Disinformation and Elections in East and South East Asia: Digital Futures and Fragile Democracies

“A recent series of elections in Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines and indeed across Asia has highlighted the salience of digital media in political campaigns and insidious modes of electoral manipulation. This two-day workshop aims to gather evidence into the operations and impact of digital disinformation in the context of recent Asian elections.

The conference approaches Asia as a site in which disinformation in various digital and analog forms have not only deep local histories but also radical acceleration and innovation the likes of which have little to no precedent in advanced liberal democracies in the West. Many Asian countries lead in both scale and intensity of technological adoption and use while serving as “laboratories” for testing and experimentation by Big Tech firms, with minimal oversight and accountability to the potentially grave consequences of algorithmic tweaks, the dispersed labor of content moderation, and new platform rollouts. Thus we seek to develop a framework that examines the social and political ramifications of this process beyond the region.

The two-day event aims for interdisciplinary and collaborative approaches to thinking through issues of disinformation that draw from areas of sociology, politics, media and communication studies, journalism studies, critical legal studies, information science, and anthropology.”