After years of digital growth in the double figures, Southeast Asia now features numbers comparable to leading global markets in internet penetration (58%), social media penetration (55%), and mobile connectivity (141%). At the same time, this new digital landscape means many in the region frequently come across (intentionally or otherwise) misleading news and claims. Rather than producing empowered citizens who respond by looking up verifiable facts and figures online, the access to almost unlimited information on our fingertips has exposed a widespread deficit in critical thinking and information literacy.
One familiar scene frequently unfolding in Southeast Asians’ virtual living room is what their WhatsApp chat groups and Facebook feed. A politician finds himself in a sticky situation. Perhaps the anticorruption commission is on his trail for some new graft case, perhaps his enemies are circulating a video documenting what he really thinks of some taboo subject. In response, someone will inevitably post a combustible commentary that seems to confirm, or even inflame, often ill-founded opinions, even if it may not be true. Without the time or ability to think things over, too many people in Southeast Asia fall victim to misinformation.
Unfortunately, this disorientation has begun to blight political life in Southeast Asia, as it has elsewhere around the world. In our first Spotlight article previously published by AsiaGlobal Online, Australian National University professor Ross Tapsell characterizes this new nexus as ‘post-trust’ politics. As mainstream media continues to struggle with bottom-line issues and challenges to its integrity, Southeast Asians increasingly turn to people they feel they could trust, those on social media. Tapsell also explores the ways the ubiquity of social media in Southeast Asia both corrodes and, interestingly, fortifies democracy.
In our second Spotlight article, The Irrawaddy news editor Kyaw Phyo Tha documents the process by which the Myanmar military tries to turn the country’s media into a tool of state propaganda. Faced with outside pressure on violence in Rakhine, a senior general uses appeals to national unity and stability to oblige the Myanmar press council to write “unbiased news with a constructive attitude.” That is an interesting interpretation of ‘unbiased’ reporting, as if Myanmar journalists did not already appreciate the need for “press freedom and the fact that a healthy media has to be independent.”
Such pressures will be familiar to other journalists around Southeast Asia, and as Tapsell warns, “flagrantly partisan political coverage in the mainstream media erode[s] the public’s trust in it.” On the other hand, the public must think carefully about where it gets its information from. If the public objects to the government’s influence on the media and the latter’s supine response, it must also be alert to other interests behind what information it comes across on social media. A public with a thirst for independent reporting is a friend of independent media.
