Platform Resistance and Counter-Disinformation Strategies: How Environmental Journalists Combat Corporate Misinformation Networks in Maritime Southeast Asia

This study examines how environmental journalists in Eastern Indonesia develop innovative digital strategies to counter corporate disinformation while maintaining credible climate reporting amid systematic censorship and algorithmic suppression. Through ethnographic fieldwork with 34 environmental journalists in Makassar and surrounding maritime communities (2023–2024), combined with digital platform analysis and content verification tracking, this investigation reveals how local journalists create “networked verification archipelagos” that mirror traditional maritime communication systems to combat extractive industry misinformation. Our analysis revealed three primary counter-disinformation mechanisms: (1) community-based verification networks that successfully identified 87% of corporate misinformation within 48 h through traditional knowledge integration; (2) algorithmic resistance strategies that increased environmental content visibility by 156% through cultural framing techniques; and (3) cross-platform coordination that maintained journalist communication networks despite 34 documented censorship campaigns. These networks enable accurate environmental reporting despite corporate-sponsored disinformation campaigns, government restrictions on mining coverage, and social media algorithms that amplify climate denial content. The research demonstrates how journalists in the Global South develop decolonial approaches to counter-disinformation that challenge Western platform-centric fact-checking models while maintaining journalistic credibility and community accountability. These findings contribute to understanding power dynamics and coloniality in disinformation studies while offering insights for media literacy and democratic integrity in climate-vulnerable regions.