123 Disinformation in the Global South, First Edition. Edited by Herman Wasserman and Dani Madrid-Morales. © 2022 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2022 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 9 Media System Incentives for Disinformation Exploring the Relationships Between Institutional Design and Disinformation Vulnerability Jose Mari Hall Lanuza and Cleve V. Arguelles Introduction: Media Systems in Southeast Asia Hallin and Mancini’s landmark attempt to map the developments of the press in estab- lished democracies (2004) has proven lacking when applied outside of Europe and North America, as recognized in their later work (2012) and agreed with by other scholars (Voltmer 2008). While others have tried a media systems approach in Latin America (Albuquerque 2005; Santana-Pereira 2015), East Europe (Jakubowicz and Sükösd 2008), South Africa (Hadland 2007), Sub-Saharan Africa (Ngomba 2011), and even East Asia (Jiafei 2008; Rohrhofer 2014), literature on media systems in Southeast Asia appears to be scant. We contribute to the literature by attempting a typology of Southeast Asian media systems and discuss how each system’s particular institutional arrangements shape certain disinformation outcomes. We define media systems as a collection of rules, norms, and institutions that regu- late and shape the relationships between and among the state, the media, and the public in a given country. A media system has numerous components with an endless array of configurations, which in turn affect mass and political communication pro- cesses (Hallin and Mancini 2004). We posit that the same applies to disinformation. Literature shows that media gets more susceptible to manipulation because of decreas- ing public trust in media, increasing inclination towards sensationalism, and overreli- ance on a business model focused on ad revenue and optimized engagements (Marwick and Lewis 2017; Tucker et al. 2018). These factors are actually media system features that a diverse network of actors – including trolls, bots, conspiracy peddlers, partisan groups, hyperpartisan media, and even foreign governments – exploit, often in compe- tition with each other, to produce and promote disinformative content. Across differ- ent media systems, how prevalent these features are highly varied. We modify Dixit’s (1999), Hallin and Mancini’s (2004), and Santana-Pereira’s (2015) models in analyzing and classifying the media systems in Southeast Asia. We assess Southeast Asian media systems on the social role of the media in each society – who controls it and for what purpose is its power used (Arguelles and Lanuza 2020). We use the following major dimensions to determine similarities and differences in media systems in the region: (1) the historical development of media markets and the extent of its circulation; (2) the nature and degree of in/dependence c09.indd 123 c09.indd 123 13-12-2021 15:56:07 13-12-2021 15:56:07