PETALING JAYA: Kampung Tunku assemblyman Lim Yi Wei today urged Malaysians to stop sharing videos of incidents of violence in schools on social media, calling on the media to avoid sensationalising such incidents as well.
The DAP assemblyman said her call was to prevent social contagion, a psychological phenomenon in which behaviours, emotions or ideas spread quickly and spontaneously, potentially triggering copycat incidents.
"Having physical and online discussions and sharing information feels helpful, but where do we draw the line between solidarity and sensationalism?" she said in a statement.
Sarawak police previously said that a teenager who allegedly attacked a teacher at Tunku Putra-HELP International School in Kuching yesterday morning had live-streamed the incident.
State acting police commissioner Saifullizan Ishak said the recording, lasting 12 minutes and six seconds, showed the attack from the teenager’s perspective and was taken down by the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission.
Lim expressed disappointment over social media posts on the Kuching incident that used the hashtags "#viralkan" and "#fyp" to boost their visibility.
"They exploit legitimate shock and concerns about school safety, which generates likes, shares and sometimes income for the poster," she said.
Lim said a 2015 US study found that mass killings involving firearms, including school shootings, were motivated by similar events in the immediate past, with the temporary increase in probability lasting an average of 13 days.
"Outside this period, perpetrators of particularly horrific massacres such as those at Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook and Umpqua Community College, clearly cited mass killers before them as inspiration for their attacks," she said.
Lim said discussions on school violence should not involve sharing videos or sensationalising attackers' actions and manifestos, but that social media platforms had little incentive to remove such content because their business models thrived on heated discourse and virality.
"We say children are susceptible to the influence of social media; (the theory of) social contagion explains that adults are not immune.
"We must confront ourselves: are we sharing because we really care, or because our brains thrive on the endorphin rush from online validation?" she said.