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Who’s afraid of the big, bad cybertroopers? 20 years of online political communication in Malaysia

In 2004, three news articles in Malaysia’s New Straits Times – owned and operated by the-then ruling party UMNO – used the term “cybertroopers”, referring to groups of people working for the political party in a cyberwar against “the Opposition”. This would be one of the earliest admissions of manipulation of online information by state actors in Malaysia, and arguably around the world. In this talk, I will reflect on how the term “cybertroopers”, and by extension, its perceived threat, has evolved in the two decades since that first article – celebrated, demonised and weaponised in various political contexts. Currently, “cybertroopers” as a term is no longer in vogue – while there are occasional references to the shortened cytros, other terminology, such as walaun and macai, are more commonly used instead. Drawing insights from the analysis of over 400 news articles from 2004 to 2024, and a series of interviews conducted between 2018 and 2023, this paper asks – in 2025, who, if anyone, is afraid of the big, bad cybertroopers in Malaysia? 

Dr Niki Cheong is lecturer in Digital Culture and Society at King’s College London. His research interest sits at the intersection of media, politics and digital culture. Specifically, Niki’s research focusses on mis/disinformation in Malaysia, and the digital citizenship and practices of online users – including LGBTQ+ youth – in the Asia Pacific. Currently, Niki is researching the navigation of (political) information on Whatsapp, and smartphone use of older online users in Malaysia and Singapore. Prior to academia, Niki spent a decade in journalism, including as an editor at Malaysia’s largest English newspaper The Star. His book Growing Up in KL, featuring socio-cultural commentary about Malaysia, was published in 2017.

When Thai Girls Love Industry meets China’s State Censorship: Staged Homoerotic Fan Meetings and the Dislocation of Macau, Hong Kong and Singapore

Thailand’s Girls Love industry has grown exponentially. The pioneering release of GAP (ทฤษฎีสีชมพู) was followed by eighteen more GL in just a few years. Thai GL largely follows the kingdom’s already-successful Boys Love formula: two actors are paired and star as lovers across multiple projects, the dramas prioritise romance over explicitly gay identification and are free to watch with multi-lingual subtitles on YouTube, and the industry monetises its global reach through fan meetings across East and Southeast Asia (Baudinette, Li and Pang, Zhang and Dedman). Fan meetings incorporate re-enactments of romantic scenes, music performances and game segments, staging homoerotic moments between actors to encourage fans to imagine them as real-life lovers (ibid).

Unsurprisingly, Thai GL draws huge fan followings in China and numerous fan meetings took place in the southern city Nanning. China’s sanction on homosexuality and fan-initiated participatory censorship have however made it risky for actors to perform together, and they often appear separately in “1+1” events that devoid fans of homoerotic interactions (c.f. Wang and Tan; X. Zheng; W. Zhang and P. Qiao). 

This paper examines how Macau, Hong Kong and Singapore become proxy sites for Chinese fans attending GL fan meetings. Drawing on digital participatory observations, I argue that these events primarily target Chinese fans who are able to travel to these city-states. Building upon Liu and Li’s observation that Inter-Asia cultural studies must address China’s rise in the regions, I develop a framework of dislocation to describe both Chinese fans’ mobility and the two SAR’s marginality.

Dr Carman Fung is Lecturer in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at Simon Fraser University. Her research foregrounds queer Asian media and transnational mobility, drawing on cultural studies and ethnographic methods. Her monograph Leaving the Tomboy Behind (under contract with University of Michigan Press) examines Chinese, Taiwanese, and Hong Kong lesbians’ global media consumption in relation to their backlash against butch masculinity. Carman’s current research follows the Sinophone fandoms of Thailand’s Girls Love industry and examines Hong Kong lesbians’ post-protest migration to Canada and England. Her previous research appears on Continuum, International Journal of Communication and Journal of Lesbian Studies.

Digital media theorising from the postcolonial non-West: On mobile-mediated glocal intimacies

This presentation illustrates how digital media scholarship can meaningfully engage with postcolonial scholarship to theorise the transnational mediation of contemporary intimacies. As a case in point, it looks at the theory of mobile-mediated glocal intimacies.

Drawing on postcolonial thinking, glocal intimacies foregrounds the context within which its assumptions and arguments have emerged and developed. It is reflexive about the interpretive elements it plays up and downplays and, consequently, the import its scholarly insights might offer. Being grounded in East/Southeast Asia, the theory carries with it the imprint of a region where many societies continue to live with the persistence of colonially rooted institutional and social logics. So, its value lies in its attunement to how people in the postcolonial non-West often think of their local digital media cultures vis-à-vis the continuing but troubled dominance of Western global modernity.

Glocal intimacies also eschews assumptions of universality in terms of the insights that it might generate. It instead rests its broad applicability by building in a consideration of the diverse contexts wherein mobile technologies are developed, adopted and used. This is most evident in the theory's key dimensions of digital access, contextual localities, and sociotechnical dynamics. Through these dimensions, it underscores how people’s experiences of technologies continue to be structured in and negotiate with coloniality. 

In talking about glocal intimacies, this presentation hopes to show that the future of digital media scholarship would benefit from practices that enable more nuanced and inclusive theorising.

Jason Vincent A. Cabañes is Senior Lecturer in Postcolonial Media and Culture at Goldsmiths, University of London. His current research is on the entangled mediations of cross-cultural solidarities and intimacies across the world. He also does work on digital media cultures in relation to the political, socio-economic, and cultural realities of the global South. He is co-author/co-editor of three books, including “Mobile Media and Social Intimacies in Asia” (Springer). He has also published numerous articles in top-tier journals. He is presently completing his full-length book on media and postcolonial racism, which will be published by New York University Press.

Header image credit: Kittitep Khotchalee via Unsplash.