COVID-19 Intensifies Digital Repression in South and Southeast Asia

Janjira Sombatpoonsiri, Sangeeta Mahapatra | 23 October 2021
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COVID-19 has enabled states to reformulate public health surveillance as law-and-order issues.

 

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, several countries in Asia had experienced rising levels of autocratization and digital repression as governments leveraged digital technologies to stifle online dissent and surveil critics. The pandemic, however, could deepen governments’ capacities for digital repression. Recent developments in South and Southeast Asia offer insights about this worrying trend.

The trend toward “lawfare”—the abuse of laws to criminalize oppositional civil society and generate a chilling effect to achieve self-censorship—emerged in South and Southeast Asia long before the pandemic. Provisions condemning defamation, sedition, and public assembly have been instrumental in suppressing pro-democracy voices for years in established autocracies such as Vietnam, increasingly authoritarian regimes such as in Cambodia and Thailand, and democracies like India. In the past decade, computer- and cyber-related laws have added a new ingredient to this cocktail of legal repression. In Thailand, for instance, social media users have been charged under the Computer Crime Act for online speech offending the royal family. In India, Section 66a of the Information Technology Act have empowered the authorities to censor posts and websites or to arrest citizens for any online content deemed offensive or inciting.

The following table lists examples of these laws and their respective dates of enactment in South and Southeast Asian countries.

TABLE 1: NEW LAWS ENABLING ONLINE CENSORSHIP IN SOUTH AND SOUTHEAST ASIA

Country

Law

Year of Enactment

India

Information Technology (Guidelines for Intermediaries and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules (executive rule)

2021

Nepal

Information Technology Bill

2020

Pakistan

Citizen’s Protection (Against Online Harm)

2020

Singapore

Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act

2019

Sri Lanka

False News Bill (draft)

2019

Thailand

Cybersecurity Law

2019

Bangladesh

Digital Security Act

2018

Malaysia

Anti-Fake News Act

2018, revoked in 2019, reintroduced in 2021

Vietnam

Cyber Security Act

2018

Thailand

Amended Computer Crime Act

2016

Laos

Law on Prevention and Combating Cyber Crimes

2015

Bangladesh

Section 57 of the Information Technology and Communication (ICT) Act

2013

Myanmar

Telecommunications Law

2013

Singapore

Internet Code of Practice

2013

Philippines

Cyber Crime Prevention Act

2012

Cambodia

Cyber Law

2012

India

Sections 66A and 69A of the Information Technology (Amendment) Act

2008

Indonesia

Electronic Information and Transaction Law

2008

Sri Lanka

Computer Crime Act

2007

India

Section 54 of Disaster Management Act

2005

 

COVID-19 has spurred governments in South and Southeast Asia to accelerate the weaponization of these laws—particularly to punish critics under the guise of combating “fake news.” For instance, between January and March 2020, the police in Vietnam took action against 654 cases of purported fake news and sanctioned 146 people, including a dissident publisher. In Cambodia, by April 2020, around thirty activists and opposition members had been detained on the charge of spreading “fake news” about COVID-19. In Singapore, alleged spreaders of “fake news”—including political rivals of the government and independent journalists—were targeted under the Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act. In Malaysia, the government used a health emergency decree as a pretext to revive a “fake news” bill that had been revoked in 2019. In Indonesia, one of the region’s last-standing democracies, the government arrested citizens, including a West Papuan pro-independence leader, for spreading supposedly false information.

 

The state of digital rights is not looking any better in South Asia. In India, hastily introduced executive rules gave the government sweeping new powers over digital content, curbing peoples’ rights to free speech and privacy. Following a devastating second wave of COVID-19 infections, these rules enabled the broadening of the definition of disinformation to include criticism of the government. Subsequently, user posts were taken down on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. At least fifty-five journalists who reported on COVID-19 were attacked or arrested in 2020, a number that has climbed since then. In Sri Lanka, the police arrested multiple individuals who criticized the government’s response to the pandemic on social media. Similarly, in Bangladesh, the government exploited the Digital Security Act to crack down on journalists critical of its overall corruption and management of the health crisis.

The pandemic has increasingly normalized the deployment of facial recognition technology by governments in the region and increased the prospects of mass surveillance by legitimizing invasive measures on public health grounds. These developments present a special risk in countries that lack institutional checks against the misuse of digital surveillance. COVID-19 has enabled states to reformulate public health surveillance as law-and-order issues; in Singapore, for example, the authorities now use data collected from a contact tracing app in criminal investigations. Many such surveillance measures lack sunset clauses, thereby establishing new norms for states to control their citizens through their data. 

Janjira Sombatpoonsiri is an associate at the German Institute of Global and Area Studies (the GIGA) and researcher at the Institute of Asian Studies at Chulalongkorn University in Thailand.

Sangeeta Mahapatra is a visiting fellow at the GIGA. 


This article was originally published on Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.   
Views in this article are author’s own and do not necessarily reflect CGS policy.

 

 

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