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Fake news has been recognised as a pressing issue by scholars, who have highlighted the destabilising impact it portends in societies. Beyond an understanding of the empirical effects of fake news on democratic institutions that recent scholarship has shed light on, emergent research also points to the potential of fake news being weaponised as a discursive tool to achieve political ends. In that light, this study sets out to analyse the discourses of fake news as advanced by states. Results from a critical discourse analysis of articles relating to fake news ( n = 450) from four countries – Cambodia, Malaysia, Singapore and Vietnam – reveal four key findings: first, fake news is being framed as an existential security issue that directly threatens foundational societal values. Second, fake news as an issue is constructed as a new and unprecedented contemporary problem, and compared on equal terms to other security threats such as terrorism, chemical attacks and cyberwarfare. Third, the threat of fake news is used to justify the passing of broad-reaching legislation and curbs on free speech that are construed as aligned with global democratic norms. Lastly, the term is used to facilitate unsubstantiated ‘lying press’ accusations against media outlets. Overall, this study suggests that fake news can be damaging to the quality of democracies not only as a result of its dissemination, but also through the discursive instrumentalisation of the term to curb civil liberties and justify crackdowns.

This article sets out to explain national variation in the governance of fake news; it asks, under what conditions would governments pursue securitization in order to address the threat of fake news? Through a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis of 24 countries in Asia-Pacific, this article explores multicausal explanations behind why some countries have moved to securitize fake news—framing it as an existential threat and justifying the passing of laws that curtail civil liberties—while others do not. The analysis yields two main findings. First, although prevailing political arguments emphasize the threat of fake news to society and national security as justification for the securitization of fake news, this condition is neither necessary nor sufficient in causally accounting for the decision to crackdown on fake news. Conversely, crackdowns on fake news occur more frequently in countries less affected by fake news. Second, the analysis provides a set of two distinct, theoretically and empirically relevant causal pathways explaining the decision to crack down on fake news; the first pathway shows how non-democratic states without media freedom and which are relatively less affected by fake news instrumentalize the issue to restrict freedom of speech further; the second pathway shows how non-democratic states experiencing economic growth and political turbulence with proximate elections attempt to restrict freedom of speech. The findings suggest that implementations of broad legislation may not be an optimal approach, given that they appear to be more motivated by political circumstances than by the objective resolution of the problem.

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The Chinese government is fond of invoking the ‘hurt feelings of 1.4 billion Chinese citizens’ to protest foreign actions and policies. However, this rhetoric might be nothing more than propaganda and attempts to leverage nationalist sentiment. How much do citizens in China actually care about issues completely unrelated to their daily livelihoods? To answer this, the study employs a representative survey to investigate the extent to which rhetoric about ‘hurt feelings’ is consistent with public opinion on four contemporary socio-political disputes involving the NBA, Marriott International, Mercedes-Benz and the city of Prague. Across the scenarios, we found that the Chinese government did not exaggerate the displeasure of audiences—citizens are aware of the cases, were indeed upset by them and advocated for retaliatory measures that were surprisingly more forceful than those adopted in reality. These emotions were largely driven by nationalistic sentiment rather than personal experiences or encounters, suggesting the success of state propaganda in steering the public opinion toward outcomes favourable to the state. These findings support recent studies highlighting the peculiar case of rising nationalism in China, and have important implications for the impact of public opinion on Chinese policymaking.

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The events of Arab Spring that swept across the Middle East have altered the face of domestic politics within Arab states, spurring a rise in Shia/ Sunni sectarianism across the region. Yet, to view sectarianism as an inevitable outcome ignores the fact that both factions have lived together peacefully in the past. This article employs securitisation to interrogate the construction of Shi'ism as a societal threat in Saudi Arabia. It addresses two questions: first, what empirical insight can the framework provide regarding the religious securitisation of Shi'ism by Saudi Arabia? Next, what are the implications of the securitisation discourse on the Shi'a minority and the wider Saudi society? Theoretically, this article engages with contemporary debates concerning Eurocentric aspects of securitisation and the concept of religious securitisation. Empirically, it argues that the Saudi state has instrumentally securitised Shi'ism to curb the perceived threat from Iran. Crucially, it analyses how the securitisation discourse has justified institutionalised discrimination against the Shi'a minority, and shows how this has unleashed centrifugal trajectories that undermine societal stability. This has unfolded in an empirical cycle of violence, as Sunni citizens become normalised to violence against the Shi'a, spurring the minority to mount an increasingly violent campaign of resistance.