As Western democracies debate social media regulation, Jonathan Corpus Ong outlines the valuable lessons they can draw from Southeast Asian experiences. Governments in the region have weaponized regulation and hijacked moral panics about disinformation to consolidate control over the digital environment. The challenge facing the world, he argues, is to build a more precise language of responsibility to tackle this multidimensional issue.
Jonathan Corpus Ong
Jonathan Corpus Ong is associate professor of global digital media at the University of Massachusetts - Amherst. His research on the shadowy political trolling industries in Southeast Asia uses ethnography to understand the identities and motivations of disinformation producers. Currently, he is Research Fellow at the Technology and Social Change Project at the Shorenstein Center, Harvard Kennedy School, which houses his current project on conspiracy theories in alternative spirituality online communities.