Winners of the 2024-25 LSE Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre Postgraduate Dissertation Prize
SEAC is delighted to announce that the Postgraduate Dissertation Prize of this year has been awarded jointly to Moses Siregar and Gladys Tan.
We extend our heartiest congratulations to the winners for achieving this remarkable feat. Congratulations!
Moses Siregar holds an MSc in Political Behaviour and has won the award for his dissertation titled Can Hiring a Cyber Troop Increase Political Conformity? Evidence from an Instagram Field Experiment with Buzzer-Coordinated Comment Sections.
Moses’ dissertation investigates how coordinated cyber troop operations — locally known in Indonesia as buzzers — shape online political behaviour and perceived consensus. The study implements a pre-registered field experiment with 913 Instagram users from Bogor City, randomly assigned to follow one of three private Instagram accounts for one week: (1) a control group with no exposure to manipulation, (2) an account infiltrated by anonymous cybertroopers, and (3) an account featuring credible-looking fake cybertrooper profiles. Across the treatment conditions, these operatives conducted astroturfed commenting campaigns that uniformly criticised local street-level bureaucrats in response to identical posts.
His dissertation has been recognised by leading scholars to offer the first causal and experimental evidence worldwide on the behavioural consequences of cyber troop operations. Within one week, participants exposed to cybertroopers publicly conformed to the orchestrated narrative—adopting similar language, tone, narrative framing, and comment length. In contrast, their private political attitudes, including meta-perceptions of public discourse and personal evaluations of bureaucrats, remained largely unchanged. This divergence highlights a key democratic risk: coordinated online manipulation can engineer the appearance of public agreement without genuinely shifting underlying beliefs, potentially distorting discourse and amplifying manufactured social pressure.
The resulting paper is currently under plans for journal publication. Building on this foundation, the research will serve as the basis for Moses’ PhD project examining how cyber troop strategies evolve through AI-generated content, multimodal disinformation, and platform-specific affordances across Southeast Asia, with the goal of identifying effective strategies to counter emerging forms of digital manipulation and disinformation.
Gladys Tan holds an MSc in Environmental Policy and Regulation and has won the award for her dissertation titled Capacity, Constraint, and Credibility: Climate Governance and Ambition in Singapore.
Her dissertation examines how Singapore — a high-capacity yet resource-constrained small island state — defines and navigates its climate ambition. Through an analysis of national strategies, parliamentary debates, and international positioning, Gladys explores how narratives of limits, foresight, and exceptionalism shape the country’s climate strategy.
This analytical lens reveals a clear imbalance in climate policy: adaptation is framed mainly as a technical and infrastructural necessity, while mitigation is presented as an opportunity for economic innovation and global leadership — where ambitious international messaging coexists with a more pragmatic, cautious stance at home. Situating Singapore alongside other small island states further highlights the unique pressures faced by countries that are institutionally strong yet still highly vulnerable to climate risks.
In her current role in climate philanthropy, Gladys applies these insights in practice. She manages a regional portfolio focused on just energy transition and climate resilience, working to translate research and policy into actionable strategies that support communities and help drive ambitious climate action across Asia.
