, an independent government agency, said in August the actual number of victims could be much higher than the official figure.

“Many people on the fringes of our society — Muslims, farmers, fishermen — haven’t even heard that there is a process for filing claims,” ??Crisanto said.

“So the effects of the regime might have touched them, but they are not recorded.”