Malaysian Crypto-Publics on WhatsApp

The next speaker at AoIR 2019 is Amelia Johns, who focusses on private group chats on WhatsApp, especially in the Malaysian context. Malaysia’s political climate has led young adult Malaysian-Chinese political activists to organise through this platform, and WhatsApp is now the second most popular platform in Malaysia (after Facebook). It is also used especially for discussing news and politics, partly due to its use of end-to-end encryption.

Such encryption is especially important because of sedition and media laws in Malaysia, which have created a chilling effect on the public expression of criticism of the monarchy or government, especially by non-activists. Young people have not completely disengaged from activism as a result, however, but have switched their communication activities to WhatsApp and Telegram as non-public encrypted platforms. There is still some suspicion about surveillance by Facebook, Inc. as the owner of WhatsApp, however, even if government agencies no longer have any direct surveillance capabilities.

The crypto-publics that have emerged through these shifts are interesting as they show that activists may no longer need to show a truly public face to pursue their aims – yet even in these crypto-publics there are still concerns about indirect public exposure through communication on-sharing especially by government informers that may have infiltrated larger chat groups; some such cases have been reported in the media.

This intersects conventional state surveillance with a form or peer or lateral surveillance – and officials from the CyberSecurity Malaysia agency are actively encouraging such lateral surveillance by chat participants. Yet even where governments are not promoting such peer surveillance, family members may engage in it anyway because they are concerned about possible state repression that may result from political statements – the chilling effect is in action in this ‘aunty problem’.

Conventional theory discussing such surveillance forms focusses too much on public rather than nominally private spaces, and draws clear distinctions between peer and state surveillance; these perspectives may not necessarily apply very neatly to the cryptic-publics of WhatsApp any more. We must think through what this means for our understandings of digital citizenship, and the emancipatory and politically progressive potential of platforms like WhatsApp.