Justifying Digital Repression via “Fighting Fake News”: A Study of Four Southeast Asian Autocracies

INTRODUCTIONIn mainland Southeast Asia, the governments of Cambodia, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam have been using the pretext of curbing “fake news” to control digital space. The phenomenon of “fake news” gained international traction in light of, among other things, the 2016 US elections and Brexit, in which false online information contributed to the rise of hate speech and extremism, political divides and the eroding of democracy. While these concerns are legitimate and have led to the implementation of various regulatory measures and content moderation policies, political leaders, especially autocratic ones, have found it useful to make policy responses to “fake news” as a means to stifle critics. This weaponizing of “fake news” allegations has served to tighten the regimes’ grip on information to the detriment of a healthy information environment.In this article, we show how the regimes in Cambodia, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam have used vague definitions of “fake news” to justify diverse practices to suppress digital space. We focus on these four countries because their regime types are characteristically autocratic and have a propensity to intensify digital repression. According to the Varieties of Democracy Institute (V-Dem), Cambodia is an electoral autocracy, while Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam are identified as closed autocracies. Civil liberties in these four countries are severely constricted, all ranked by Freedom House as “not free”. As we shall see, these autocracies have employed diverse methods to narrow digital space. We highlight the governments’ increasing use of a “fake news” label to foster four main repressive tactics: legal persecution of users and platforms, content restriction, surveillance, and Internet shutdowns. Across the four autocracies studied, we observed at least four methods in which governments rely on the claim to curtail “fake news” to justify digital repression. First, in all four cases, the government uses the “fake news” claim to charge in court Internet users who have been critics of the regimes. Second, at least in Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam, the “fake news” threat provides a pretext for compelling Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and social media platforms to block and take down content unfavourable to these governments.