Malaysia orders Meta, TikTok to present plan to curb offensive content, amid surge in complaints of ‘harmful’ posts
- Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim’s administration has been on an extended campaign against posts deemed to be provocative to race, religion and royalty
- The government has also asked Meta and TikTok to remove content linked to scams or illegal online gambling and boost online safety for young children
Malaysia has instructed social media giants Meta and TikTok to give a concrete plan of how they intend to clamp down on offensive content circulating on their platforms, the government has said, as the nation seeks to curb posts touching on the hypersensitive issues of race, religion and royalty.
Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim’s administration has been on an extended campaign against posts deemed to be provocative to the so-called 3Rs, after a 2022 election brought a conservative Malay nationalist minority bloc into parliament, whose political rise is blamed by some for stoking tensions between communities in the multicultural nation.
Malaysia’s online communications regulator and police said on Tuesday they had forwarded a total of 51,638 complaints of “harmful” social media content to platform operators over the first quarter of this year, a surge from the nearly 43,000 cases reported over the whole of 2023.
The two agencies did not specify the exact nature of the complaints. But they said tech giants Meta and TikTok had been ordered in a meeting on Monday to improve on their monitoring following the spike in harmful content.
“TikTok and Meta are required to prepare an improvement plan and strategy with comprehensive details as agreed to during the meeting,” the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission and police said in a joint statement.
The government had also asked Meta and TikTok to swiftly remove content linked to scams or illegal online gambling, and also implement age verification for children aged 13 and younger to bolster online safety for minors on their platforms.
Malaysia’s government has been criticised for trying to control the content of concerts, films and now the internet, ostensibly to protect Malaysian values. But critics say Anwar’s administration is on a slippery slope towards censorship and lost freedoms, in a bid to assuage a growing Islamist voting bloc that has gone to the opposition.
Communications Minister Fahmi Fadzil had in October reprimanded TikTok for not doing enough to curb defamatory or misleading content, and accused it of failing to comply with local laws.
Earlier, the government threatened to take legal action against Meta for failing to take down “undesirable” content. It later dropped the plan after several meetings with the company.
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In its latest Transparency Report released last December, Meta said it restricted some 3,100 pages and posts on its Facebook and Instagram platforms between January and June 2023 following reports that they had allegedly violated local laws.
It was the highest number of restrictions imposed by the company since it began reporting content restrictions in Malaysia in 2017, and six times higher than the amount reported over the same period a year earlier.
TikTok in December said in a similar report that it received 340 requests from the government to remove or restrict content in the first half of last year.
The micro-video blogging platform removed or restricted 815 posts or accounts over that period, which was about three times the number that TikTok had removed over July to December 2022.
