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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