KUALA LUMPUR, May 30 — Islamist party PAS and its president Tan Sri Abdul Hadi Awang were found to be the most strident in inciting ethnic-based narratives on social media in the lead-up to the 15th general election (GE15), an independent report revealed today.

The report titled "Social Media monitoring of Malaysia's 15th General Elections” said Abdul Hadi and his party were complicit to incitement by neither calling out nor restricting social media users from further spreading hate in relation to ethnic groups.

"So these actors are fueling hate narratives, as well as user-generated comments and they were silent, so we can say they are complicit since they did not call out.

"It was very telling through the entire monitoring period,” Centre for Independent Journalism (CIJ) executive director Wathshlah Naidu said during the report's launch here.

With a total of 99,563 unique messages on social media analysed between October 20 and November 26 last year, the report found that "a significant majority” of social media posts comprised ethnic and religion-based narratives.

Wathshlah said Abdul Hadi himself was the sole individual with two posts reaching "Level Three” severity, for his posts which were categorised as containing dehumanising and hostile language.

Citing a social media post by Abdul Hadi ahead of the November polls, the report said the lawmaker has actively propagated anti-Chinese sentiments and antagonised DAP through the language used, which was further exacerbated by misinformation and disinformation.

"In fact, Abdul Hadi's aforementioned TikTok posting on Malay election candidates fielded by DAP as 'cunning and dangerous' was found to have the highest engagement at all social media platforms combined at almost 2.5 million,” the report added.

Wathshlah said such patterns of messaging also resulted in post-election propaganda, with actors manufacturing fear such as the creation of TikTok campaigns that sought to instigate possible recurrence of the May 13th historical race riots should the DAP and Pakatan Harapan return to power.

What was even more alarming was that 17,800 or 18 per cent of total unique messages were classified as between Level Two (offensive) and Four (calls for hostility), indicating that one in five social media users reacted with hurtful, discriminatory, inhumane, and inciteful remarks rather than simply disagreeing.

The report said TikTok videos loosely-linked to the May 13, 1969 racial riots, uploaded days before November’s polling, were significantly amplified through sharing and reposts as the coordinated and paid attempts to stoke anti-DAP and anti-Chinese fear and hatred through inflammatory posts manifested.

"The most prominent narrative on TikTok from our manual scraping was the demonisation of the DAP.

"This was done through racial incitement with the 13 May videos. It was also done by generating anti-DAP and anti-communist sentiments, labelling PH supporters as anti-Malay, and asserting pro-Malay nationalist views, including calling non-Malays pendatang (immigrants),” it said.

It was also observed that the aforementioned videos carried the "Paid Partnership” label, proving that the content was sponsored even though the identity of the sponsors remained unknown.

For religion-based narratives, Islam was weaponised to fan Malay-Muslim insecurities with a total of 24,484 unique posts across all social media platforms, with the attacks going hand-in-hand with the depiction of DAP as atheistic and anti-Islam.

"The monitoring also found narratives portraying some politicians as defenders of Islam.

"Assertions were also made that not voting for PAS or Perikatan Nasional would mean being un-Islamic or that the voter would likely ‘go to hell,’” the report said.

Religion was used to undermine and attack the rights of the LGBTIQ community and spread homophobia, with postings amplified by several actors, including PAS’ mouthpiece Harakah Daily that painted LGBTIQs as deviant and going against Islamic precepts.

"We see this also through the Malay supremacy narrative day in, day out which we basically see on social media, often this is fueled by many other factors including how institutionalised and systemic it can be,” Wathshlah said.

Apart from user-generated comments, the report also looked at coordinated inauthentic behaviour (CIB), commonly defined as accounts posing as bots and cybertroopers.

Out of the 99,563 unique messages, 2,623 or 2.63 per cent were identified as messages posted by CIB accounts.

"Most CIB activity was found on Twitter (1,642 posts), and most CIB activity was focused on race (1,458 posts) and religion (1,138 posts).

"Our findings reaffirmed the conclusions of other research about attempts to control public narrative during elections in Malaysia,” the report said.

CIJ, in collaboration with the University of Nottingham Malaysia (UNM), Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM) and Universiti Malaysia Sabah (UMS), carried out the monitoring project in conjunction with GE15.

Social media was mined using a customised automated tool that scraped almost 2.3 million data on identified accounts using keywords and character embeddings.

CIJ-trained monitors then reviewed, categorised and tagged the data and narrowed it down to 99,563 unique messages for the final analysis.