Introduction When comparing media freedom2 in Malaysia, Myanmar, and Thailand, so-called “fake news” and “hate speech” appear as threats to deliberative (online) public spheres in these three contexts. However, “negative campaigning” in Malaysia, “information operations” in Thailand and “racist propaganda” in Myanmar are more precise terms to capture these forms of systematic manipulative political communication (disinformation)  3. Although new forms of communication on the Internet add new dimensions to harmful disinformation, this paper argues that manipulative political communication practices do neither originate from online communication platforms nor are they limited to online public spheres. Rather contextual trajectories lead to harmful speech which is then disseminated online. In the three contexts in question harmful manipulative political communication routinely takes place on the Internet but is by far not limited to online communicative spaces, and does not originate from the structures, processes and agents of online communication technologies in particular. The three examples from Southeast Asia underscore that contextual conditions determine how and why harmful disinformation occurs and make clear the need for legal discourses about online regulations to be strongly contextualized and to go beyond a universal conceptualization of online hate speech as simply in opposition to tolerable speech. Since online communication has become mainstream, even in most technologically least developed countries, the cyber utopian discourse of the liberal potential of the Internet is now widely considered as a debate on the necessity to restrict (online) free speeches to tackle online and offline communicative violence and related human rights violations. From the beginning of the discourse on the liberating potential of the Internet there were critical voices, including Morozov (2011), who condemned an implied “cyber-utopianism” and emphasized the contextdependency of the potential of the Internet for liberalization and democratization processes. The potential of the Internet to share information cheaply, quickly, and effectively facilitates the spread of civil and uncivil speech in the same manner and is highly context-dependent. To understand how context impacts the trajectories of extreme forms of speech4, particular histories of speech                                                                                                                         2 I conceive of media freedom rather an analytical question: “how and why is media controlled in a specific context?” than a normative concept, because media and public speeches are controlled to a certain extent by different (f)actors in all contexts, in liberal democracies as well as in autocracies, totalitarian/authoritarian systems or other contexts. 3 In recent debates the terms “hate speech” and “fake news” are so broadly used that they fail to capture actual phenomenon of disinformation and harmful speeches in differing contexts. In this paper I use the term disinformation to capture types of systematic manipulative political communication which uses false information or vitriol in an uncivil manner to manipulate the public discourse towards ones own purpose. Those forms of disinformation are deemed harmful for a free and peaceful society and therefore can be considered an opponent of civil free speech in their respective context. 4 In order to capture harmful speech (online and offline) I refer to Pohjonen´s and Udupa´s (2017) “concept of extreme speech [that] has thus been an attempt to move the debate beyond a normative understanding of vitriolic online speech practices as hate speech” (p. 1186). “[Their] proposed concept of extreme speech (…) which bring[s] to the fore contextual differences as the majority of the world’s populations becomes connected to the Internet and begins to communicate in ways we may have not even anticipated” (p. 1187).     69 | Journal of Contemporary Eastern Asia, Vol. 18, No.2