Cybertroopers: When outrage is for sale

THERE is a particular kind of dread I feel scrolling through social media these days, recognising, almost instantly, which posts are organic and which are not.

It is a skill I never asked for but picked up somewhere between journalism and a few years in marketing communications: recognising the tone of a paid narrative, the suspiciously uniform outrage and comment sections that read more like scripts than conversations.

I can usually tell, but most people cannot and that is precisely the problem. For the average reader, a polished infographic from an unfamiliar "news" page looks no different from a report published by a credible outlet.

A flood of angry comments looks like consensus, not coordination. Old videos resurface, stripped of context and shared as though they happened yesterday.

Few people pause to check the date, let alone the source. Fact-checking has become optional in a digital world built for speed, not scrutiny. This is not a hypothetical concern.

We saw it play out as Pakatan Harapan, Bersatu and Muda rolled out their candidate line-ups ahead of the Johor polls, with reactions online arriving faster than verified information and judgments forming long before facts could catch up.

We saw it again when former Johor Speaker Datuk Mohd Puad Zarkashi alleged that caretaker Menteri Besar Datuk Onn Hafiz Ghazi had become a "puppet" of the palace, a claim Onn Hafiz firmly denied.

Within hours, the allegation had taken on a life of its own online, repeated and amplified far beyond the original statement regardless of the denial that followed.

We also saw it as Negeri Sembilan was consumed by its Yamtuan succession dispute, a matter touching on royalty, custom and constitutional law — all genuinely complicated issues, yet treated online as a simple binary of villains and heroes.

People picked sides and attacked accordingly, sources be damned. And these are just state elections. If this is the climate surrounding state-level contests, what happens when the country turns its full attention to the 16th General Election?

The machinery behind manufactured outrage does not need to become much more sophisticated to do real damage. It is already working.

I do not say this as someone above the fray. I understand the appeal of clean narratives and easy villains in a media landscape that rewards exactly that. But understanding the trick does not stop me from wondering, more and more often, what we are trading away for it.

The cost extends far beyond the political scoreboard. Reputations are flattened into caricatures. Public trust, already thin, erodes further with every manufactured pile-on.

We chase likes, shares and engagement but somewhere along the way, we forget that the person on the receiving end of an attack is a real human being, with a life, family and feelings of their own.

Cybertroopers will continue doing this work because it pays and because it works.

The harder question is what it will cost Malaysia's future if we continue to consume narratives designed to benefit a single person or party, dressed up as public opinion.