Room 404 at the University of the Philippines held something rare on June 10, 2026 — a genuinely cross-regional reckoning with one of democracy’s most invisible threats. As part of DRAPAC 2026, themed “Building the Commons: Scaling Collective Resources for Our Digital Futures,” Doublethink Lab and Tempo co-hosted a landmark panel discussion titled “Bridging Gaps, Building Understanding: Countering Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference in Asia.”
Experts from Bangladesh, Indonesia, Taiwan, India, and the Philippines filled the room — each carrying field evidence that separately alarmed and together confirmed a regional pattern too consistent to dismiss.
Setting the security frame
Retired Rear Admiral Rommel Jude Ong of the Ateneo School of Government opened the security lens decisively. He argued that FIMI is not a communications failure — it is a deliberate, structured attack on national sovereignty. Drawing from his research on Chinese political warfare, he repositioned the conversation firmly within defence and security frameworks rather than media studies alone.
Janina Santos of Doublethink Lab reinforced this framing with operational precision. Her investigations revealed how state-linked actors — primarily China and Russia — deploy coordinated inauthentic behaviour across Asian platforms, timed deliberately around elections and civil unrest to maximise societal disruption.
Voices from the field
Ika Ningtyas of Tempo brought Indonesia’s lived experience into focus. She documented how health and political disinformation mutually reinforce each other, eroding both institutional trust and civic participation. Her decade-long journalism career gave her findings an immediacy that research alone rarely achieves.
From India, Rohit Sharma of ThinkFi demonstrated how AI and open-source intelligence tools now expose influence operations that previously went undetected. He showed concrete examples of fifth-generation warfare tactics targeting South and Southeast Asian democracies simultaneously.
Zulker Naeen from Bangladesh’s Centre for Critical and Qualitative Studies added a dimension others had acknowledged but rarely examined in depth — the disproportionate targeting of women voters, minority communities, and migrant-connected populations during Bangladesh’s 2026 national elections. FIMI, he argued, exploits existing social fractures with surgical precision.
Jerry Yu of Doublethink Lab and Dana Batnag of Democracy.Net.PH then connected individual country findings to a broader architecture of manipulation — one that crosses borders as fluidly as internet traffic does.
Rights at the centre
Throughout the discussion, FactLink’s Lia Peng guided the panel toward a critical conclusion. Countering FIMI cannot justify restricting expression. Every proposed intervention must anchor itself in fundamental freedoms — online and offline — or risk becoming the very threat it opposes.
A shared infrastructure for defence
What DRAPAC 2026 made unmistakably clear is this — no single country can outpace a threat that operates regionally. Cross-border intelligence sharing, whole-of-society coalitions, and rights-based frameworks are not aspirational language. They are operational necessities.
The commons Asia needs to build starts exactly here — with conversations like this one.
