The Weaponisation of WhatsApp Memes in Malaysia and Singapore

The next speaker in this AoIR 2019 session is Niki Cheong, who continues our focus on the uses of WhatsApp in Malaysia and Singapore. His project investigates the weaponisation of popular culture for political issues, in particular, and drew on walkthrough and scrollback methods as well as digital ethnography, interviews, and surveys with users.

This began from the observation that the current ‘fake news’ discourse is being weaponised as a tool to suppress dissent, create fear, or scam digitally illiterate citizens, and found that memes, online personalities and influencers, and innovative content formats are being utilised in the process. Indeed, there is a “Memes’n’Dreams” group on Telegram that has almost 20,000 users now.

But such memes are not just chasing shareability, but also pursue a mid-point between education and entertainment – they use popular culture content as an empty vessel that can be loaded with ideological content; the format disarms recipients and facilitates the spread of contentious ideas. Further, the use of graphical memes ensures that the content is distributed as intended, with limited further modification.

Such memes may address health conspiracies or race and religious controversies, and there are ‘black ops’ teams on various sides of the controversy that do battle with each other in order to control the framing.