When Would a State Crack Down on Fake News? Explaining Variation in the Governance of Fake News in Asia-Pacific
| Author | Ric Neo |
| Published date | 01 August 2022 |
| Date | 01 August 2022 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/14789299211013984 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/14789299211013984
Political Studies Review
2022, Vol. 20(3) 390 –409
© The Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/14789299211013984
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When Would a State Crack
Down on Fake News?
Explaining Variation in
the Governance of Fake
News in Asia-Pacific
Ric Neo
Abstract
This article sets out to explain national variation in the governance of fake news; it asks, under
what conditions would governments pursue securitization in order to address the threat of fake
news? Through a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis of 24 countries in Asia-Pacific, this
article explores multicausal explanations behind why some countries have moved to securitize fake
news—framing it as an existential threat and justifying the passing of laws that curtail civil liberties—
while others do not. The analysis yields two main findings. First, although prevailing political
arguments emphasize the threat of fake news to society and national security as justification for the
securitization of fake news, this condition is neither necessary nor sufficient in causally accounting
for the decision to crackdown on fake news. Conversely, crackdowns on fake news occur more
frequently in countries less affected by fake news. Second, the analysis provides a set of two distinct,
theoretically and empirically relevant causal pathways explaining the decision to crack down on fake
news; the first pathway shows how non-democratic states without media freedom and which are
relatively less affected by fake news instrumentalize the issue to restrict freedom of speech further;
the second pathway shows how non-democratic states experiencing economic growth and political
turbulence with proximate elections attempt to restrict freedom of speech. The findings suggest
that implementations of broad legislation may not be an optimal approach, given that they appear
to be more motivated by political circumstances than by the objective resolution of the problem.
Keywords
securitization, fake news, censorship, authoritarianism, misinformation, security, fsQCA
Accepted: 12 April 2021
Introduction
Politicians, like all of us, are sense-making machines. When faced with a situation or
issue that has the potential to impinge upon the status quo, political leaders can decide to
construct the issue as one that is “menacing, dangerous and existential” (Hayes, 2009:
The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam, Hong Kong
Corresponding author:
Ric Neo, The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam, Hong Kong.
Email: ricneo@hku.hk
1013984PSW0010.1177/14789299211013984Political Studies ReviewNeo
research-article2021
Article
Neo 391
978). This notion constitutes the key concept of securitization theory, which is introduced
in the security study lexicon by theorists of the Copenhagen School. Securitization theory
advances that security results from a meaning-making process that presents an issue as an
existential threat to a particular referent object, and because of this constructed sense of
danger, justifies emergency and extraordinary measures to protect the threatened object
(Buzan et al., 1998).
This article will employ securitization theory as an analytical lens to causally examine
how countries within the Asia-Pacific region have politically responded to the threat of
fake news. By most measures, fake news can be understood as an archetypal security
issue—it is novel, socially salient, and has the potential to adversely impact not just upon
social harmony but also foundational democratic institutions. Yet, what explains why
some countries move to securitize fake news, framing it as an existential threat and justi-
fying broad laws that curtail civil liberties—while others choose to address the issue at
the political level? Wæver (2000: 251) establishes that securitization is always a matter of
political choice, and this is actualized through the securitizing discursive practice of labe-
ling something a security threat, thereby justifying the passing of emergency measures to
resolve the threat. At the same time, these choices are equally susceptible to influence
from a myriad of conditions including the dynamics of political and economic contexts,
the political time in which the state actor operates, social sentiment, and external events.
Thus, this study asks as the main research question: what are the conditions that are caus-
ally conducive to the securitization of fake news?
Plausible relationships between the identified conditions producing the securitized
outcome form the basis for six key hypotheses, formulated as statements of sufficiency,
to be examined by fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA). The outcome con-
dition in this study refers to countries that have passed broad anti-fake news laws that
were justified by discursive framings of the issue as posing a national security threat.
FsQCA enables systematic cross-case comparisons while attending to within-case com-
plexity, particularly in small- and intermediate-N designs, making it well-suited for this
study’s medium-n design of 24 case countries (Berg-Schlosser et al., 2009). As
Emmenegger et al. (2013) argue, a key reason why fsQCA renders itself to comparative
research is the intrinsic complexity of political and social phenomenon, which typically
makes the distillation of causes to single explanations futile. Given that the combinations
of conditions under which governments choose to pursue the securitization of fake news
is likely to vary—and that there are thus different routes toward activation—this feature
of fsQCA makes the approach apt for this study. To that end, the analysis takes into
account six key factors—democracy, the level of media freedom, proximity to a national
election, the presence of political turbulence, the state of the economy, and finally, the
empirical impact of fake news in the country—which in sum contextually situates the
government’s response to fake news, collectively enabling or limiting actors’ strategies.
More specifically, we examine how these various conditions combine in different causal
paths toward the outcome in which fake news is securitized by the government.
The analysis yields two main findings. First, although prevailing political arguments
emphasize the threat of fake news to social harmony and national security as justification
for the securitization of fake news, this condition is neither necessary nor sufficient in
causally accounting for the decision to crack down on fake news. Conversely, crack-
downs on fake news occur more frequently in countries that are relatively less affected by
the problem of fake news. Indeed, this presents a stark contradiction to the commonly
cited justification advanced by many (authoritarian) governments about the urgent need
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