functioning of Myanmar´s social systems, such as the media system and its restrictions. An instrumentalized Buddhist supremacy maintains long-lasting racism that has been propagated by the ruling elites for decades and led to the horrifying human rights abuses in the Rohingya refugee crisis. Although postcolonial Malaysia and Myanmar are both multilingual and multi-ethnic, diverging historical developments, social constellations, and cultural contexts call for different explanations for the formations of power in political communication control mechanisms. Thailand and Myanmar both uphold Buddhist supremacy and face persistent violent conflicts in their borderlands, in contrast to Malaysia where Muslim Malay supremacy characterizes every level of political and social action. Thailand, known around the world as a tourist destination, is situated as a mid-range income level country in Southeast Asia and is socially and politically shaped by a deep divide between Bangkok’s progressive middle-class elites and traditional rural Thailand. Thailand’s Bangkokcentric media system accentuates a deep social and political divide of the country, accompanied by conflicting transformative dynamics in divergent value sets (Horstmann, 2001) between progressive political middle-class elites (“yellow shirts”) and the traditional rural Thailand (“red shirts”). In contrast to relative political stability in both Malaysia, with the ruling of the coalition government of the Barisan Nasional (BN, which means national front) until 2018, and Myanmar, ruled by the Tadmadaw between 1962 and 2015, Thailand has experienced 12 coups6 since the end of absolute monarchy in 1932. Being marked by a persistently discontinuous political landscape and the continuing dominance of the military and monarchy as political powers, it has never been under foreign control by colonial or other powers. Although the three countries present a wide range of contextual factors and social, cultural, and political formations, all three countries do not currently provide sufficient conditions for free media reporting or free speech, either online or offline. Nevertheless, the historical and cultural processes which impact the three forms of disinformation differ significantly and originate from the unique formations of their contexts. Therefore, the analysis of the historical and cultural formation of the conditions for these forms of disinformation in their connotative contexts is the focus of this comparison. As a result, this study has the potential to provide new knowledge about the contextual foundations and underlying concepts. In the following section I will briefly introduce the difficulties of applying media freedom measurements in non-Western contexts. This clarifies the necessity of contextualization in order to understand the peculiarities of disinformation which curtail a free public sphere and the methodological implementation of this in-depth case study comparison.                                                                                                                         6 The number of the coups varies depending on whether you count failed coups.   71 | Journal of Contemporary Eastern Asia, Vol. 18, No.2