Our newly appointed Communication Minister has come out all guns blazing in directing the The Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) to ask social media giants such as Facebook, Google and Twitter soon to block “false information and rumours” on their platforms.
That in itself is quite frustrating, but what really got me scratching my head was his claim that “that social media providers acted on 78 per cent of MCMC’s request for removal of content last year, with Facebook taking action on around 81 per cent of its request.”
Reuters reported that:
A Google spokesman in Kuala Lumpur said the Internet giant was “always in conversation with” the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission but he declined to comment on the request from the government on curbing content.
Facebook and Twitter were not immediately available for comment.
Fortunately, we don’t need to ask Google, Facebook or twitter about these specific request, because this information is already publicly available. All 3 social media platforms publish transparency reports that detail any and all government request made to them, and whether or not those government request were acted upon.
And as it turns out the data that our Minister has doesn’t quite tally up with the information published by the platforms. According to the Facebook transparency reports (found here and here), the Government of Malaysia made 36 content removal request, and 46 user account request. Of these, less than a quarter were acted on by Facebook, unfortunately Facebook doesn’t provide the details about the specific Government agency making the request or which specific request were acted upon. But, as you can see, the numbers are fairly small (a mere 36 content removal request over an entire year), and the success of those request are quite slim as well (less than 25%).
With twitter things get even more interesting.
In 2014, the government made 3 User account request to twitter, of which all 3 were rejected that’s a resounding success rate of 0%. And in the first half of this year, it had made 1 removal request, which was also rejected. Twitter doesn’t quite like the request from our government, and the government doesn’t make that many either.
I could go on with Google, but you get the picture.
The government is not having ANY success with the removal request, so why bother trying.
A more pertinent question is why is the Minister making these numbers up? Either he’s been given false information, or he’s just making shit up at this point. There is a possibility that maybe he’s telling the truth, through some math-magic, maybe the MCMC makes a smaller fraction of the request to Facebook, and maybe those have a success rate of 80%, but that’s unlikely, and it would be a insignificant number anyway.
My theory is that when you have Ministers who are appointed based on their loyalty to a certain someone, as opposed to technical knowledge of the area they’re supposed to be administering, you will continue to get this sort of this bullshit.
When technical merit, takes a backseat to political connections and allegiances–you’re bound to end up with people who don’t know anything. Something we all should be very very worried about.
Full disclosure:Google actually had one request for the 2nd half of last year, and complied with that request, resulting in a 100% compliance. However over the entire reporting history, Google complied with 17 out of 31 request, nowhere near the numbers the good Minister has.