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ONLINE hate speech and false narratives circulating in comment sections of Dewan Rakyat live streams risk threatening national harmony and causing real-world harm to vulnerable communities, media and political communication experts have cautioned.
They said repeated exposure to harmful allegations and misinformation could lead the public to accept such narratives as “truth”, or to weaponise them as justification for hostility and discrimination against others.
New Straits Times cited Experts noting that many of the comments employ deliberate misspellings and fragmented language, a tactic widely used by social media users globally to evade automated content moderation systems and reach their intended audience.
Communications and Multimedia Content Forum chief executive officer Mediha Mahmood said the nature of comments highlighted by the New Straits Times should not be normalised, warning that they promote harmful stereotypes and fear.
“Netizens lump migrants, immigrants, undocumented persons and refugees under one label, ‘Pati’ (pendatang asing tanpa izin), meaning migrants without legal documents.
“They generalise about the group while promoting hate or fear against such communities and imposing criminality on them. You stereotype the Rohingya as thieves or whatever.
“This is bad because you're stereotyping an entire community,” Mediha said.
She said such allegations could translate into serious real-world consequences for communities that are already vulnerable.
“Some TikTok users prompt people to hunt these communities down.”
“It’s strong enough to get people to either hate it or support it, thereby dominating the discussion, which leads to either converting people to the same ideas or converting them to hate.”
Mediha also highlighted the intentional use of incorrect spelling to bypass algorithmic detection.
“For example, instead of saying ‘rape’, they say ‘grape’.
“Or if they don’t want to escape the algorithm, but they want to escape people searching for those words, they misspell it,” she said.
Monash University Malaysia communications and new media academic Dr Benjamin Y.H. Loh described the incoherent nature of many comments, coupled with deliberate misspellings, as an extreme form of “whataboutism”.
He said the tactic involved dropping fragments of information and keywords without making a coherent argument, prompting readers to draw conclusions on their own.
Readers, he said, might dismiss such comments as meaningless and move on, or be misled due to preconceived beliefs or limited media literacy.
Loh warned that such manipulation of public perception was dangerous because it created a distorted sense of reality.
“This will feed into their perceptions, world views and then reinforce it in many different ways.
“Where you're seeing thousands of (social media) accounts doing all these kinds of activities, this is where it gets dangerous because it's not in the spirit of democracy anymore.
“You're trying to create a fake impression of what people are presenting or what public opinion is looking like.
“That’s the main goal behind this.
“You’re trying to manipulate public opinion,” he added.
Meanwhile, Institute of Strategic and International Studies Malaysia director of research Harris Zainul said the use of sockpuppet accounts and automated accounts, commonly known as “bots”, was widespread in the region.
He said similar tactics were used in Indonesia and the Philippines to create the illusion that certain narratives were organic and widely supported.
“This is a part of mainstream political messaging strategies where digital labour is employed to create and support selected narratives,” Harris said.
He added that such potentially inauthentic activities were often indistinguishable from genuine online engagement, making them particularly effective and difficult to counter. - February 8, 2026