practices. In the case of the southern conflict and when it comes to the bigger picture in Thailand´s communicative public spheres, universal conceptions of fake news and hate speech fail to paint the whole picture. The case of mainly accepted, but dubious, disinformation by the military information operations, is located in a definitional grey zone where it becomes specifically problematic to discuss ethical and legal foundations of such information actions. Although Thailand´s military information operations are predominantly handled with acceptance and may not be considered fake information, nonetheless they intend to manipulate the public in order to legitimize violent military actions in the Southern conflict. Although this seems mostly accepted by the Thai society and politics, analysis of cultural and historical impacts underlines the unique functioning of Thailand´s social and political processes which delegitimize other forms of disinformation or extreme speech, when it, for example, comes to seniority or culture of agreement. This underpins what is then conceived of as media freedom, hate speech or fake news. Further analysis will, therefore, depend on the context and the discourses on the limitations of (online) free speech; it also needs to go further by investigating actual communicative practices to capture their contextual trajectories and to tackle underlying social, cultural and political foundations. At first glance negative campaigning in Malaysia might be considered an acceptable but harsh political discourse, however, on closer inspection, it reveals itself as a form of political communicative violence that does not support a deliberative public sphere and also leads to offline violence. Negative campaigning intensifies social stratifications and leads to daily communicative violence between cultural and political fractions. Nevertheless, this situation must not be exploited to curtail media freedoms through the implementation of fake news laws as inevitably they will fall short of solving actual social problems. In Myanmar, it becomes clearer that vitriolic speech on Facebook arises from a historically implemented racist propaganda machinery, thus exemplifying the most horrifying and undiluted form of harmful disinformation and human rights abuses not seen since the Nazi era. What we can learn from the three cases is that although the three forms of disinformation result from different cultural trajectories they share a similar reinforcing process through the impact of harmful disinformation in volatile contexts (see Figure 1). Winter 2019 | 84