It is more than 10 days since the PAS MP for Kepala Batas, Siti Mastura Muhammad, with a doctorate, made an international fool of herself by claiming that I was related to the former MCP secretary-general Chin Peng as well as the Singapore founder Prime Minister, changing his surname to “Lim” Kuan Yew.
But there has been total silence from the PAS President, Hadi Awang.
I can understand Hadi silence on the Siti Mastura issue — as he had not been quiet during the period — and Siri Mastura was clearly his best disciple.
What Siri Mastura did was no different from the wild and preposterous allegations which Hadi had made — that DAP and I had been anti-Malay, anti-Islam, anti-Royalty, communist, and spreading Islamophobia — but which Hadi had not been able to produce an iota of evidence after more than a year.
In fact, Siti Mastura and Hadi Awang are the best examples of the study which showed that the “green wave” was the result of the political misinformation and hate propaganda of the social media in the 15th General Election.
In a piece titled “Social Media and the Manufacturing of Malay-Muslim security”, researchers Hew Wai Weng and Nicholas Chan cited a report that nearly three in four Malaysian Internet users relied on the social media as their main source of news.
They wrote: “Hence, social media necessarily becomes the primary medium where sequestered Malaysian voters experience politics. That means they also experience the wave of hate propaganda, half-truths, and downright misinformation that comes with it.
“There is no understanding of the green wave without an honest reckoning of these elements.”
In post-mortem examinations of GE15, it was shown that PN had tapped into the pulse of nation through its deft use of social media — particularly TikTok — to amplify its communal politics and overcome shortcomings at the grassroots level, leapfrogging rivals that were still campaigning traditionally.
According to Hew and Chan, the phenomenon was not unique to Malaysia, and was effectively a “common right-wing playbook” also being deployed in the US, India, and Brazil where the strategy was to “wrap the anti-liberal, anti-minority, and anti-establishment discourse as one, with the moral critique appealing more to conservative middle-class religiosity.”
Such messaging was particularly effective among the masses as it appealed to groups that saw themselves as being marginalised in their “own country,” they added.
“With hate speech and misinformation mainstreamed at such volume, efforts aimed at preserving free speech without regulation and ‘fact-checking’ without proactive measures seem increasingly out-of-sync with present challenges.”
(Media Statement by DAP veteran Lim Kit Siang in Penang on Saturday, 18th November 2023)