Freely reporting media is often perceived as an enemy of social harmony and the nation`s stability hence strategic forms of disinformation, such as the information operation, are handled with acceptance. Although interviewees emphasised the problem of so-called fake news in reference to other forms of disinformation, for the analysis of the conflict in Southern Thailand it is noteworthy that the term “fake news” was not used in the debate on disinformation. [T]he term fake news wasn't used in that [conflict] region but they are very familiar with what the officials or what the military call information operation I.O., they tend to call it I.O., even social activists who shouldn't adopt the term (P. Kularb, personal communication, 3 March, 2017) Furthermore, in Thailand, the term hate speech, as interviewees explain, is used elusively and arbitrarily. Largely when it comes to oppositional speech/reporting by “red shirts” (media), terms like fake news and hate speech are used to curtail dissent. However, when pro-government (yellow shirts) media report or speak out the same way it is not considered fake or hateful speech. This ambiguity, and altogether the three cases, shows that speech which might be tolerable in one context may not be acceptable in another, and this even changes within the same context. Cultural Trajectories of Harmful Disinformation in Southeast Asia. The comparative contextualized analysis of these three under-researched Southeast Asian contexts allows for a much-needed expansion of cases for the debate on and analysis of harmful disinformation, and accompanying constraints on media freedom. Negative campaigning in Malaysia, racist propaganda in Myanmar and information operations in Thailand occur along different types of persisting conflict lines, mainly resulted from social polarizations and supremacy of religious norms and values, and are inflected by other specific context factors. In all three contexts, persisting conflicts (both armed and unarmed), which are highly correlated with supremacy of religious norms and values and multi-ethnicity induce a strong “national security culture” (Peri, 2012, p. 12), which in turn serves as justification to manipulate political communication, and leads to offline violence in all three contexts (or as a minimum to violence justification). In Thailand and Myanmar, national security cultures lead to manipulative political communication strategies that have facilitated human rights violations in Thailand´s southern conflict and in the Rohingya refugee crisis. These are social conflict lines that preserve Buddhist supremacy used to build a national identity in both countries. In Malaysia the social conflict lines are also connected to supremacy of religious norms and values, here Islam, but are further incorporated with a social stratification within Malay´s society, leading to offline violence mainly in times of political contentions (such as elections). The volatility and arbitrariness of what the often ill-defined concept of hate speech captures, for example in Thailand´s case, accentuates the need to examine context-based communicative   83 | Journal of Contemporary Eastern Asia, Vol. 18, No.2