This book focuses on developments and trends pertaining to online falsehoods and mobile instant messaging services (MIMS), the impact of online falsehoods transmitted via MIMS, and practice and intervention. As the reliance on mobile devices for news seeking and information sharing continues to grow, the spread of online falsehoods on MIMS is a problem that confounds academics, practitioners, and policymakers. Recent developments in countries such as Brazil and India demonstrate how MIMS facilitate the spread of online falsehoods. Given that a number of non-academic and non-governmental institutions in the region are doing important work in countering the influence of online falsehoods, this book also includes contributions by practitioners who design initiatives and programmes in this area. The book is a timely contribution in addressing the distinct issues of online falsehoods in a large, technophilic region such as Asia, grappling with problems of online falsehoods on so many fronts, including ideological extremism, political opportunism, cyberscams, political activism, digitalised learning, geopolitical tensions, and more. Relevant to researchers and policymakers, this book provides a timely and critical analysis of both research and practice conducted in the Asian context by scholars hailing from a range of disciplines such media studies, political communication, cultural studies, and cognitive science.

This book offers a regional analysis of the impact of fake news – misinformation, malinformation and disinformation – on electoral democracy and freedom of expression in Southeast Asia, which has taken place in the middle of a global health pandemic. The book maps the impact of social media and the internet on democracy in the members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations that have already been in the throes of democratic regression for some time. Including an analysis of countries that do not have national elections, the chapters provide detailed information on the extent of internet and social media penetration in each country, the laws that are deployed to reel in its political potential for critics and demonstrate the impact on democracy or the prospects for democracy. Collectively, contributors note that disinformation is a serious problem in the region that negatively impacts elections and how governments’ attempts to deal with the phenomenon inevitably lead to the targeting of dissenting voices and opposition as anti-state fake news. The deleterious impact on democracy and freedom of expression, facilitated by a citizenry that is prone to manipulation of facts, appears to be the standard modus operandi in the regional authoritarian complex. This book is the first to undertake a regional analysis of disinformation in Southeast Asia and is a significant contribution to the literature on democracy, elections and disinformation. It will be of interest to researchers in the fields of Political Science and Asian Politics, in particular Southeast Asian Politics.

"This book explores the societal, technological, and user-related factors in understanding why and how digital-savvy college students in Asia's most mobile cities-Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taipei-seek news via the mobile phone, how they evaluate mobile news for credibility and usefulness, and the consequences of this practice: becoming engaged with mobile news, which then teaches them about current affairs. The analyses are situated in the intersection of technological advances from 3G to 4G and marked differences in political and media systems across the four cities, which jointly shape Asia's new generations of citizens. Technologically, the deeply diffused mobile phone motivates civic-minded millennials and centennials in Asia to access news with their phones and engage with the news for civic learning. However, sociopolitical factors impede potential positive outcomes of mobile news consumption. Cross-societal comparisons of survey data collected from two time periods reveal new insights into the interplay of technology and society in consuming mobile news"--

With a communication-centered framework that brings together communication studies, sociology, and political science, this book explains how people adopt and maneuver mobile technologies as tactics of contention for political mobilization in contentious moments and everyday resistance in contemporary China.

This volume captures the domestication of mobile communication technologies by families in Asia, and its implications for family interactions and relationships. It showcases research on families across a spectrum of socio-economic profiles, from both rural and urban areas, offering insights on children, adolescents, adults, and the elderly. While mobile communication diffuses through Asia at a blistering pace, families in the region are also experiencing significant changes in light of unprecedented economic growth, globalisation, urbanisation and demographic shifts. Asia is therefore at the crossroads of technological transformation and social change. This book analyses the interactions of these two contemporaneous trends from the perspective of the family, covering a range of family types including nuclear, multi-generational, transnational, and multi-local, spanning the continuum from the media-rich to the media have-less.