EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

• •Indonesia is the most populous Muslim country in the world, with 87.18 per cent of its 260 million population embracing the Islamic faith. However, Indonesia is neither an Islamic state nor a secular one. It adopts Pancasila as the state ideology but has a Ministry of Religious Affairs (MORA) overseeing six official religions.

• •MORA has its genesis in Dutch colonial rule (1602–1942). It was strengthened during the Japanese occupation (1942–45) and then sustained by the post-independence Indonesian government (after 1945). The decision to keep MORA was to compensate those who had aspired for the enactment of the Jakarta Charter in the era of Sukarno but failed.

• •MORA has always been the arena for contestation betweenthe traditionalist Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) and the modernist Muhammadiyah. Both organizations eye not only the minister post, or leadership positions in the bureaucracy, but also lower ranking positions.

• •This article examines how MORA has been managed under President Joko Widodo (Jokowi) from 2014 till the present. It highlights similarities and differences in Jokowi's control of the influential ministry compared to his predecessors. In 2014, even though Jokowi was elected on a reform agenda, he left MORA untouched.

• •After the 2019 election, Jokowi appointed Fachrul Razi, a retired general as Minister of Religious Affairs, departing from past practices of naming a religious scholar (ulama) or a religiously trained person (santri) to that position. This demonstrates a wish on the part of the President to shake up the ministry and to exert control over the institution. This decision, however, has alienated core supporters in NU who helped him get re-elected in 2019.

Singapore, an island city-state with a population of 5.6 million, reports some of the highest percentage of social media users in Southeast Asia. According to a report on digital users by We Are Social (Kemp 2020), 88 per cent of Singaporeans are online and 79 per cent are active on social media. With fast internet speeds, a highly educated population and a burgeoning digital economy, Singapore's socio-political landscape is really like no other in the Southeast Asian region. While other countries are characterized by highly diverse national versus regional dynamics, structures and institutions, Singapore's one-party led city-state allows for a far more controlled and top-down approach to shaping social media discourse. Singapore's place as a geopolitical powerhouse too is a factor; not just in the region and as a key member of ASEAN, but in terms of its strong relationship with larger powers like China and the United States. This international outlook is especially important for Singapore, which has significant and important diplomatic ties with other countries and a large English-speaking population. Big tech companies like Facebook and Google maintain their large and growing Southeast Asian offices in Singapore, and numerous international dignitaries, academic and business conferences and delegations flow through Singapore which debate the nature of social media discourse and disinformation. To give one example, in 2020 Reuters and Facebook announced an Asia-wide media verification programme and Third- Party Fact-Checking Program based in Singapore, focusing on English language content (Reuters 2020).

Nevertheless, the local context remains key to understanding how social media discourse has evolved in Singapore. This chapter will analyse how key events in Singapore's socio-political history shaped the use of social media for civic and political engagement. In the context of Singapore, events that have engaged citizens on a massive scale in terms of civic and political engagements have been elections. For this reason, the analysis undertaken in this chapter is through the lens of elections in shaping how social media has been used in the country. This chapter argues that the internet, largely through bloggers, was originally a burgeoning tool for alternative news and views in Singapore. It was in this context that social media was adopted.

Disinformation production has become a prominent fixture in recent electoral campaigns in Indonesia, leading to fears of “divisive” political discourse that affect not only online debates, but also have real-life consequences for violence (Heriyanto 2019). Social media platforms are often blamed both for the spread of disinformation and for “polarizing” the nation. This article argues that social media disinformation is an extension of the expanding political campaign industry, whose significance increased, and is being used by political elites to maintain their power. The rise of disinformation via social media is new, but is part of a long history of engineering consent and manipulation by elite political and economy forces in the country.

My research in Indonesia has shown that the production of disinformation via social media campaign teams could be observed since as early as the 2012 Jakarta gubernatorial election, an election which saw the victory for Joko Widodo (hereafter Jokowi), who would become Indonesia's president two years later. The 2012 election witnessed for the first time the extensive and professional use of social media campaigning, although much of this activity went unnoticed by scholars and the mainstream media. The industry continued to develop in the 2014 Indonesian presidential election, grew substantially in the 2017 Jakarta gubernatorial election, and grew even more in the 2019 presidential election. During these elections, social media was increasingly used for disinformation production, pitting supporters of candidates against each other. It was driven by the emergence of increasing campaign funds directed towards social media management, production and manipulation of social media discourse.

This chapter will examine the political-economic context which allowed for the growth of disinformation production in Indonesia. It will begin by examining the early use of social media campaigning, examine a “tipping point”, and identify the growing players behind the disinformation production in the social media sphere. In doing so, it highlights a Gramscian argument that the power holders control the masses (particularly in democracy) through committing repression but also by gaining their consent.

EARLY USE OF SOCIAL MEDIA IN INDONESIA

Social media engagement in Indonesia began positively for reformists, and was largely seen as activities considered to be supportive of democracy.

Malaysia's adoption of disinformation was part of a gradual response by the Barisan Nasional (BN) government to an online space perceived to be dominated by pro-opposition forces. The ruling Barisan Nasional coalition—and by extension, the state—adopted social media as part of its communication strategy in the late 2000s. But it realized that those efforts were not sufficient to win over online sentiment in what was considered the “opposition's playground” (Leong 2019). This turn to disinformation was most evident in the 2013 General Election (GE13) campaign. In the previous general election of 2008, the pervasiveness of new communication technologies, such as online news sites and blogs, was credited as having contributed to Barisan Nasional's loss of its two-thirds majority in Parliament, only the second time this had occurred since the country gained independence in 1957 (Hah 2012; Ndoma and Tumin 2011). As GE13 approached, Barisan Nasional feared similar results, and was fending off strong sentiments of distrust at the establishment pushed by the Bersih social movement calling for free and fair elections.

The wave of anti-Barisan Nasional sentiment among many urban, Peninsula social media users, alongside years of efforts by opposition parties and civil society groups to target the ruling coalition on internet platforms, led to more concerted measures from the state, including turning to disinformation practices (Ding, Koh and Surin 2013; Johns and Cheong 2019; Muhamad 2015). The BN state thus increasingly tried to control the flow of information and communicative practices on the internet, including tightening up media regulation and introduction of new laws, surveillance and threats, and censorship. Furthermore, this period saw the establishment of government-linked “cybertroopers” to counter opposition sentiment. Despite the emergence of cybertroopers, the anti-Barisan Nasional sentiment on social media continued towards the end of the 2010s, amplified by the domestic and international accusation of corruption associated with Prime Minister Najib Razak. At the next general election in 2018 (GE14), Barisan Nasional would lose power for the first time in the nation's history.

Barisan Nasional's disinformation campaigns could not hold up against two decades of the “opposition playground”, bucking the trend in the Southeast Asian region where many elite ruling regimes have remained firmly in power.

A sharp rise in the use of new technologies and social media in Southeast Asia has triggered a debate about the possible effects on the political architecture in the region. Is social media leading to increased political participation? Can social media boost democratization in authoritarian states in Southeast Asia? How are Facebook, YouTube and Twitter changing political communication? This chapter uses Southeast Asia as a laboratory to test certain hypothesis of the impact of social media on democratization and authoritarian resilience. While social media were seen as instruments of liberation a decade ago, they are today considered a major threat to democracy and human freedom (Diamond 2019). Digital media are regarded as providing fertile ground for the rise of authoritarian strongmen and right-wing groups, accelerating and deepening the current wave of autocratization. Autocratization is used here as an umbrella term to cover the diverse processes of democratic backsliding (which means the loss of democratic quality in a democracy), the breakdown of an existing democracy and the worsening conditions in electoral authoritarian regimes. In electoral authoritarian regimes elections are not competitive and fair and incumbents often use various strategies of manipulation to stay in power.

In this chapter I argue that authoritarian regimes in Southeast Asia have adapted to new technologies and are increasingly using social media and the internet for their own ends. They have enhanced censorship and online repression and are employing the internet to co-opt certain social groups, repress critics and legitimize their rule. The young democracies in the region are unstable and weakly institutionalized. Social media is furthering polarization and distrust in Southeast Asian societies, often based on disinformation campaigns and growing sectarianism. Here, elections have become virtual battlegrounds between contestants and internet and social media are actively used to misinform and intimidate.

The chapter is structured as follows: first, I compare political developments in Southeast Asia with global developments. I show that the region has not experienced a region-wide wave of democratization seen elsewhere and authoritarian regimes are more or less resilient towards political change. I then briefly discuss causes of democratic instability and authoritarian resilience in Southeast Asia. In the last chapter I discuss the effects of digital media for authoritarian resilience and democratic backsliding and identify the main mechanisms how social media is influencing regime developments.

Social media entered Myanmar during its most monumental political transition from decades-long and repressive military dictatorship to a burgeoning electoral democracy. During this seismic political shift, Myanmar has been plagued by optimism for a more open and wealthier society coupled with fear of uncertainties that naturally accompany any significant societal and political change. Social media has become the arena where such tension plays out in the most toxic way: it gives rise to nationalist right-wing activism, polarization and disinformation that accompanied offline communal violence with devastating results. Despite the initial high hopes that the expansion of internet and social media connectivity would positively contribute to the country's democratic transition, today Myanmar is the site of one of the world's worst humanitarian crises—dubbed the world's first “Facebook genocide”—as more than 700,000 Rohingya minorities have been displaced and thousands feared dead (Mozur 2018). Facebook was forced to admit it failed to stop the use of its platform to perpetuate hate speech and violence in Myanmar, particularly against the Rohingyas (Hatmaker 2018).

Yet there was initial hope among activists and opposition groups in the late 2000s that social media could be a force for progressive change. Many of the pro-democracy networks and civil society groups were established overseas, particularly in neighbouring Thailand, and had access to internet and social media long before it became widely available in Myanmar. They understood firsthand the power of digital media in facilitating social and political change—they had used these tools to help facilitate the “Saffron Revolution” in 2007. The “revolution” was sparked by a YouTube video of the former leader General Than Shwe's daughter's lavish wedding, among other factors.

As internet access expanded, social media became a space of toxicity rather than civility as the right-wing nationalist voices became influential, subverting much of the critical, more progressive voices. What makes Myanmar so vulnerable to online falsehoods and hate speech? Entrenched political polarization and systemic state violence against the Rohingya minorities may have provided structural conditions that facilitate communal violence. I argue in this chapter that social media has become a readily available tool for mobilization of radical voices in Myanmar partly because there was little state intervention to stymie such radicalization, and partly because the nascent activist groups that emerged online were deeply divided over the issue.

“Patient zero” was how Facebook executive Katie Harbath (2018) described the Philippines in a public talk in Germany, on the topic of “protecting electoral integrity on Facebook”. “That was the beginning”, she argued, referring to the election of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte in a country that prided itself to be one of Asia's oldest democracies. “A month later it was Brexit, and then Trump got the nomination, and then the US elections”, she added. Describing the Philippines as “patient zero” both illuminates and obscures the role of digital technologies in shaping democratic politics. It is illuminating insofar as it exposes the pathologies associated to strategies of digital campaigning that brought illiberal strongmen to power. In 2016, journalists, academics, civil society groups and even the Roman Catholic Church of the Philippines called out the toxic incivility and proliferation of fake news on Facebook. The Philippines’ Commission on Human Rights was alarmed with the growing extent of cyberbullying and harassment of citizens who posted critical views of President Duterte on social media. Female journalists were often targeted, particularly those who published unsavoury reports about the Duterte campaign (Rodriguez 2016). Meanwhile, 81 per cent of Filipinos reported having read fake news on social media according to a recent national survey (Pulse Asia Research Inc. 2018). These trends have led to international headlines about Duterte's “paid trolls” or “keyboard armies” who spread disinformation and amplify hate speech (Palatino 2017; Syjuco 2017; Williams 2017). For Rappler founder and CEO Maria Ressa (2016)—Time Magazine's Person of the Year for her work on press freedom—the “weaponization” of social media spells the death of democracy in the Philippines. The contagion of fake news and hate speech resulted in a series of proposed “cures” of patient zero. These include fact checking, promoting digital literacy, and anti-fake news laws.

The spread of digital disinformation is indeed a pathology that compromises the integrity of democratic politics. However, describing the Philippines as “patient zero” obscures the longer history of inequalities in economic and political power that created conditions for the proliferation of digital disinformation.

When the Hanoi city administration announced a plan to cut some 6,700 trees from the city's boulevards in 2015, the authorities did not anticipate it would trigger a large-scale grassroots movement online. A Facebook page “6,700 people for 6,700 trees” quickly gathered more than 55,000 likes. Protests in the capital city subsequently ensued as civil society groups and ordinary citizens hit the streets. Within days, the central government immediately halted the plan to cut the trees, and launched a further investigation. In a one-party Communist state like Vietnam, whose regime has a tight grip on traditional media and criticism of the government is largely repressed and frequently punished, that an online movement could trigger a widespread backlash and force authorities to scrap its plan was extraordinary. As one of the most repressive regimes in the world, grassroots online activism was rising in Vietnam and a more politically engaged citizenry seemed to be an inevitable result.

Elsewhere in Southeast Asia, social media's positive impact on promoting grassroots issues seemed similar. In Indonesia, Joko Widodo was elected as president in 2014 partly through a powerful social media presence as a “new” kind of grassroots-driven politician, supported by much of Indonesia's civil society and pro-democracy activists. In Malaysia, the Bersih “Clean Elections” movement used social media to coalesce reformists, and enabled mass street protests against a corrupt semi-authoritarian regime. In Myanmar, one of Southeast Asia's most conservative societies, LGBT communities flourished on Facebook when Colours Rainbow Yangon was established to advocate for gay rights. Even in Thailand, reformists were making important gains. The Thai government planned to consolidate internet traffic through the creation of a single gateway, causing internet rights and media civil society groups to fight back. Internet advocacy groups created online petitions on change.org that elicited more than 500,000 signatures and heated conversations across a number of Thai web board communities.

This chapter chronicles the evolution of social media in Cambodia from its inception as a relatively unfettered platform for social interaction, to becoming an emergent venue for political participation, and finally to its role in the suppression of political opposition. In so doing, it is argued that social media enables simultaneously bottom-up, expressive civic activism and top-down, proactive exercise of political domination by the ruling party, the Cambodian People's Party (CPP).

Cambodians had reasons to be optimistic when the internet and social media arrived in the late 2000s. Despite a long history of restrictions on traditional media, there was no indication early on that the Cambodian government would seek to curtail freedom in cyberspace. Indeed, up until 2014, internet censorship did not go beyond restricting sexually explicit materials online and blocking of only a few anti-government websites (Freedom House 2009). Entrepreneurs, activists and journalists alike were excited by the economic, social and political transformations these information and communication technologies (ICT) could bring. Social media and the internet were seen to have provided a relatively free space for ordinary Cambodians to exchange information, interact and share viewpoints—all of which could strengthen social capital and increase political efficacy. The level of freedom found online was so unprecedented in comparison to other media outlets that some activists placed high hopes it could usher in the era of “digital democracy” in Cambodia (Chak 2009). The early optimism of the democratizing power of the internet lived on for several years, thanks to a slow expansion of internet connectivity and a low ICT adoption rate, which had kept the cyberspace relatively free of government interventions. Internet enthusiasts were so optimistic about the digital future that the first “internet party”—the Chatter Party—was founded as early as in 2006 through networks of bloggers and web service provider associations (Bun 2006). A small Cambodian blogosphere was emerging with some bloggers even sharing critical views of the government freely online. With half of its population under the age of twenty-five and a high rate of mobile subscriptions, Cambodia was poised for the digital disruptions that could spawn social and political change.

Yet Cambodia's cyberspace today quickly became more repressive (Freedom House 2019). The consecutive decline in internet freedom is a recent development, but one that is in line with existing patterns of traditional media controls.

In December 2019, two events related to disinformation received polaropposite responses from the Thai government. The Constitutional Court announced it would rule on a sedition complaint that accused the Future Forward, the second biggest opposition party, of its linkage with the Illuminati who conspires to overthrow the monarchy. Drawn on online hearsay, the petitioner claimed that the Future Forward's upside down triangle-shaped logo was supposedly the evidence for this vile conspiracy (Sivasomboon 2019). In parallel, online disinformation regarding the government's 40 per cent tax hike for female tampons sparked nationwide outrage within hours. The government and its Anti-Fake News Centre immediately threatened to file a lawsuit against the purveyor of disinformation (Bangkokbiznews 2019). These two events illustrate the politics of handling disinformation in Thailand. Future Forward's connection with the Illuminati is virtually baseless and even absurd in view of some staunch conservatives (Weerawan 2019). But the politically-motivated Constitutional Court proceeded with the case that could have resulted in dissolving Future Forward (Macan-Markar 2020a). In contrast, ruling elites swiftly dealt with what it viewed as false information to destabilize the government.

These events reflect a current development of internet-state-society relations that are shaped by protracted political conflicts. In the early stage of internet accessibility, Thailand's cyberspace was relatively open. But as Thai politics has become embroiled in protracted and divisive crises between the pro-establishment and anti-establishment forces, the internet became the site of mobilization for both camps. The establishment moved to curb growing cyber defiance, setting in motion the widespread of repressive policies that plunge Thailand deeper into autocracy. On the other hand, the anti-establishment sees the internet, and social media in particular, as a site of collective resistance to the establishment.

In this chapter, I examine how policies are framed and implemented to address what ruling elites consider the threat of disinformation. I argue that Thailand has taken on the securitization approach to disinformation. Securitization removes what is supposed to be a political matter from the normal political domain into the security sphere. Once an issue is labelled as a “security concern”, the process of policy-making and implementation can evade political deliberations (Wæver 1995).

Commentators often equate Vietnam's internet freedom as similar to China. Indeed, the West regularly includes Vietnam on its “state enemies of the internet” list, as it does for China, Iran, or Syria (Deutsche Welle 2013). There is some truth to the concerns of Vietnam looking towards China as a model, given how ideologically, politically and economically aligned Hanoi is with Beijing. Vietnam is embracing Chinese hardware and packages of security software to increase its technical and infrastructural capabilities for information controls (Sherman 2019). A prominent example to justify this observation is Vietnam's passage and enforcement of the 2018 Cyber-Security Law, which bears striking resemblances to a similar Chinese law (Trinh Huu Long 2017) which gives the government carte blanche to strictly police the internet, scrutinize personal information, censor online discussion, and punish or even jail dissidents.

While Vietnam sees China as a potential example to follow, I argue in this chapter that due to political, economic and technical reasons, Vietnam has only selectively taken a page out of the Chinese playbook in online censorship. Even in an authoritarian state like Vietnam, some measure of popular support is crucial to a regime's longevity, forcing the authorities to occasionally appear responsive, not just repressive, to public sentiment online. Vietnamese internet users, well aware of this grey area, have capitalized on the power of social media to successfully sway the political decision-making process for the public's sake. The 2014–15 period marked the beginning of digital activism in Vietnam that resulted in rare victories for the environment in a country where natural conservation is often dwarfed by economic development. This momentum has enabled social media users to continue testing the waters of what is allowed and not allowed within Vietnam's online sphere.

Unlike China, Vietnam's popular social media platforms are foreignowned, making it more difficult for the state to exert the kind of controls and restrictions its Chinese counterpart could on their homegrown social media. In an unlikely move, Vietnamese authorities have also shown signs of tolerating, embracing or even co-opting social media, chiefly Facebook, to deploy their disinformation campaigns.

INTRODUCTION

The watershed 14th general election in Malaysia resulted in the incumbent dominant Barisan Nasional (BN) falling for the first time in the country's history and power being taken over by the opposition coalition Pakatan Harapan (PH). Interestingly, the effects of this turn of events on state governments were direct: PH now controlled seven states, up from two states, BN-controlled states fell from ten to two, and PAS retained power in Kelantan and also regained the neighbouring East Coast state of Terengganu.

Although the PH lasted less than two years in power before political events at the end of February 2020 saw the Perikatan Nasional (PN) taking over on 1 March 2020, the short twenty-one-month period is worth studying more closely. This piece focuses on the relationship between the federal and state governments during that period by first examining the historical background, then moving to the commitments made in the PH manifesto, studying the new structures that the PH set up, and finally analysing how development and financial negotiations played out, seen through the lens of federally aligned state governments as well as opposition-led ones.

PH came to power on the back of a 203-page election manifesto. However, the coalition itself was made up of different parties with varying backgrounds and interests. PPBM in particular was an outlier: it was the newest party in the fold, and had no history of coalition governance with its partners. The other three parties, namely, Parti Keadilan Rakyat (PKR), Democratic Action Party (DAP) and Parti Amanah Negara (Amanah), had been doing exactly that for a decade in governing Selangor and Penang in the face of resistance from both UMNO and PAS.

The PH administration chose to retain existing institutions. This created duplication of functions and helped it to bypass opposition state governments. At the same time, it responded to the rising wave of devolutionary demands by setting up new institutions and mechanisms, which benefited both PH- and BN-run states. Ultimately, political expedience and power maintenance prevailed—in order to contain BN, and later Muafakat Nasional (MN), as well as to appease internal expectations of rewards through patronage and positions. These collectively left PH with a mixed record in federalism-related reforms, not least in providing equal constituency development funds (CDFs) to all members of parliament (MPs).

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

• •On 9 May 2018, Malaysia's Barisan Nasional (BN) government lost the country's 14th general election (GE14). Replacing it was the Pakatan Harapan (PH) coalition, made up of four parties, three of which had had experience cooperating with each other for a decade, namely Parti Keadilan Rakyat (PKR), the Democratic Action Party (DAP) and Parti Amanah Negara (Amanah). The fourth was the new Parti Pribumi Bersatu Malaysia (PPBM) led by Dr Mahathir Mohamad.

• •The election also saw equally significant changes at the state government level. PH now controlled seven states in total, up from two, while BN went from controlling ten states to retaining but two. PAS regained Terengganu and with its control over Kelantan now held the two East Coast states. The Sabah state government, held by Parti Warisan Sabah (Warisan) aligned itself with PH, while the Sarawak state government chose to stick with BN.

• •As many as ten of the sixty promises listed in the PH 2018 election manifesto related to federalism and Sabah and Sarawak, an indication of the growing importance of these two states (and of state issues more generally).

• •The PH administration's two significant set-ups were the Special Select Committee on States and Federal Relations and theSpecial Cabinet Committee on the Malaysia Agreement 1963(MA63). Serious attempts were made to address concerns byboth committees, with achievements being more visible in the Special Cabinet Committee on MA63, possibly due to the greater attention given on Sabah and Sarawak. Issues brought up within the Parliamentary Special Select Committee were not substantively addressed.

• • PH's time in power saw how states aligned to it maintained a smooth working relationship with the federal government. What was more interesting to note was that even non-PH aligned states such as Kelantan, Terengganu and Perlis also received favourable attention from the federal government.

• • Federal-state relations were much more aggressively tackled under the PH government than under any other preceding administration.