Illiberal responses to “fake news” in Southeast Asia

While both liberal and illiberal regimes have sought to respond to the issue of fake news, we know little about how the latter in particular respond to this development. It seems reasonable to expect that illiberal regimes may use the pretext of a fake news epidemic to clamp down on free speech, yet not all non-democratic states go down identical paths of digital censorship and repression. To explain this puzzle, I argue that the driving factor of an illiberal state’s response is the nature of its public sphere. I present a typology identifying the range and nature of fake news strategies, which classifies regime responses into two paths: an active regime response on the basis of confronting an anti-regime public sphere, or a passive regime response on the basis of encouraging the spread of pro-regime information among the public. At the end of both paths, the result is ultimately same: the forestalling of democratization. This typology is further explored using the cases of Singapore and the Philippines, to illuminate how the nature of the public sphere in each country determines the regime’s response to fake news.