In 2018, the electoral authoritarian regime led by Najib Razak (UMNO) was replaced by governments oscillating between authoritarianism and democracy. These governments either did not have enough time and dedication to reform (Mahathir Mohamad), stalled reforms or even invented new repressive instruments (Muhyiddin Yassin), or promoted only a few, isolated reforms in order to uphold a government with the support by the opposition (Ismail Sabri). The Anwar Ibrahim government that has come to power in late 2022 promised to repeal a range of oppressive laws, but is still slowing down the reform process. 
The Anti-Fake News Act (AFNA) from April 2018 was clearly an instrument to stifle government critics, especially in relation to the 1MDB corruption scandal involving then-PM Najib. The Act penalised the spread of “wholly or partly false news” with fines of up to RM500,000 and jail of up to six years. It was even to be applied extraterritorially, that is even if an offense was committed outside the country by a person of any nationality. Even opposition leaders such as Mahathir Mohamad and Rafizi Ramli were investigated under AFNA, although eventually not charged because in May 2018 the UMNO-led government lost in the national elections. In only one case a Danish citizen living in Malaysia had been sentenced. The Act was devised as an instrument to crack down on government critics, but it came too late to serve as a repressive tool. 
The Act was finally abolished in late 2019 after the Mahathir government had also gained a majority in the Senate. When the reformist coalition fell in 2020 and a conservative government again took over, it used the Covid-19 pandemic to declare a state of emergency and to introduce the Emergency Special Measures Ordinance. On March 12, the Emergency (Essential Powers) (No. 2) Ordinance 2021 came into force and banned the spread of “fake news” on Covid-19 or the proclamation of the emergency. Yet, the Ordinance also did not provide an effective instrument to restrain civic spaces. Civil society groups even came up with new initiatives for social mobilization such as hashtag campaigns that initiated offline movements. 
During this turbulent succession of four governments within only a few years, all of them with very tiny and fragile majorities in Parliament, it was, arguably, impossible to make use of a comprehensive arsenal of repressive tools without running the risk of losing the backing of some coalition partners or inciting street protests.
All in all, there are only a few cases of AFNL included in our dataset. The low number is a result of a tendency to use other laws in order to charge activists or critical journalists/academics, for example the Sedition Act. Sometimes the very vague term “improper use of network facilities” is mentioned with regard to Section 233 of the CMA. Thus, the connection to “fake news” or “false information” cannot be made. Even the cases covered here are not that clear-cut. The journalist Wan Noor Hayati mentioned “fake news” in an interview, the charge under Section 505 (b) of the Penal Code does not clearly establish this connection. She was charged in 2020, died in 2023, and it is unclear whether she had been sentenced. 
In sum, AFNL has been used during this whole process since the 2010s not in a systematic, wide-ranging form, but rather in isolated incidences. New legislation largely failed because of civil society resistance, but also because the different regime coalitions were too fragile to allow for large-scale repression. 
This also pertains to the definition of what constitutes false information; a broad consensus among regime coalitions has always been lacking since 2018. False information on Covid-19 was overwhelmingly not misused against government civil society activists, journalists and academics. At the same time, most of the old-fashioned repressive laws were not repealed in order to sustain some control over civil society. Today, the three “R’s”, that is issues concerning royalty, religion and race, circumscribe the contours of the legal public discourse. Criminalization takes place frequently, but usually not on the grounds of spreading false information of “fake news.”