Little academic research has been conducted on critical speech in Southeast Asia during the COVID-19 pandemic.1 This article aims to partially address this gap through an empirical case study of op-eds published on the website of the civil society program Strengthening Human Rights and Peace Research and Education in ASEAN/Southeast Asia (SHAPE-SEA). Intended for ‘those who find it challenging to access more mainstream media’, the op-eds provide a snapshot of how civil society groups, scholars and students who otherwise might be marginalised from conventional academic discourse are exercising their freedom of expression in grey literature during a time of global crisis. The study asks, who authors these commentaries? What are they writing about? Which countries are their focus? How far are they willing to go in criticising government policies? Each op-ed was assigned a ‘criticalness score’ based on the frequency of criticising the government and the severity of the language used. The scores were then used to test whether, for instance, the level of criticalness correlates with a country’s Global Freedom Scores or a government’s handling of the epidemic. Although little to no correlation was found, among other things, the criticalness scores nonetheless revealed that male and female authors were equally critical, students were more critical on average than lecturers or non-governmental organization (NGO) workers, and certain themes—law and order, human rights and freedom of expression—elicited the most critical speech. The average overall criticalness of the 115 op-eds evaluated was 1.15 on a scale up to 3, reflecting ‘slight criticism’. The study sheds light on the nature of freedom of expression in a region well known for its restrictive laws, policies and practices on speech, indicating that criticalness of government remains mild, even during the pandemic.