ABSTRACT
The rise of social media in the late 2000s provided more avenues for dissent to emerge, especially among political oppositions whose voices were suppressed by mainstream media. Countries with high internet penetration such as Brunei, Malaysia, and Singapore are not equal in their shares of digital activism. As the online population in the country grew exponentially through the popularity of mobile social media, digital activism had expanded to include a large population of the urban middle-class such as in the case of the anti-corruption movement in the late 2000s. Just as governments range from the highly dictatorial to the more democratic, press practices in these nations of Southeast Asia vary from freewheeling in the Philippines and post-1998 Indonesia to totalitarian control in Laos and Vietnam. The rights of freedom of expression guaranteed in the 1993 Cambodian Constitution led to the growth of print media, which has led some to argue that Cambodia's press is one of the freest in Asia.
