Dec 9, 2022
Several posts warning about a possible repeat of the deadly May 13, 1969 race riots were found on TikTok in the 48 hours after polling day for GE15, which accumulated over several hundred thousand views.
The videos propagated a similar narrative targeted at Malay-Muslim viewers, alleging political dominance by DAP if the party is allowed to be a part of the government. It has been confirmed that at least three of these videos were indeed paid for.
In this week’s episode of InsideKini, we sat down with our special reports editor Aidila Razak and revisited a project she led in 2019 on the May 13 riot.
Dina: Hello Aidila, thank you for sitting down with me again. Some disturbing videos have emerged on TikTok and other social media platforms about a possible repeat of the May 13 race riots, following the polling day of GE15.
Can you share any updates on this?
Aidila: As we know, TikTok has taken down some of those posts and actually some of them were found to be paid, but TikTok doesn't want to say who paid for them. Following that, the MCMC has summoned TikTok to find out more. We don't know what has happened since then, but hopefully, we'll get more updates (soon).
Dina: Based on what was shared recently regarding the race riot, how much do you think we, as Malaysians, know about the incident?
Aidila: To be honest, I was a bit disappointed with some of the things that I saw on the platform because we had done quite extensive coverage on it during the 50th anniversary in 2019. So to see the kind of shallow understanding of it through those videos makes me feel like maybe we need to do it again or that project needs to be shared again.
In other words, I felt like at least the people who were behind those videos had very little knowledge (on the matter) and it was very obvious. I think they didn't really put any effort to find out. We can see that some of the viral videos even got the date wrong, which is kind of weird.
So it was just a lot of “here's some random photo and let's mention this date or associate this date with some violence”. It didn't seem to me that there was a very deep understanding of what had happened.
Dina: In 2019, you, the Kini News Lab team and others released a project on the race riots titled ‘May 13, never again: The 1969 riots that changed Malaysia’. What kind of preparations did the team need to do for this?
Aidila: We came into it knowing that it might be contentious - that we had to be really careful about what we produced. So even from the start, like the composition of the team; we made sure that it was ethnically balanced which isn't usually the case for other kinds of special reports or News Lab reports. At that point, we knew that we were trying to reach the younger generation. People who didn't experience May 13 have probably heard it from their grandmothers or - two generations down. So we also tried to make sure that there were young people in the team as well.
The other preparations would be trying to understand what the scope of the project was, like really defining the scope and the sources that we wanted to refer to and how we were going to make reference to those. That was the kind of preliminary preparation.
After that, it was just basically trying to find all the sources that we wanted. That would be your journal articles, your books, going into the archives to look at newspapers at the time and other sources which we felt were credible and people would not question those sources. That was really important for us because this incident is very weighted in the national memory.
But at the same time, lots of people don't really know what happened, it's become a sense of folklore. So we wanted to take it from that sphere of folklore and myths into something that can be in a way fact-checked and something more credible that people can refer to.
Dina: You mentioned archives - what was the whole process like in compiling them and how long did it take?
Aidila: It's been a while, so I don't remember how long we actually worked on this project. I think it was a few months, but actually, the National Archives was quite helpful. We went to them and our former colleague, Kai Hui, took this part of the project. She went to the National Archives and told them what we were looking for and they pulled out newspaper clippings from that era.
But there wasn't much - if we were looking for government documents or anything - there wasn't much there. The government account obviously was from the National Operations Council (Mageran) report that was released after.
Dina: What would you say was the biggest challenge the team faced when working on the project?
Aidila: There was always this anticipation that it might not be so well-received - so that was always a concern (while) doing the project. I guess the challenge wasn't so much in producing it, but it was after dealing with how people reacted to it because it's such a contentious subject. There were people who thought we were referencing too much of what the government had to say and some people thought we referenced eyewitnesses too much or even articles at the time. So it was really quite difficult to balance those. It even came to a point where some people were quite upset that lots of our references were male.
So we organised a sharing session at the end of the coverage. We had an event where eyewitnesses would speak to young people predominantly under the age of 25 or 30 about their experience. We were trying to balance ethnic representatives and then I suppose, age or where they were at that time, but unfortunately at that time, it was only men. So that was also another issue that we faced, that we were not providing space for all the people who experienced it. It is difficult in that sense that everyone had a beef about how the project was done but I guess because it's such a difficult topic, it could never be perfect.
Dina: Yeah, I understand. And I think people might also have different perspectives on the incident, and when the project was published, it might not necessarily have been what they learned or heard from others about the riot.
Aidila: Absolutely. And everyone had heard something or the other from their family members or their friends, right? I remember one of our colleagues even came to us and (said), “my grandmother told me there was this attack at an open-air cinema”, which actually was something that people talked about a lot, but we found zero references to that and we couldn't find any living eyewitnesses to attest to it so we couldn't include it.
So there were things like that. People felt like we were censoring that part and depending on maybe which community was attacked in that particular incident. So they would view it as not giving enough weight to the suffering of this particular community in this incident.
But mostly it's because we couldn't find a reference to this and basically all the incidents that we included in that coverage had a reference. (We even) have a footnote for all of it. Even eyewitness interviews had to be corroborated by documents or by another eyewitness. We were not ready to put in something if it was just from someone who heard it from someone no longer living.
Dina: It does sound like the whole process was very meticulous and had to be thought out carefully - and you said earlier about picking out the team members to work on this. Because, well the riot is a touchy subject especially when we’re discussing racial matters.
Aidila: You think that as journalists you should not be biased in that sense, you should just report objectively. But yeah, it's hard. These things are kind of embedded in you and even if we were so objective, we needed to show that we were, so that's why we had carefully chosen the team to be that way.
Dina: Speaking of eyewitnesses, what stood out the most in the project, for me, was their accounts of the riot. How was it for you to hear those stories during the interviews?
Aidila: I interviewed one person who was a student at the time, who got caught up in the riots in Kampung Baru just by circumstances and was stuck there for a few days. Even now, reading back the interview which we published almost in full, I was in tears again.
The thing is, even if you know all the details or at least most of the details of the incident, hearing it from the perspective of someone who was there and how they felt is really different even from that interview. And even from logging all the locations of the riot, I think for months every time I go past those areas I would kind of see what happened.
I'm kind of hearing it secondhand, but it's still like traumatising in a way. Imagine if someone actually lives through it. And for them to say that sometimes they can't even go to those places again 50 years on, or they can still smell the blood in the incident. It's really something that stays with you.
Dina: What do you hope readers can learn from what the team have gathered on the race riots?
Do you think there should be more projects or research on the May 13 incident, especially now that we’re seeing it resurfacing on social media?
Aidila: I guess what I hope people will learn is obviously no one wins in this kind of situation. It's really ridiculous even now when people want to say, “Oh, the Chinese community got it worse, or the Malays got it worse”, and because this happened or that happened. Who cares who got it worse? People died for no reason. They were just there and they were killed. So that's what I want people to understand - no one wins in this situation. Even the people who went there of their own volition never wanted it to happen again. So why would we want a repeat of this?
I have some, I wouldn't say regrets, but I kind of wish that the project happened later when TikTok was more of a thing as it is now. We didn't even consider TikTok at that time, (because) I guess there was less focus on online discussions and all those things. It was more in-person because we didn't live through this whole Covid period.
So if we had done this project now, we would've done more to reach a much younger audience on platforms which serve them like TikTok. The platforms that we were using before, I think maybe would've reached people in their twenties or even late teens but not younger people, like teenagers who I think are starting to learn about it in less accurate ways through means like TikTok.
What's next?
As of Nov 30, the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) and police have summoned TikTok’s management to explain “paid content” warning of a repeat of the May 13 riots.
Meanwhile, newly minted Digital Communications Minister Fahmi Fadzil said he had a planned meeting with representatives from TikTok to discuss matters related to existing regulatory frameworks.
Host
Wan Irdina
Social Media Producer
Guest
Aidila Razak
Special Reports Editor
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