For the first time, I watched a news story unfold on Twitter, and it was a most uplifting and entertaining end to what has been a long and frustrating day in Malaysian politics.
The day started with the news that the Agong had agreed to a state of emergency in Malaysia to stem the spread of Covid-19. The emergency ordinance runs from today until August 1, or earlier if the Covid-19 situation is under control, although what it means to have the situation under control has not been explained.
Our unelected and useless Prime Minister broke into English during his Malay press statement to reassure “stakeholders” that “Malaysia is open for business” despite yesterday announcing a lockdown for six states, all but one of which are among the top six states contributing to the country’s GDP (Selangor, KL, Johor, Sabah, and Penang). This is also okay, because despite there being a lockdown in place, five economic sectors will be open for business as usual – manufacturing, construction, services, trade and distributions, and plantations and commodities. Which is, um, basically all of them.
Anyway, what any politically-aware Malaysian knows is that the real reason for the emergency is to suspend Parliament and prevent elections from being called because the Prime Minister, who was part of a coup last year that saw him betray his own coalition at the start of the pandemic, has now lost the confidence of the assholes who partnered with him to overthrow a democratically elected government.
The government’s majority, which had been 113 out of 222 members of Parliament was reduced to 110 out of 220 (two MPs having passed away) a couple of days ago when some of his conspirators turned against him. His emergency announcement was followed by another conspirator withdrawing support for him and daily Covid-19 cases in Malaysia reaching a record high of 3309.
In other words, as of today, the backdoor government led by Muhyiddin Yassin has collapsed, but in a remarkable second coup, he has managed to avoid being thrown out of Parliament. Gotta hand it to him, that’s excellent political strategy.
Anyway, all that drama meant I was a little distracted during the workday so I was planning to spend my night revising a paper but my co-author sent me a message pointing out a 2014 tweet from the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC), which regulates communications, media, and information in the country. The tweet read simply “fuck fuck fuck”. (And it was one of the less offensive tweets that I saw.)
Earlier this evening, the MCMC had released a statement telling people to behave themselves online and not spread misinformation or make slanderous or incendiary remarks pertaining to race, religion, or royalty on social media. It even encouraged people to rat each other out via Whatsapp and email.
Which led to this fantastic saga unfolding on Twitter.
The Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission’s (MCMC) Twitter account @SKMM_MCMC went dark tonight after local Twitter users unearthed old tweets with crass and puerile content from the account dating back to 2014.
[The tweets [from the original account, owned by a teenager at the time], many of which were retweeted and quote-tweeted by local users [included] f-bombs, several homophobic tweets, racist remarks, and also lewd ones expressing lust.]
[The] original owner of the account…had [sold it] to another person — who presumably then sold the account to the administrator of the MCMC account.
Account trading, which violates Twitter’s terms and conditions, is used when a person or entity wishes to acquire an account that has already amassed a huge number of followers straight away rather growing it organically over time.
[When Twitter users reported the MCMC account to itself, MCMC] claimed that its Twitter account was infiltrated and hacked by “irresponsible parties”, and has been suspended for the time being — despite the tweets dating back to 2014.
It also [warned] the public against being influenced by “suspicious, offensive and slanderous” tweets published by its account.
Usually I get to these stories after the original posts have been deleted, and all that’s left are screenshots. And that’s where things did wind up tonight, but I was there for it all, and it was great. The memes have been fantastic. Here are some that made me actually lol.