In the first part of this investigation yesterday, Malaysiakini and data journalism platform Newsgraphy traced how a single Facebook video depicting the sultan of Kedah's visit to Istana Kedah in Penang travelled across hundreds of Facebook accounts and groups.

The investigation found that the campaign expanded through a mixture of political pages, community groups, and ordinary users before eventually reaching mainstream political discourse.

But one question remained: why did this particular narrative resonate so widely?

To answer that question, we examined not only who shared the...