Hashtag Campaigns during the COVID-19 Pandemic in Malaysia: Escalating from Online to Offline

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Social media is “a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0 and that allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content”.In Malaysia, social media has played an important role in democratic and political processes by enabling greater access to knowledge and information and expanding the public sphere for discussion. In fact, digital platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have become strategic tools for social mobilization and protestbecause of their ability to function as networked communication spaces.One striking feature of social media is the hashtag function in relation to topics, issues and events.

In a hashtag, the pound sign (#, also known as a hash) precedes a word or phrase and is often used as conversational features on social media, especially Twitter. Hashtags allow people to tag content on social media sites such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter; it is a metadata indexing system that is used to identify specific posts on social media, and helps users to easily navigate and search for posts on various platforms.The political hashtag often refers to a politically controversial topic under discussion that could involve political figures, movements, causes, locations or issues.

From the semiotic perspective, hashtags are indicators of the intended meaning of the user’s statementand empowers online communities to establish themselves around issues or causes.When these are mediatized in cyberspace, “ad hoc”or “intimate publics”may form, centring around hashtags. Thus, hashtag activism is the “discursive protest on social media united through a hash tagged word, phrase or sentence”;hashtags are used to highlight issues and mobilize participants to be part of a cause or movement. For its proponents, “democracy is just a tweet away”and online campaigns can be used effectively by disenfranchised members of society against powerful elites. The decision to tweet is sometimes based on a political issue, event or topic that triggers the Twitter user’s interest and awareness and is congruent with his/her political predisposition, after which he/she encodes the responses within the technological design of the digital service. There are three types of political events that might influence users to tweet: Direct experience such as actual participation in campaign events or political meetings; indirect mediated experience such as watching televised debates or reading news reports; and encountering Internet content such as tweets or Facebook posts.