Norizah Aripin

Comments on fire! Classifying flaming comments on YouTube videos in Malaysia

Flaming refers to the use of offensive language such as swearing, insulting and providing hateful comments through an online medium. In this study, the act of flaming will be explored in the context of social media, particularly YouTube. The research aims to discover the types of comments that are found on Malaysian themed YouTube videos and classify them accordingly. The Uses and Gratification theory was used as a base to explain the satisfaction obtained through YouTube as a platform to express via comments; hence obtain satisfaction through negativity. The methodology employed to carry out the study was through a content analysis. One video from the top 5 YouTube category namely entertainment, film and animation, news and politics, comedy and people and blogs were chosen with at least 100,000 views and a minimum of 100 comments. Top 100 flames were then sorted out for each video and analyzed using the thematic analysis approach. The results of this study show that the two most frequent types of comments found on Malaysian videos are political attack and racial attack. Other subcategories that are also driving the two categories mentioned above are stereotypes, speculation, comparison, degrading comments, slander/defame, sedition, sarcasm, threaten, challenge, criticism, name-calling, and sexual harassments. Through this study, the severity of the issue of flaming on account of YouTube comments has been identified; enabling the concerning party to take proper action including the use of artificial intelligence against cyber-bullying. Keywords : Social networking, online harassment, flaming, YouTube, malicious comments.

Shaping the journalism education studies in Malaysia: the effects from the study on ethnicity

Journalism education is a unique field of study under a liberty of social science because it works in context. The surrounding society gives a lot of impact on how journalism has been practiced and educated. However, there are not many studies on journalism education that focuses on the elements of its society (i.e. gender, ethnic, religion, class, etc.), what more studies from the students’ perspectives. Therefore, this study attempts to fill the gap by having students of journalism as its samples. This article presents an extract from a huge study on journalism education in Malaysia. It studies the journalism students’ perceptions and expectations of journalism education in Malaysia and identifies whether different ethnics in Malaysia make any differences in their perceptions and expectations. Using quantitative methodology, 187 sets of survey questionnaires were collected from Malaysian journalism students who are studying at public universities in Malaysia. The result shows significant differences in terms of good journalism practice, news gathering skills and news production skills between three main ethnics of Malaysian journalism students.