Report Reveals Surging Social Media Censorship In Malaysia

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Country behind more than a quarter of TikTok take-down demands in the world in last half of 2023.
(The Vibes) – MALAYSIA made 1,862 demands to TikTok to take down content in the second half of last year, 5.5 times the number six months before, Straits Times reports.
Quoting TikTok’s biannual transparency report, it said Malaysia made 2,202 take-down requests to TikTok in 2023, a more than 30-fold increase from 70 in 2022, and the most number of such requests from a country in the world.
Australia came in second with with 651 requests. In Southeast Asia, Indonesia was in second place with 351, and Singapore third with 47.
Malaysia alone was responsible for over a quarter of the world’s removal demands in this period.
TikTok did not provide details of the content it was asked to restrict in Malaysia. It said it would only take down content that breached community guidelines or local laws.
A similar trend was also observed on Meta platforms, which owns Facebook and Instagram.
Meta reported that 8,600 content restrictions were applied in Malaysia last year, a 15-fold jump from 553 in 2022.
Quoting sources in the social media industry, the report said demands for restrictions are continuing to grow in 2024 as the authorities deploy personnel to trawl platforms for offensive content.
“A vast majority (of the requests for take-downs) are political in nature. Over 90% possibly,” said a person involved in the content restriction process.
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