'Queen of Dragons': The inside story of Malaysia's election fixer

As Malaysia votes, the country's most prolific fake news creator reveals her story. Syarul Ema ran a successful misinformation operation for seven years

09 May 2018

Malaysia's fake news law can see those found guilty be sentenced to six years in jail

Getty Images / Mohd Rasfan


Last year, it metastasised. In May when university lecturer Kamarul Zaman Yusoff put a post on Facebook alleging that Yeoh’s 2014 memoir, Becoming Hannah, which includes a discussion of the role of her Christian faith in her decision to enter politics, presented a persuasive case for Christianity. The stories in it, he said, could “coax, influence and instigate” people to convert, and thus amounted to proselytising—a crime in Malaysia, where two systems of law, civil and shariah, run in parallel.

That post went viral and splintered into a massive campaign of misinformation, as other social media users – many anonymous – took the original half-truth and evolved it. Meme-style doctored quotes pasted onto her image spread on Facebook and WhatsApp, alleging that she had called for the establishment of a Christian state in Malaysia, that she was an overt supporter of Israel. They circulated quickly, in part because the medium allowed it – more than half of Malaysians use WhatsApp to share, find or discuss news, according to 2017 research from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism – and in part, because so many people were primed to believe it.

Yeoh is an ethnically Chinese Christian in a country where the majority of the population are Malay Muslims, and where identity politics has always been a pathway to electoral success. The allegations against her were designed to play into long-held and deeply-rooted conspiracy theories—that outsiders, Christians and the Chinese have a plan to undermine Malaysia’s religion, culture and heritage. Yeoh had unwittingly become the latest, but by no means the only, avatar for those fears.

She is also an opposition figure in a political system where a single party has jealously held onto power for more than half a century, whose supporters have shown themselves more than willing to exploit these fictions for electoral gain.

“It’s not some random citizen commenting. These are all political websites, political blogs,” she says. “We call them cyber-troopers.”

The past few years have shown how easily electorates in supposedly developed democracies can be manipulated by false narratives that confirm peoples’ prejudices and widen existing social divisions. Compared to the US or Europe, however, Malaysia is the Wild West, where independent operatives, religious extremists, special interest groups and governments all compete for attention. Deep-rooted racial and religious tensions, a quasi-autocratic administration, a moribund mainstream press and ubiquitous social media usage have made this fertile ground for sowers of misinformation.

Another election is due in May 9, in a political environment made more febrile than ever by the weakness of the prime minister, who has been embroiled in a massive, multi-billion dollar corruption scandal, and by growing religious and racial intolerance. In that mix, cyber-warfare could have a major, and damaging effect.

“I think it’s like a timebomb, to be honest,” Yeoh says. “We don’t know how extensive an impact it will have.”

The personal cost has been significant too. Yeoh has reported several websites to the police, but they have taken no action. The falsehoods continue to circulate. In December, a quote attributed to her saying: “Israel owns Jerusalem” went around on WhatsApp, an inflammatory statement at a moment when Malaysian Muslims were protesting against US president Donald Trump’s decision to move the Ameri-can embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

Yeoh is worried that people reading the allegations may take matters into their own hands. In February 2017, a Christian pastor, Raymond Koh, was abducted in Malaysia, and is yet to be found. Many in the community believe that his disappearance is linked to earlier allegations that he had been proselytising to Muslims. It is a case that preys on Yeoh’s mind.

“When these lies reach the hands of extremists, it can be life-threatening for the victims,” she says. “That is my concern. That it does not just become something to talk about on social media, but it becomes life-threatening… these kinds of allegations, when they come to religion, are very sensitive. When the lies end up in the hands of people don’t know how to process those lies, that’s scary.”

Syarul Ema ran online misinformation campaigns under the Ratu Naga monkier

Syarul Ema

The Malaysian government’s first forays into cyberwar began a decade ago, in the aftermath of a humbling election result. In 2008, opposition parties were able to sidestep the government-controlled mainstream media and get their messages directly to the electorate. The ruling Barisan Nasional coalition, which has been in power since Malaysia’s independence, lost five state assemblies and its two-thirds majority in parliament, an important threshold, as it denied the government the ability to rewrite the constitution.

“I think we saw the potential of the internet impacting peoples’ views in 2008, when the opposition really used the internet to garner support and to spread alternative news,” says Tan Meng Yoe, a lecturer in communication at Monash University in Selangor, who researches how the internet has shaped religious and political discourse in Malaysia. “I think that was when we learned the potential of spreading a lot of news very fast to the masses, for better or for worse.”

One expert, who contributed to Barisan Nasional’s election postmortem review, says that the party’s leaders concluded then that they needed a better strategy. “The leadership agreed that the major reason why they lost was that they lost the social media war,” he says. “So after that they poured a lot of money into this so-called cyber-warfare.”

At the same time, the party doubled down on its identity politics. Malays are the largest ethnic group in Malaysia, and to be Malay is to be Muslim, according to the constitution. Barisan Nasional, and its largest constituent party, the United Malays National Organisation, have maintained their position through affirmative action policies that give Malays preferential access to housing, education, government contracts, jobs, and even import licences for cars.

In the 1970s, these policies were justified on the basis that ethically Chinese communities had benefited more than Malays during British rule, and that the balance needed to be redressed. Over the decades since, Malay identity has become more tightly bound to religion, and to an increasingly conservative interpretation of it. The economic arguments for affirmative action have been gradually replaced by an ethnonationalist narrative, by which the government has positioned itself as the protector of the faith and the race.

“There is [now] this siege mentality that somehow there is an attempt by the Chinese to try to carve a larger political space, or even to carve a larger political space for Christians,” says Mohamed Nawab Osman, who heads the Malaysia program at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore.

It was in this environment that Syarul Ema Rena Abu Samah found her calling. In 2008 she was a relatively minor blogger, albeit a politically well-connected one – her mother had been a regional communications head for the party; her husband is a former youth leader. She was tangentially involved in the party’s online strategy, and taught a few classes on how to make infographics, but as Barisan Nasional started to gear up to fight the next election, she was invited into the tent.

By 2013, she had built a network of 80 cybertroopers who ran thousands of fake social media accounts, that created and amplified falsehoods to undermine opposition to the government.

A decade on, the playbook that she developed for online misinformation is a familiar one. She and her colleagues worked to delegitimise Barisan Nasional's political opponents by fabricating supporters who would make outrageous, usually racist statements, that would drive anger against the main opposition parties.

“We would take names and pictures from [social media accounts in] Indonesia or the Philippines and make a fake account, acting like an opposition supporter. We’d come up with racist statements… then we’d print screen and spread it everywhere,” she says in an interview in her lawyer’s office in Kuala Lumpur.

If a major story broke that would damage the government, her network would create a distraction. “If an issue like [a major corruption scandal] comes up, people get angry. But you throw out an issue like: ‘this Chinese fella mocks our people’, they will focus on that.”

Sometimes they targeted specific politicians. One 2014 post that she showed to WIRED was a faked quote from Theresa Kok, an opposition member of parliament. Kok had been arrested in May of that year and charged with sedition for a YouTube video in which she allegedly made jokes about Malaysia being an unsafe place to live. Syarul Ema’s post shows Kok saying that she saw nothing wrong with offending Malays—tacitly admitting to the charges. Kok filed a police report.

During the interview Syarul Ema, an intense, round-faced 35-year-old, vacillates between contrition and barely suppressed pride at her ability to shape political narratives. “I have said sorry,” she says. “Publicly.”

Her crowning achievement came later in 2014, when she was called in to firefight during a by-election in Teluk Intan, a constituency where the racial mix, and hence the electoral algebra, was finely balanced. The ethnically Chinese population was expected to vote for the DAP, Malay voters would turn out for Barisan Nasional, so both sides looked to the Indian minority to swing the result.

Twenty-four hours before polling stations opened, a video began to circulate on WhatsApp. It began with footage of a scuffle in the street, then cut to an Indian member of Barisan Nasional giving an angry piece-to-camera, alleging that he had been assaulted by a DAP activist who had insulted his mother and religion. It was a lie, entirely masterminded by Syarul Ema.

“I gave him a script,” Syarul Ema says. “I asked him to say: ‘if you love your religion, you need to go and vote for Barisan Nasional and make sure that the DAP loses’.” The DAP lost the seat by 500 votes.

All of this was done with the tacit blessing of the government. She claims to have met with the media unit at the Prime Minister’s office; they did not respond to requests for comment. However, the government has made no secret of the fact that it encourages a huge network of cybertroopers, some of whom are on the payroll.

Syarul Ema says that she was never paid; she did it out of an ideological commitment to the party. “I was indoctrinated,” she says. “I thought I was fighting dark forces. I really thought that.”

She was kept at arm’s length, an independent consultant running her own team of volunteers who were tasked with solving problems. Her account tallies with those of others who spoke to WIRED; that they were given a basic direction by the party, but that their tactics were of their own devising. “They call it ‘Black Ops’,” she says. “Cyberwar. Propaganda.”

Syarul Ema’s defection came about because she wrote something online that she actually believed. In 2015, angered by prime minister Najib Razak’s flip-flopping on economic policy, she wrote a scree about trade policy and tax, which included the quintessentially Malay curse-word “Pukimak”—literally “mother’s pussy”. On that basis, she was sued for insulting the prime minister.

“Even Trump doesn’t sue people who criticise him,” she says. “Why am I being sued for that? Because I am telling the truth? They sued me because of one f-word. It’s unjust.”

Her house was raided, her phone was confiscated. She has now been formally charged under Malaysia’s Communications and Multimedia Act, an open-ended piece of legislation that is routinely used to shut down opposition in Malaysia. The case is due to go to trial in the next few months.

Malaysia's prime minister Najib Razak appears on a digital billboard advertising his Barisan Nasional party ahead of the country's election

Getty Images / Ulet Ifansasti / Stringer

The fake news machine has kept on moving since Syarul Ema quit. Just as in the US or Europe, where dog-whistle stories targeting migrants or Muslims have spread widely and rapidly, the narratives can look unhinged to anyone outside of the specific community that they aimed at.

Just in the last 12 months, the police have had to debunk rumours that Chinese government patrol cars were operating in Malaysia; shoppers have boycotted shoe company Bata Primavera after a false report that it was stocking shoes with ‘Allah’ written on the soles; and the owner of the local McDonald’s franchise has filed police reports against social media users wrongly claiming the company was funding Israel’s actions against Palestine.
The problem has become so wild, so well established, that the government says that it feels compelled to act. In March, they passed a bill in parliament that would outlaw fake news, making it punishable by up to 10 years in jail and 500,000 ringgit (£91,000). The law is incredibly broad, covering local and foreign publications, social media, and anyone who offers “financial assistance” to those posting or sharing news deemed to be fake.

Its first conviction, on April 30, was of a Danish citizen, Salah Salem Saleh Sulaiman, who pled guilty to lying about witnessing the shooting of an alleged member of the Palestinian militant group Hamas, Fadi al-Batsh, in Kuala Lumpur. He was sentenced to a month in jail.

The law was met with horror from activists and journalists, who say that the bill will simply be another way for the government to crack down on dissent and suppress embarrassing stories. Amnesty International said it was a “blatant attempt to shield the government from peaceful criticism”. Lawyers For Liberty, a local free speech NGO which is representing Syarul Ema, called it “the death knell for freedom of speech”.

Pro-government cyber-troopers already seek out dissent online, finding offence where they can. Under Najib the government has been hyper-sensitive to criticism. Dozens of people, from high profile activists and critics to individual Facebook users, have been charged with sedition, or under the Communications and Multimedia Act for things that they have posted on social media. These can be quite innocuous. In February, a 24-year-old man was fined RM4,000 (£730) by a court in Kuala Lumpur for a Facebook post mocking the prime minister’s karaoke rendition of Sha La La La by The Walkers, which he performed in duet with the president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, in 2016.

The point of greatest sensitivity is a massive corruption scandal, centred on a government-backed fund, One Malaysia Development Berhad, known by its acronym 1MDB. Najib and those in his inner circle have been implicated in the misappropriation of billions of dollars from the fund. Najib has denied any wrongdoing, and any deviation from his official account is punished. In August 2015, Malaysia issued an Interpol “Red Notice” seeking the arrest of the British journalist Clare Rewcastle Brown, founder of a Malaysian news site, the Sarawak Report, which covered the scandal. Interpol rejected that request.

With an election around the corner, analysts see the law as a naked attempt by the government to gain an advantage and to discredit their critics. On May 2, a week before the election, the head of the Kuala Lumpur police Mazlan Lazim announced that a fake news case had been opened against the opposition leader Mahathir Mohamad, who had claimed that a charter jet due to fly him to a campaign stop had been sabotaged.

“[The new law] will be targeted at the opposition. Not people who put out fake news in support of the government,” says James Chin, a Malaysian academic and the director of the Asia Institute at the University of Tasmania. “Once you put in place this law, you go after all the opposition cyber-troopers. The [administration] can turn around and say: ‘look at these prosecutions. It’s clear that the people who are spreading fake news in Malaysia are the opposition’.”

The opposition does have one expert on board. In an attempt to make amends for her past work, Syarul Ema has turned whistleblower. Using her old screenname “Ratu Naga” – Queen of Dragons – she is trying to expose the tactics that she helped to popularise, calling out fakes on social media. “I believe that we can open up people’s minds so that these tactics no longer can be used,” she says. “Now, I just tell the truth only.”