ASEAN could trace fake campaigns together. Its own plan waits until 2029.

Dien Nguyen An Luong, a visiting fellow at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore, begins with what ASEAN cannot do. Writing in Fulcrum, he says ten governments will never agree on whether a disputed political claim at home is true, so ASEAN should not try to judge that. It should do the narrower job: work out who runs deceptive campaigns and how they are organised. During Indonesia's 2024 election, fabricated speeches attributed to political figures spread online, and research on that vote found that what people already believed decided which fakes worked on them. Indonesian journalists and fact-checkers, who know the candidates and the local argument, are the ones placed to spot a faked speech.

What a regional body can do is follow the wiring, and he gives two cases. A Reuters investigation in October 2025 traced a Chinese-funded operation that used a Manila-based marketing firm and fake Filipino accounts to praise Beijing and attack the United States. A CNA investigation in July 2026 found more than 550 TikTok videos from 30 accounts making misleading claims about Singapore and Malaysia, reusing the same scripts and computer-generated presenters, and the operators were never identified. His test for ASEAN involvement is simple: act when linked campaigns hit more than one member state.

The tools are thin. Europe can order large platforms to hand over data, and publishes their takedown reasons in an open database. He writes that ASEAN "lacks the EU's legal teeth to compel such disclosures from Big Tech." What it has is a 2018 cooperation framework, a 2023 guideline separating honest error from deliberate deception, and literacy workshops that reached nearly 194,000 people by November 2023. Some measures in the 2026 to 2035 media work plan are scheduled for 2029 or later. His suggestion is a small pilot now: compare a few suspected campaigns across borders, asking where the content appeared first and which accounts and scripts were reused.

Why it matters

Indonesia votes again in 2029, which is roughly when ASEAN's plan gets to this, so for the next campaign the defence is local: the fact-checkers and researchers already doing the work. You can use his test on your own feed, since a clip pushed by 30 accounts using one script is a campaign, not an opinion. No platform here is obliged to say what it took down or why, so the record of a fake stays with the company.