cultures “need to be understood” (Pohjonen & Udupa, 2017, p. 1173). Analysis of media freedom in Malaysia, Myanmar, and Thailand reveals that disinformation in the three media contexts plays a significant role in all (media) public spheres. Therefore, this research does not focus on the analysis of specific forms of online disinformation but rather analyses the contextual trajectories of their (online and offline) formations within the discourse of media freedom. The leading question of this comparative study is: “how do the trajectories of the connotative contexts impact the differing harmful disinformation in Malaysia, Myanmar, and Thailand as threats to media freedom?” By analysing existing fault lines in the three countries,  5 this article broadens the current discourses on hate speech and fake news and demonstrates how historical, political, and cultural contexts affect particular forms of disinformation. The Southeast Asia region is highly under-researched and the results of this research can, therefore, enhance our understanding and handling of different forms of disinformation. More specifically, the study of three contexts in question will analyse the scope and magnitude of disinformation in the region and illuminate the diversity of factors that enable a qualitative heuristic analysis that highlights the cultural trajectories of the harmful speech formation in the region. For such an analysis, variations in the impacting factors are the foundation for the maximized structural perspectival changes towards the research object of `harmful disinformation` (Kleining, 1994, pp. 28-31). The three cases represent a wide range of political, economic, developmental, and cultural facets. Post-colonial Malaysia has reached relatively high socio-economic and technological standards and represents a contradictory example of the transition paradigm (Nissen, 2016), which is fundamentally called into question by scholars such as Carothers (2002) and Sparks (2008). Despite liberal economic development in the country, it practices discriminatory Malay supremacy and Islamization policy, does not respect human rights, and the same autocratic government controlled the country from its independence in 1957 until 2018. Hence, while liberalization of the market brought about relative economic wealth, formal democratization only led to “electoral authoritarianism” (Tapsell, 2013, p. 614). Malaysia´s heterogeneous society, fragmented along ethnic and religious conflict lines, is the basis for polarization in political communication, and negative campaigning is often used to discredit opponents, leading to on- and offline violence. By contrast, post-colonial Myanmar is one of the poorest countries in the region and until recently was one of the poorest in the world. Additionally, until 2010, it was one of the most closed economic, political, social and media systems in the world, ruled by the Tadmadaw (a military junta) for nearly half a century; a dubious accolade shared with countries such as North Korea and Cuba. Myanmar’s transition process, starting with top-down democratization through the “roadmap to democracy” initiated by the Tadmadaw in 2003, has followed a similar pattern of elite continuity that Sparks detected for the comparison of China, Russia, and Poland (Sparks, 2008). Elite continuity is a significant characteristic to assist in our understanding of the                                                                                                                         5 Although the conflicts cannot be considered as confined by national borders and the reference to the nation states implies a methodological nationalism, it is useful to refer to nation states because analysis of media freedom situations, with specific laws, distribution channels and political policies, is widely impacted by national governments. Winter 2019 | 70