CCPP Graduate Research Affiliate Fatima Gaw, a PhD candidate in Media, Technology, and Society at Northwestern University, has co-authored a new article in Political Communication, one of the leading journals in the field.
The article, titled “Towards the Comparative Study of Domestic Influence Operations: Cyber Troops and Elite Competition in Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand,” offers one of the first large-scale comparative analyses of domestic influence operations (IO) in Southeast Asia. Drawing on 78 in-depth interviews with industry insiders, Gaw and her co-authors investigate how social-media-based influence campaigns differ across Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand, and how those differences reflect the structure of political and elite competition in each country.
Their study reveals striking contrasts:
- In Indonesia, IO campaigns are organized through informal, ad-hoc networks around individual candidates and used to promote state policies.
- In the Philippines, IOs are often led by professional PR agencies working for both national and local politicians.
- In Thailand, state-funded IOs largely serve to defend the military-monarchical regime, though recent decentralization has expanded their use by political parties.
The authors conclude that influence operations mirror the character of elite competition, from candidate-centered and fragmented in democracies to state-centered and institutionalized in autocracies, offering a new comparative framework for understanding the political economy of online manipulation.