‘Queen of Dragons’: The inside story of Malaysia’s election fixer
(Wired) – As Malaysia votes, the country’s most prolific fake news creator reveals her story. Syarul Ema ran a successful misinformation operation for seven years
Hannah Yeoh is a natural target for the online hate mob. Young, female, successful and highly visible. Since her election to the state assembly in the Malaysian state of Selangor in 2008, she has faced the usual kind of abuse on social media—insinuations about her marriage, the occasional death threat.
Last year, it metastasised. In May when university lecturer Kamarul Zaman Yusoff put a post on Facebook alleging that Yeoh’s 2014 memoir, Becoming Hannah, which includes a discussion of the role of her Christian faith in her decision to enter politics, presented a persuasive case for Christianity. The stories in it, he said, could “coax, influence and instigate” people to convert, and thus amounted to proselytising—a crime in Malaysia, where two systems of law, civil and shariah, run in parallel.
Yeoh is an ethnically Chinese Christian in a country where the majority of the population are Malay Muslims, and where identity politics has always been a pathway to electoral success. The allegations against her were designed to play into long-held and deeply-rooted conspiracy theories—that outsiders, Christians and the Chinese have a plan to undermine Malaysia’s religion, culture and heritage. Yeoh had unwittingly become the latest, but by no means the only, avatar for those fears.
She is also an opposition figure in a political system where a single party has jealously held onto power for more than half a century, whose supporters have shown themselves more than willing to exploit these fictions for electoral gain.
“It’s not some random citizen commenting. These are all political websites, political blogs,” she says. “We call them cyber-troopers.”
The past few years have shown how easily electorates in supposedly developed democracies can be manipulated by false narratives that confirm peoples’ prejudices and widen existing social divisions. Compared to the US or Europe, however, Malaysia is the Wild West, where independent operatives, religious extremists, special interest groups and governments all compete for attention. Deep-rooted racial and religious tensions, a quasi-autocratic administration, a moribund mainstream press and ubiquitous social media usage have made this fertile ground for sowers of misinformation.
Another election is due in May 9, in a political environment made more febrile than ever by the weakness of the prime minister, who has been embroiled in a massive, multi-billion dollar corruption scandal, and by growing religious and racial intolerance. In that mix, cyber-warfare could have a major, and damaging effect.
“I think it’s like a timebomb, to be honest,” Yeoh says. “We don’t know how extensive an impact it will have.”
The personal cost has been significant too. Yeoh has reported several websites to the police, but they have taken no action. The falsehoods continue to circulate. In December, a quote attributed to her saying: “Israel owns Jerusalem” went around on WhatsApp, an inflammatory statement at a moment when Malaysian Muslims were protesting against US president Donald Trump’s decision to move the Ameri-can embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
Yeoh is worried that people reading the allegations may take matters into their own hands. In February 2017, a Christian pastor, Raymond Koh, was abducted in Malaysia, and is yet to be found. Many in the community believe that his disappearance is linked to earlier allegations that he had been proselytising to Muslims. It is a case that preys on Yeoh’s mind.
“When these lies reach the hands of extremists, it can be life-threatening for the victims,” she says. “That is my concern. That it does not just become something to talk about on social media, but it becomes life-threatening… these kinds of allegations, when they come to religion, are very sensitive. When the lies end up in the hands of people don’t know how to process those lies, that’s scary.”
