“Greater mainstream media credibility and digital literacy are paramount. Independent organisations such as fact-checkers, investigative journalists, researchers and regulatory bodies who can expose what messages are spread and by whom online is crucial.” problem here is how those who receive such information might respond. Big data companies are being used to take advantage of this segregation and try to appeal to their interests, or exploit their fears and insecurities. Thus, what is more likely today is that a political party could run an unofficial ‘scare campaign’ of ‘rising’ immigration levels spread through informal networks like WhatsApp, while at the same time run a different official campaign message on Facebook or Instagram. But it is the unofficial ‘scare campaign’ messages around ethnicity or religion circulated among friends and family member circles that resonate with voters. In a more concrete example, one Islamic Party (PAS) candidate in Malaysia said that each year he organises a Chinese New Year event, and he sends out Happy New Year messages on WhatsApp to ethnic Chinese members of his community. But he told me it was dangerous to publicise this practice: “In the Malay community, there are some who are very conservative. For example, even me organising a Chinese New Year event, some Malays will not be able to accept that. You have to be very selective in terms of the information to various groups.” It is not difficult to see in this situation how a politician could say one thing to one ethnic group (telling Chinese communities on WhatsApp that they are pluralist and wishing them a happy new year), yet say another thing to another ethnic group on WhatsApp (telling a Muslim group that the Chinese are too powerful and degrading Islam). Of course, politicians have long been chameleons, and in the pre-digital era, political parties in Malaysia could hypothetically advertise in a Chinese-language newspaper stating they are pro-pluralism, while at the same advertise in Utusan Malaysia in Bahasa Melayu claiming the Chinese are a threat to Bumiputera dominance. However, there seems little evidence that big data is improving the situation of ‘echo chambers’ of ethnic and religious divisions. Rather, issues of race, religion and ethnicity are further polarising online and social media ‘bubbles,’ all encouraged by political campaigning which aims to microtarget groups in order to win an election campaign. In short, online segregation makes it is easier to divide and hide online societies by appealing to ethno-nationalism and sectarianism. It is also true, however, that we have not sufficiently studied how ‘echo chambers’ in Southeast Asia really work, particularly in semi-rural and rural areas where citizens have only recently bought their first-ever ‘smartphone’ and are using ‘the internet’ with only two platforms: Facebook and WhatsApp. To understand this emerging, shifting ‘information society,’ we need more extensive studies using methodologies from anthropology and ethnography – asking how people experience social media in everyday life – in their local and regional contexts. Too much research on media ‘echo chambers’ comes from ‘topdown’ studies of scholars sitting at computers, examining ‘big data scraping’ which is a process of extracting large amount of data from websites. An increasing amount of these studies comes from the security or cybercrime sector. As a result, unsurprisingly, much of the output revolves around the internet being ‘weaponised,’ rather than seeing digitalisation as inextricable from the environments in which everyday life plays out. So how can we encourage citizens in Southeast Asia to avoid falling into an ‘echo chamber’ of online information? Security experts would say we need more laws and better monitoring of online flows. Indeed, it is increasingly important that political parties declare what they spend online and on social media, and for there to be limits to this spending, as there already is on television, print or radio campaign advertising. This allows citizens to know why a certain political line is being pushed on a particular online platform, for example. A more difficult challenge is exposing non-official interest groups for creating and spreading hate speech through messaging apps like WhatsApp, Telegram and WeChat. Southeast Asian citizens with their often ubiquitous usage of social media platforms coupled with low digital literacy rates are going to be regular targets of political party campaigners, social media giants and big data companies in the future. Their practices and methods urgently need to be more transparent. However, greater monitoring and crack-downs of the online realm may have the opposite effect and in fact encourage people to be more distrustful of official information. The more governments try to limit ‘alternative’ viewpoints, the more people may be drawn to their conspiracies. Greater mainstream media credibility and digital literacy are paramount. Independent organisations such as fact-checkers, investigative journalists, researchers and regulatory bodies who can expose what messages are spread and by whom online is crucial. To expand the digital public sphere beyond ‘echo chambers’ of alternative bubbles of hyper-partisan information, people need to see credible, mainstream, independent media which is also able to be critical of the government. This realm is in decline in democratic Indonesia and the Philippines, while in Myanmar and Malaysia the media landscape is shifting rapidly. A more professional media online is critical for undermining the information flows of sectarianism and ethno-nationalism. Dr. Ross Tapsell is Senior Lecturer at the Australian National University’s College of Asia and the Pacific, and Director of the ANU Malaysia Institute. He is author of Media Power in Indonesia: Oligarchs, Citizens and the Digital Revolution. 15 — ISSUE 5/2018