2024 Volume 62 Issue 1 Pages 90-106
Military persecution of the Rohingya, a Muslim minority in the southern part of Buddhist-majority Myanmar, has continued for years. And the beginning of democratization in the 2010s did not decrease the intensity of persecution. In response, Rohingya militant groups have fought back against the Myanmar military, deepening the religious antagonism between Buddhists and Muslims. Persecuted Rohingya refugees flooded into neighboring countries such as Bangladesh, Thailand, and Malaysia in May 2015, November 2016, August 2017, and April 2020. This paper investigates the issue by analyzing the Malay narrative of Rohingya on the social media platform Twitter (now X) in Malaysia, a country that has taken on more than 100,000 Rohingya refugees. Unlike conventional media in Malaysia, which has focused only on the rapid spread of anti-Rohingya sentiment on social media since the beginning of 2020, this paper contains a rather long-term analysis of the quantitative evolution of Malay-language tweets regarding Rohingya from 2015 to 2022. The focus is on what was being said during the above four peak periods. Positive sentiment toward Rohingya was dominant in the first three peaks, but negative sentiment became quite evident in the last peak of April 2020. A closer analysis of Malay tweets from April 2020, however, shows that even when anti-Rohingya sentiment was at its highest, tweets on the Rohingya issue were still diverse in content. Focusing solely on the anti-Rohingya sentiment might misrepresent the diverse opinions in Malaysia.
