Deception and propaganda are highly influential tools political movements and warfare. These elements are developed with one purpose in mind - to manipulate public opinion.

Carl von Clausewitz, a Prussian general and influential military theorist stated aptly in his book ‘Vom Kriege (On War)’, “War is nothing but a continuation of politics with the admixture of other means”, if you were to consider a broader definition of war as something that goes beyond military strength and artillery, the word could figuratively signify a more sinister embodiment of the present political warfare we now face.

The recent US Presidential election introduced global citizens to the term ‘fake news’; lies thinly veiled as news - a phenomenon that is nothing new and is as old as civilisation itself. Donald J Trump’s victory in the presidential election had the entire world focus on the deluge of false information and fictitious stories, particularly on social media, which many thought played a central role in his success.

For centuries, politics relied on more than just mere data and facts; it was and still is driven by ideological frameworks where interpretations of certain information are seen to be crucial elements that can make or break any socio-political structure.

Recently during the 16th Asian Media Awards, Malaysia’s Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak reminded the country that it was ‘the duty of publishers, editors and reporters to maintain readers’ trust and to fight to the last this tide of fake and false news that threatened to turn truth into a purely subjective matter, with little relation to actual facts’ and continued to address how foreign activists exploit and exaggerate “crackdowns” on free speech in Malaysia.

The narrative adopted by the prime minister closely resembled the diatribe deployed by Trump and Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte; which has lead to many of us to believe that therein lays a sense of desperation and misplaced vigour that struggles to placate an increasingly doubtful Malaysian society.

Dictators and pseudo-democratic governments are notoriously known to control mainstream institutions and traditional media outlets by curbing every ounce of freedom. Restricting expression and speech made it easier to manipulate news and distorting information to ensure political longevity and control over the mass population.

Consider this, Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Germany’s master propagandist, was in charge of producing Nazi propaganda with the sole purpose to present Hitler in the most positive light imaginable. Under Goebbels, one of their major principles of misinformation was “if you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth”.

Conveniently, this idea was lifted, adapted and exploited by our ruling regime; hence, for the past several decades, Malaysians have witnessed how truths were stretched and lies fabricated to justify some of the most crucial decisions that were made.

In the past, socio-political frameworks were constructed mainly from the political divide between left and right. Each presented different ideological hypothesis where analysis of similar facts were interpreted differently and policies were crafted based on the outcome of thorough discourse...