Page 263 - Towards_a_New_Malaysia_The_2018_Election_and_Its_6146371_(z-lib.org)

248 Meredith L. Weiss

landscape will shift and settle in new patterns over time. We can identify ve
such interrelated elements; taken together (but in no necessary sequence), they
o er insight into why and how Malaysia has reached its current point and how
it might continue.
e rst factor is increased availability of political information, feeding
rising political awareness. Mainstream media are not only subject to
constraining laws, but nearly all are state- or BN-owned or controlled. ey
have long been e usively one-sided in their coverage and editorial slant (see,
among others, Zaharom 2002, 2008; Abbott 2011; Mustafa 2013). However,
Internet-based and social media are key features in Malaysia’s contemporary
media landscape—making possible new data-mining and advertising strategies,
among other implications. Moreover, that activists purposefully channel,
develop, and deploy these platforms, engaging in what Cherian George (2006)
labels ‘contentious journalism’, helps to increase their impact.
e numbers alone are startling, and reveal the impossibility of the state’s
controlling the ow of information and ideas in present-day Malaysia. As of
May 2018, about 81 per cent of Malaysians were on Facebook; 58 per cent of
Malaysians say they read news there. Another 6 per cent were on YouTube, on
which 26 per cent consume news, and 5 per cent were on Twitter. WhatsApp
is also ubiquitous: over half of Malaysians now say they read or share
political news on the platform. Overall, 86 per cent access news online, most
commonly free sites, via smartphones, dwar ng the share who prefer television
(54 per cent), newspapers (45 per cent), or radio (15 per cent). Nor is online
access so skewed as in the past by an ethnic digital divide; the share of Malays
with smartphones, including in rural areas, approximates the overall gures
(StatCounter [2018]; Tapsell 2018). WhatsApp is especially inscrutable, since
encrypted, favouring less easily parseable videos and images (T. Tan 2018).
Moreover, various e orts within civil society sought to leverage the Internet
to crowdsource election-speci c information. News site Malaysiakini had
supported undi.info, a compilation of election statistics and maps, since 2004;
other initiatives have appeared since then. For 2018, these included Sinar
Project, with a public database on politicians; a reprise of 2013’s ‘Watching
the Watchdog’ initiative on the scope and quality of media coverage; Tindak
Malaysia, which developed detailed, online electoral maps and trained polling,
counting, and polling-booth (barung) agents, termed PACABA; and Bersih
Pemantau, an o shoot of electoral-reform group Bersih (Movement for Clean
and Fair Elections), which both organized campaign- and election-observation
e orts and asked members of the public to submit observed o ences, to
investigate and add to an online map. Particularly given the surge in surveys and
1

This content downloaded from 139.80.253.0 on Fri, 06 Nov 2020 04:22:45 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms