'F*#% News' Not Just A Western Problem

Although the US, Britain and the EU still tend to dominate news headlines, it's not just Donald Trump and half of Europe that's battling against the rapid spread of false information online. In countries like Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, and South Korea, disinformation and misinformation campaigns are equally prominent, and possibly even more problematic, exploiting often volatile political party fault lines. Campaigns of false information also tend to have more diverse or different iterations than we see in 'the West', which exposes one of the primary mechanisms of the spread false information: how it exploits social behaviours in order to propagate.

This short article published on the Poynter network gives a timely and interesting overview of events and issues surrounding false information in South and Southeast Asia, and highlights why it's becoming a growing concern. 

I'm going to add that I dislike the term 'f*#% news'. It's been militarised by politicians and governments, and been used so randomly, for so many types of information, that it has become almost simultaneously meaningless. This very weaponised-amorphousness is problematic in itself, where states are banning or disrupting what they term 'f*#% news', but without any clear or universally accepted definition of what that means. Although this article points out that several regimes in Asia are already doing this (arresting people for publishing misinformation), it doesn't overtly say if or why this is problematic. The appropriation of 'f*#% news' as a means of diluting media freedom is potentially a much larger global problem than the 'f*#% news' itself.