Short and Sweet version:

Dear Malaysians,

Someone or something is targeting our society in a huge information operation that's designed to manipulate our people and threaten our democracy by making us fight and disagree with one another. 

Right now, there is a wave of fake profiles on social media impersonating Malaysians to sow racial discord. We don't know where they are from or who is responsible for them - but they exist, and they are being coordinated to achieve a political objective. 

These accounts, often with AI-generated profile pictures and with Malay names, target controversial news articles where they know that they can throw in politics and race.

There, they post racist and politically biased comments (e.g. "Its time for the gov to consider remove dap from the coalition, as they have been frequently criticising the gov efforts lately... dont let dap be the reason the unity gov gets labelled as a communist") and coordinating to like each other's comments to make you feel that other people support racism and even hatred for the political parties that they are targeting.

This is happening at scale with at least fifty and potentially hundreds of accounts across Malaysian social media, all of which are fake accounts - we have no idea who started them, but they exist. 

Our calls to action are the following, and if you agree with them, we urge you to sign the petition.

a) We urge the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) to investigate and eliminate these harmful accounts. 

b) We also call upon the Malaysian Parliament to address this critical issue through open debate of this issue.

c) Lastly, we urge Meta to treat this matter as an instance of Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior (CIB) and to consider this activity in light of previous investigations conducted against CIB in Malaysia, and to use this case study for the purpose of AI model training to eliminate and automation of CIB, and to eliminate it from Malaysia. 

Please sign and share this petition if you care about democracy, and make taking action a national effort so we can root out these malicious fake accounts and the individuals or organizations behind them and please be careful when you are on the internet.

Consider leaving a comment about why you are signing this petition as well as we fight this together!

Yours, 
Victor Tan.

 

Longer version:

Malaysian democracy is under threat by a wave of fake profiles on social media impersonating Malaysians to sow racial discord. They are performing internet brigading, manipulating debates, and performing deceptive campaigning against political parties by faking their identities and giving Malaysians the false impression that large numbers of people support their activities.

Here are two of the profiles in question. 

 

 

 

 

An incomplete list of profiles is also included.

Why are they "fake" profiles?

These accounts falsely impersonate Malay people and are active on nearly all prominent news websites such as Malaysiakini and comment on contentious issues.

The profiles typically share a few commonalities.

a) Firstly, they have AI-generated profile pictures. They are made with AI image generators and 
b) Secondly, they are often locked (but not always, as you can see from Khairul Asyraf's account).
c) Thirdly, they generally have names that identify them as being part of the Malay community (the people running them may not actually be Malay), which helps to fulfill their goal of creating racial discord - which is a real possibility in Malaysian society.
d) Fourthly, all of them go onto Facebook and look for contentious news articles and attempt to influence the narrative on them in a way that aligns with a strategic or political objective. They do this by writing contentious comments to influence the debate that are clearly one sided and disparaging, and then mass liking and reacting to each other's comments.

The articles that they comment on are articles like this one:

"COMMENT | Madani and Taliban's ban on women in education | Secretive visit of Taliban to M'sia raises more questions"​

"YOURSAY | Rules are rules, stop crying foul over signage"

...And the comments are like these: 

 

 

And...

 

 

And...

 

 

As you can see, the comments have no basis and are clearly incendiary.

As you can see, there are multiple fake accounts there that have spent their time proceeding to criticize politicians of a specific party, indicating that they are political actors and tell people, for example, that the Democratic Action Party (DAP) needs to go away, amongst other things, which is coded language for saying that the Chinese community in Malaysia should not be intervening in contentious issues that involve the predominantly Malay Muslim community.

(Note that I am not advocating for a particular political stance, by the way - it is that this behavior is wrong from a democratic standpoint no matter what, and that it should be stopped and curtailed.)

After having commented on a large scale, the accounts coordinate together to click like or react to each other’s comments, creating the impression that there is a widespread consensus that the party that they are targeting, or groups of individuals that they are targeting, are sanctioned by the community in an effort to influence members who are not part of their group to hold the same view.

Recall this comment:

 

 

 

...Consider the entities that have liked it.

 

 

...And consider the fact that these people are also claiming that DAP is inciting racial hatred.

Whether this strategy is successful or not is a separate matter, but there's no denying that what they intend to achieve is tremendously dangerous, that currently there is this movement and people who are not good at critical thinking are especially susceptible to this kind of manipulation, which may very well, after having swayed their reality, cause them to vote on or support issues that they might otherwise not have supported purely because of those manipulations done on a large scale - for example, some people may feel empowered to take part in racism or other forms of behavior because they feel that because others are taking part in it, they can.

 

These fraudulent accounts are not only a major concern for me personally; they pose an existential threat to our racial unity, democratic principles, and overall societal stability in Malaysia. They are efficient in disseminating discord, deception, and misunderstandings within a nation that prides itself on peace and unity, and all I have done is just point out a few accounts and solely on English language media. 

What is most alarming is their audacious attempt to manipulate our nation's democracy and stir racial discord, proven by the fact that many of these accounts are locked and bombard contentious news articles with inflammatory comments.

Even more unsettling, I've amassed substantial evidence in a database outlining the extent of this issue. 

Here is the database in question. It is view and comment only, but it contains links to all the accounts that have been used in this operation.  

This must be addressed with the urgency it deserves. 

We urge the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) to investigate and eliminate these harmful accounts. 

We also call upon the Malaysian Parliament to address this critical issue.

Lastly, we urge Meta to treat this matter as an instance of Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior (CIB) and to consider this activity in light of previous investigations conducted against CIB in Malaysia, and to use this case study for the purpose of AI model training to eliminate and automation of CIB, and to eliminate it from Malaysia, specially calling upon Ben Nimmo, Global Threat Intelligence Lead at Meta, to consider taking action. 

Please sign this petition now and share it with your friends and family through Facebook, WhatsApp groups, forums, or anything else - and above all, please be careful when you are on the internet.

Thank you!

Victor Tan.