Note: This event will take place on 7/18 at 8:00 AM PHT (Manila time) and 10:00 AM AEDT (Canberra time).
Building on their research in Mitigating Disinformation in Southeast Asian Elections: Lessons from Indonesia, Philippines and Thailand, Jonathan Corpus Ong, Associate Professor of Global Digital Media at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and Ross Tapsell, a senior lecturer and researcher on Southeast Asia media at the Australian National University, will discuss why and how Southeast Asia is at the forefront of “innovations” in social media and disinformation. They will explore new trends including the mobilization of click armies, fighting back against state-sponsored trolls, and the surge of anti-China hate speech in the region. They will give their views on where the social media and disinformation production space is headed, and ask what Facebook’s Oversight Board will mean to the region.
Jonathan Corpus Ong is Co-Editor-in-Chief of the 20-year-old media studies journal Television and New Media. His research takes an ethnographic approach to studying the work arrangements of producers of digital disinformation, published in the public reports “Architects of Networked Disinformation” (2018) and “Politics and Profit in the Fake News Factory” (NATO Stratcom, 2019). His work has been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, and Buzzfeed News.
Ross Tapsell is the author of Media Power in Indonesia: Oligarchs, Citizens and the Digital Revolution (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017) and co-editor of Digital Indonesia: Connectivity and Divergence (ISEAS Publishing, 2017). He has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, VICE and other publications in the Southeast Asian region. Ross is involved in a number of Southeast Asia activities at the ANU. He is currently Director of the ANU's Malaysia Institute, is involved in the ANU's Indonesia Project and the academic news/analysis website New Mandala.
This event will be moderated by Margaret Scott, Adjunct Assistant Professor at NYU Wagner.
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