1. Background

On Saturday (July 11th 2015) between 4.50pm – 5.00pm two Malay youths were apprehended by Oppo salesperson(s) while allegedly running away after stealing a phone from another store at Low Yat Plaza. One was released and later returned at night (7.50 pm) with other youths to take revenge on the Oppo store and salesperson(s) involved [1]. Video footage of the fight started to go viral later that night.

The majority of users were sharing the video and expressing surprise. Few users openly expressed support/respect for the Malay youths involved in the initial fight on Saturday. There were more users commenting that Low Yat traders (specifically Chinese) were known to be cheats.

On Sunday (July 12th) there was little discussion about the incident on Twitter. Starting at 4pm a link to a blog post (http://www.utaranews.com/2015/07/rusuhan-besar-akan-berlaku-di-low-yatt.html) was tweeted out stating that there was going to be a riot at Low Yat Plaza ‘soon’ allegedly ‘in retaliation to cheating by Chinese traders’. The source for this news was not stated, and the link was tweeted out together with hashtags #melayubersatu and #kekalnajib.

Screenshot of the blog text:
utaranews_screencap

Example of how it was shared:

On Sunday night at 7pm a large group of Malay youths gathered outside Low Yat Plaza and tried to gain entry. However they were stopped by police and ordered to disperse. After midnight they returned and started to begin fights outside Low Yat [3]. Five people were injured [4] and a car was badly damaged by the rioters.

2. Current Findings

We collected 149,107 tweets from 63,538 users who mentioned Low Yat and related hashtags from July 11th – 14th 2015. Additionally we collected 228,781 tweets from 111,846 users mentioning race-related terms e.g. melayu; cina; rasis; malays; perkauman. This does not include ‘chinese’ as that keyword is used globally and will need to be examined separately if possible.

Of the 63,538 users who mentioned Low Yat, 29,014 users (45.67%) mentioned racial terms.

The earliest tweet we found mentioning the fight on Saturday night was sent at 7.57 pm:

From an initial survey of the tweets there appears to be a significant number of Twitter users who believe that Low Yat traders sell counterfeit goods and cheat customers. This was a consistent message being repeated.

An estimated 12,500 users (20% of total) talking about Low Yat specifically mentioned cheating traders; Malays being cheated or counterfeit phones. Some users criticised Malays for shopping at Low Yat, because the traders are ‘well known’ for being cheats.

5,905 users mentioned a boycott of Low Yat though not all of them were supportive of it – a number were critical of the idea.

2.1 Promotion of Malay businesses

Many users started to promote Malay-owned businesses as an alternative to Low Yat. These were the most popularly shared tweets:

2.2 Humour

There were also users tweeting jokes related to the fight and riot. Examples are:

2.3 Emphasis on avoiding distraction

There were also users complaining that people should not get distracted by the Low Yat incident as other issues such as 1MDB are more important.

2.4 Racial remarks
Frequent racial comparisons were also being made by users. Examples are:

  • Users asking, “Why are Petaling Street traders; illegal actitivies in Bukit Bintang area (e.g. prostitution) and Low Yat traders protected from raids whereas Malay traders are not protected?”
  • the raid at Uptown Shah Alam was mentioned as an example (http://www.themalaymailonline.com/malaysia/article/crackdown-on-malay-traders-not-racial-domestic-trade-minister-says). Some of the tweets highlighted the incident as racial due to the raid being on Malay traders. Examples are:
  • Users questioning why DAP always comes out to defend Chinese traders but not the Malay traders
  • Users questioning why the authorities (KPDNKK) publicly announced they are going to inspect Low Yat before they arrive; whereas for Malay traders they do surprise raids

In the lead-up to the raid on Sunday we found little evidence of users calling for Malays to ‘come down’ and show support or riot.

One popular user (@ehshiedan) sent a number of tweets about the boycott, gathering and news coverage. Some of these tweets were racially-toned e.g.

Another user praised the Malay youths from Saturday’s fight:

It is not clear at this point how influential these tweets were at stirring up support for the Malay youths involved in the fight.

3. Visualisations

This graph shows users tweeting about Low Yat versus users tweeting with racial terms (e.g. melayu; cina; malays). Not all mentions of racial terms refer to the incident. However the sudden increase shows some correlation between both groups.

LowYat_RacialTerms_Graph

In this network diagram we can show how groups of users are clustered around different topics. There are a total of 126,450 users in the network. Each blue node is a user, with the largest nodes indicating the topics ‘Low Yat’, ‘Cina’ and ‘Melayu’. Nodes are clustered based on the topic(s) indicated by their position.

LowyatCinaMelayu_TopicConn_1200px

There is a sizable amount of users talking about all 3 topics.

The word cloud below shows the most popular words tweeted together with ‘Low Yat’ and related hashtags. The words are sized based on their popularity – popular words have larger font sizes.

lowyat_wordle

The word cloud below shows the most popular words tweeted together with ‘Cina’.

cina_wordle

Unfortunately we were unable to generate a word cloud for tweets mentioning Malays due to the large volume involved.

4. Conclusion

There is some racial sentiment being expressed by users which has been triggered by this incident. However the racial remarks are not widely retweeted and don’t show up in a listing of popularly shared content. This means that individual calls for racial conflict did not gain traction.

There appears to be a genuine belief that Low Yat traders sell counterfeit goods and cheat customers. The publicity surrounding the incident at Low Yat triggered an outpouring of racial remarks. However the remarks are also not clearly separated into Malay criticism of Chinese and vice versa. There are Malay speakers criticising Malays as well. A deeper analysis is needed to understand the conversation, and the extent of the belief that Low Yat traders cheat their customers.

5. Scale of Importance on Twitter

5.1 The scale of conversation

This network graph shows how Twitter users tweeting about Low Yat and related hashtags from July 11th – July 14th were connected. This includes all users on Twitter limited to those who retweeted or had conversations with each other. This does not include users who were only tweeting about racial terms e.g. melayu; cina. This helps visualise the scale of the conversation.

LowYat_RTsConversations_July11_14_1200px_unlabel

Each user is represented by a node (circle) that is coloured based on the number of their tweets that were retweeted and the number of tweets sent to them. The more attention they receive, the larger the node. Any node that retweets another node or tweets to another node is connected.

Nodes are positioned based on their connections to other nodes – strong connections pull them closer. Large nodes are considered influential within the network. We have coloured the nodes based on a scale of blue (least influential) to green; yellow; orange; red; and purple (most influential).

Due to the scale of the graph, we can only show names from the top 1196 most influential users as seen below:

LowYat_RTsConversations_July11_14_1200px_labeled

There are 58,232 users with 111,287 connections within the unfiltered graph. The most popular users were:

  1. haziq_escobar
  2. ehshiedan
  3. abdmalekhussin
  4. eddskater
  5. zahir_ars11
  6. rajasyahiranmy
  7. lawaktahapdewa
  8. ezlahuddin
  9. santaidansampah
  10. rachelyappppp
  11. hmetromy
  12. phoebeshafinaz
  13. azimsulaimans
  14. 501awani
  15. notausrah
  16. nisaazmn
  17. mieramaira
  18. apizepies
  19. longfaiz
  20. millstewart93
  21. nashriqghazali
  22. akem_my
  23. yayaanh
  24. hafizskyz
  25. rafiziramli
  26. khairilanuar
  27. f4izalhassan
  28. twtpakabu
  29. izwnsyh_
  30. _amranfanz
  31. gengbebel
  32. asrulmm
  33. jack_vladamir
  34. abelljefrry
  35. hafizhany
  36. sembangkenchang
  37. manvsiaserigala
  38. kinggopoh
  39. hooliganatwork
  40. faizdickie
  41. denabahrin
  42. tarbiahsentap
  43. iapplemustache
  44. hafizrayyan
  45. lemansantan
  46. hilalazmi
  47. norman__g
  48. hermashahirays
  49. alwinhimself
  50. thefaizibrahim
  51. iz_fusion
  52. warismalaya
  53. syahredzan
  54. ms_fiqa
  55. fahmyvevo
  56. amenggggg
  57. nabilmatzinan
  58. ameen_azizul
  59. faizalhamssin
  60. syedattan
  61. kbab51
  62. najibrazak
  63. afxtro
  64. maryamcfc
  65. donasshole
  66. akeemmmmm
  67. sksz311
  68. nst_online
  69. putrareformasi
  70. afro_dreamer
  71. ranikulup
  72. ohmedia_my
  73. nasionalis_
  74. rykalhakimi
  75. blazeseman
  76. azyshm
  77. azrinfazniazmi
  78. akutweetfakta
  79. zzeed
  80. bernipu
  81. hermanshah
  82. musaldista
  83. _waaany
  84. jimiecheng
  85. emanthehalia
  86. malaysian_gags
  87. arepich21
  88. budaktomato
  89. googielum
  90. bharianmy
  91. drzaharuddinar
  92. abgkyo
  93. sayedmunawar
  94. staronline
  95. aminsaha
  96. haikalanuar211
  97. faariis
  98. izzulazrai
  99. momoeeeeeeee
  100. betaofficial_

6. References

[1] (2015, July 12) Melee in Low Yat Plaza. The Star Online. Retrieved from http://www.thestar.com.my/News/Nation/2015/07/12/Melee-thugs-Low-Yat/

[2] (2015, July 12) Rusuhan Besar akan berlaku di Low Yatt tak lama lagi.. #repeat #lowyatt #melayubersatu #kekalnajib. Utaranews.com. Retrieved from http://www.utaranews.com/2015/07/rusuhan-besar-akan-berlaku-di-low-yatt.html

[3] (2015, July 13) Tensions reignited outside Low Yat Plaza in fresh violence, several injured. The Malaysian Insider. Retrieved from http://www.themalaysianinsider.com/malaysia/article/tensions-reignited-outside-low-yat-plaza-in-fresh-violence

[4] (2015, July 13) Five injured in mob attack at Low Yat Plaza. The Star Online. Retrieved from http://www.thestar.com.my/News/Nation/2015/07/13/Low-Yat-mob-attack/

[5] Mayuri, M. L. (2015, July 13) Crackdown on Malay traders not racial, domestic trade minister says. Malay Mail Online. Retrieved from http://www.themalaymailonline.com/malaysia/article/crackdown-on-malay-traders-not-racial-domestic-trade-minister-says

Published On: July 22nd, 2015 / Categories: Analyses, Social Media / Tags: , , , /

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