In a report titled “Information Disorder: Toward an Interdisciplinary Framework for Research and Policy Making,” Wardle and Derakhshan (2017, 20) use the dimensions of harm and falseness to distinguish between three types of information: 1. Disinformation: “Information that is false and deliberately created to harm a person, social group, organization or country.” 2. Misinformation: “Information that is false, but not created with the intention of causing harm.” 3. Malinformation: “Information that is based on reality, used to inflict harm on a person, organization or country.” Our report is based on the framework and definitions introduced by Wardle and Derakhshan (2017). Going forward, the term “information disorder” will be used to refer to mis-, dis-, and malinformation. 2.1 TOPICS OF MISINFORMATION Masato Kajimoto, associate professor of practice HKU Journalism (the Journalism and Media Studies Centre, the University of Hong Kong), observed that “hot topics” for mis- and disinformation differ between countries, depending on the context: In the US, gun control is a very polarizing issue. You could easily throw any misinformation about gun control and people buy it. Whereas gun control is a non-issue in most Asian countries. [...] any misinformation about gun control, nobody cares, nobody shares. So depending on the topic, people’s reactions are different. [...] In the case of Japan, politics is not one of those topics, but Covid-19 vaccination is. And there are several other touchy topics in Japan, like samesex marriage. (interview, 2021) 2 We observed that across Asia, politics and health were the two most prominent topics around which information disorder develops. These two topics came up repeatedly in the interviews with key informants and in the literature review. Others include natural disasters (e.g. fake images and videos, relief scams), cyberbullying, and hate speech (sometimes targeting women, ethnic minorities, and members of the LGBTQI+ community). We have also observed different elements of information disorder being combined with each other, for example hate speech campaigns that contain false information about the person or group being targeted. POLITICS Politics is one of the topics most ripe for information disorder, especially where a person or group has an interest in swaying public opinion and securing a certain outcome. Elections provide an ideal breeding ground for information disorder, as does the Elections provide an ideal process of drafting and passing breeding ground for information legislation, as support needs to disorder, as does the process of be drummed up. Many actors drafting and passing legislation, who spread disinformation are as support needs to be drummed backed by the state, or at least up. Many actors who spread aligned with a political party. Some prominent examples indisinformation are backed by the clude the “IT cells” of political state, or at least aligned with a parties in India (for more inforpolitical party. mation, see Campbell-Smith and Bradshaw 2021), “troll factories” in the Philippines (for an ethnographic study of the organization and motivations of coordinated mis- and disinformation campaigns in the Philippines, see Ong and Cabañes 2019a), “buzzers” in Indonesia (see Potkin and Costa 2019) and “cyber troops” in Malaysia (see Guest 2018). Such coordinated campaigns push out messages that promote or generate support for the political party the actors are aligned with, and launch attacks on critics. In some cases, automated bots are used to advance the messages, and in others an individual operates multiple accounts, creating an artificial impression of mass support (for more information on cyber troops, see Bradshaw and Howard 2017). In other cases, information restrictions and blocks may be used. For example, “on the day of Kazakhstan’s snap presidential election (June 9, 2019) and for days after, users in several cities where anti-government demonstrations took place found that social media platforms and messaging apps— including Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp— were temporarily inaccessible” (Freedom House 2021b). Other methods include crashing websites. For example, Jo-Ann Ding of the Centre for Independent Journalism in Malaysia related how cyber troops used bots to disrupt Malaysiakini, a major online media outlet: “Previously, on election night, Malaysiakini’s site was attacked and they had to set up mirror sites to deal with website crashes” (interview, 2021). Torokul Doorov, director of Azattyq, the Kazakhlanguage service of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), observed that “troll factories” are a growing problem in Kazakhstan (interview, 2021). While Doorov and his team have not actually done any investigation into this phenomenon, they I N FO R M ATI O N D I SO R D ER IN THE GLOBA L SOUTH Asia – 1 9 4