'Copycats' the new form of cyber video wars
The competitive atmosphere on the social media has become intense lately as the 13th general election is looming, with both BN and Pakatan Rakyat sabotaging each other by plagiarising their rival's political videos.
The competitive atmosphere on the social media has become intense lately as the 13th general election is looming, with both BN and Pakatan Rakyat sabotaging each other by plagiarising their rival's political videos.
More videos have been published on the Internet by members and supporters from both sides of the political divide since the dissolution of Parliament, as part of the parties' publicity campaign in the national polls.
However, reproductions of the videos will appear subsequently with different subtitles and voice-overs, or with some doctored footage, to spread a completely different message from the original.
Last month, the MCA Youth and Beliawanis co-launched a short video to
counter
popular DAP speaker Hew Kuan Yew's (
right
) alleged use of crude language during his ceramah sessions.
After this, Pakatan supporters quickly hit back by reproducing the political video with a slightly different footage, taunting MCA president Chua Soi Lek of his involvement in a sex scandal five years ago.
Later, pro-Pakatan NGO Solidariti Anak Muda Malaysia (SAMM) also came out a video featuring a panda - which is considered as MCA's official mascot - to spread the message that the daily expenditure of Malaysians will ultimately benefit the cronies of the BN government.
BN supporters soon came out with the reproduced version of SAMM's video within days.
The subtitles of the original video had been replaced, now stressing that the people are able to enjoy low commodity prices due to the government's subsidy policies.
More netizens pro-Pakatan?
In a related matter, a propaganda video has been widely circulated among netizens recently on Facebook . It features a female Chinese undergraduate student reminding people, in Mandarin, about corruption issues and the incompetency of the BN administration. At the end of the video, Malaysians overseas were urged to go home to cast their vote and change the BN government.
Within a day, a reproduced video emerged on Facebook , using the same tactic of replacing the subtitles and voice-over, essentially telling the antithesis of the original story and called on the people to replace the Pakatan state government.
Judging from the popularity of these political videos, it can be concluded that pro-Pakatan videos are highly accepted by netizens, as compared to the pro-BN ones.
For instance, more than 5,700 Facebook users have ‘liked' the former, with 11,000 of them having shared the video which featured the female Chinese college student.
Meanwhile, its parody video has only 800 ‘likes' and despite the fact that close to 2,400 users have shared it, it is different from the original video as most of the comments had been negative in nature and were against the video's contents.
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