I wish to explore the area of Strategic Communication as the preferred field for doctoral study. As we all are aware, the issue of fake news is considered a crisis in communication. The term “Fake News”, has been gaining the attention from societies all over the world since the end of 2016. For instance, there has been a spike in the usage of the term by leaders around the world (Gabbatt, 2018). Although the colloquial term is widely used, it is only a fraction of a larger phenomenon called Disinformation and Misinformation, which are under the umbrella of ‘Information Disorder’. The three types of Information Disorder are described below (Wardle & Derakhshan, 2017), according to First Draft News, the truth-seeking non-profit based at Harvard’s Shorenstein Centre. 1. Misinformation: Information that is false, but not created with the intention of causing harm 2. Disinformation: Information that is false and deliberately created to harm a person, social group, organisation or country 3. Mal-information: Information that is based on reality, used to inflict harm on a person, organisation or country.

The research aims to answer 3 main research questions; focuses on 1. What are the Information Disorder on Social Media, 2. What are the States Responses in Countering Disinformation and Misinformation and 3. What are the Malaysia’s Perspectives: Digital Landscape, Misinformation Trend and current Approaches as well as the way forward for Malaysia

According to Moonyati (2019) there is room for improvement to address the above problems in protecting and stabilizing the information ecosystem. There are four proposed areas of improvement: 1) enhancing current legal responses 2) developing digital literacy 3) heightening the accountability of social media platforms, 4) strengthening the fact-checking mechanism.This research will adopt mix method of both quantitative and qualitative method to analyse and report the findings.

mokhtarrudin@mmu.edu.my

News are often disseminated via online social media. However, there are prejudices and obstacles towards the reception and acceptance of the news. This research explores the prejudices existing in Asia and suggest that government and media practitioners take this into consideration.

chsoh@mmu.edu.my