Spotlight: Social Media in Southeast Asia Social Media and Politics in Southeast Asia Shobha Avadhani examines the complexities of social media as an instrument of politics in Southeast Asia. A novel technology whose political possibilities caught the world’s attention with the “Arab Spring” in 2010, social media has now become a default entity in the political landscape of many countries. Along the way, new complexities related to social media have been revealed. Western pundits like Clay Shirky applauded the democratising quality of social media, with its power to disrupt an authoritarian state’s control over mass media and to empower activists in the formation of transnational solidarities. Yet, critics like Evgeny Morozov pointed to the ways in which authoritarian regimes were able to use social media platforms to gain more power over their subjects. Certainly, social media has played a significant role in shaping the profound changes in the world’s political landscapes over the last decade. In Southeast Asian countries, where the tensions are less between absolute democracy and absolute authoritarianism and more between specific permutations of hybridity, social media may have further intensified that hybridity. Governance and social media According to The 2018 Global Digital Report by We are Social and Hootsuite, while average social media penetration in Southeast Asia is about 55%, it has been growing rapidly in the past few years and shows no signs 12 — ISSUE 5/2018 of slowing down. On the higher end of the spectrum, the rate of social media penetration is 95% in Brunei, 83% in Singapore and 75% in Malaysia. At the lower end, the penetration rate is 35% in Laos and 34% in Myanmar. Social media penetration rates are tied to rates of digital access, which are in turn linked to economic development, so these variations are not surprising. What is more significant is the way in which states in the region seek to manage increasing social media activity as part of governance, in the process moving between enabling digital access for economic development and controlling the parameters of that access for political purposes. This strategic response to the affordances of social media is best understood when viewed against the backdrop of the political hybridity of the region. According to the 2017 report by the Economist’s Intelligence Unit (EIU), the democratic spectrum of ASEAN member states ranges from “flawed democracy” to “authoritarian.” From the fact that countries with higher social media penetration rates do not necessarily rank higher in the EIU’s democracy index, it is clear that the presence of social media in the political landscape does not correlate with democratic development, and in fact can have an adverse effect as states increasingly regulate media spaces