KUALA LUMPUR, Aug 15 — DAP national chairman Lim Guan Eng today urged Inspector-General Police Tan Sri Acryl Sani Abdullah Sani to speed up and make public investigations into purported links between Malaysia’s men in blue and fake accounts on Facebook and Instagram as alleged by tech giant Meta.
The Bagan MP said the allegations were a serious matter and the police must act swiftly to protect its credibility and integrity.
“The Royal Malaysian Police should not allow itself to be weaponised as a political tool to mastermind a troll farm that manufactures fake social media accounts supporting the current coalition government and regurgitates false corruption claims against government critics,” he said in a statement.
Meta — the company who owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp — disclosed in its Quarterly Adversarial Threat Report released August 4 that 596 Facebook accounts, 180 pages, 11 groups and 72 Instagram accounts had been found linked to the Royal Malaysia Police (RMP), and have since been removed.
Meta said those accounts and posts contained memes in the Malay language, criticised the political Opposition, made accusations of corruption against critics of the government and promoted the police.
Lim noted that the Meta report further claimed those accounts and posts garnered 427,000 accounts as followers on at least one Facebook page, with 4,000 more joining the Facebook groups, and 15,000 becoming followers on Instagram.
The former finance minister also pointed out that US$6,000 (about RM26,739) were spent in total on advertising these accounts on Facebook and Instagram with payment made in ringgit.
Bukit Aman issued a two-paragraph denial statement on August 5 after local media picked up the Meta report, even as it said it took the allegations seriously.
