Who's to blame for the rohingya refugee crisis? Analyzing 'Scapegoating' narratives in youtube news channel commentaries from Indonesia and Malaysia

Anam Miftakhul Huda; Aditya Fahmi Nurwahid; Ade Firmannandya; Tsuroyya; Adibah Ismail

doi:10.31893/multiscience.2026016

Keywords:

rohingya refugee crisis

Abstract

This study examines scapegoating narratives in YouTube commentaries on the Rohingya refugee crisis, specifically how Indonesian and Malaysian netizens assign blame to various actors. Using semantic network analysis and topic modeling, the research identifies distinct patterns of blame attribution. Findings reveal that in Indonesia, criticism is directed towards the President, Indonesian Government, and the Indonesian National Army (TNI), often focusing on perceived weaknesses in border enforcement and a lack of decisive action. This scapegoating tendency may be exacerbated by existing public skepticism towards the performance of security forces. In Malaysia, the Prime Minister and ‘Kerajaan’ face backlash related to perceived policy failures and leniency towards refugees, reflecting a demand for stronger governmental intervention. This demand is intertwined with broader concerns about governance and political support within the country, where government effectiveness is closely scrutinized. Furthermore, the analysis demonstrates how resistance to granting citizenship to Rohingya refugees and negative online portrayals are connected to digital discourses of nationalism and xenophobia, where exclusionary attitudes are amplified. Myanmar is consistently framed as the primary instigator of the crisis, often referred to in association with terms such as ethnic cleansing or genocide. Meanwhile, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is frequently criticized for enabling migration flows rather than effectively addressing the root causes of displacement. These perceptions often arise from public distrust, perceived institutional ineffectiveness, and the portrayal of humanitarian organizations in global media. The findings underscore how digital platforms serve as sites of political expression and polarization, where narratives of blame reflect deeper anxieties over sovereignty, national identity, and migration governance. This study also reveals how online nationalism is constructed and sustained through emotionally charged threat narratives, offering insight into the intersection between media discourse and refugee politics in Southeast Asia.
References
1. Abbas, A. H. (2024). A Critical Cognitive-Discourse Analysis of the Rohingya Crisis in the Press. International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue Internationale de Sémiotique Juridique, 37(7), 2417–2432. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-024-10147-x
2. Abdelaaty, L. E. (2021). Discrimination and delegation: Explaining state responses to refugees. Oxford University Press. https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=pHEWEAAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PP1&dq=%22blame%22,+UNHCR,+international+organization,+accused+of+ignoring+the+concerns+of+host+populations+&ots=uAt42BkRsI&sig=OXxInqSTtFZnofm8lCVtqhtqn0g
3. Abdelaaty, L. (2023, September 18). "The Greatest and Most Important Human Right": Citizenship and Bureaucratic Indifference in Refugee-UNHCR Correspondence. https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/eg73h
4. Ahammad, T., Ahmed, S., & Sharmin, S. (2024). Decoding Online Narratives and Unraveling Complexities in the Rohingya Refugee Crisis. Social Media + Society, 10(4), 20563051241288942. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051241288942
5. Al-Rawi, A. (2019). Twitter influentials and the networked publics’ engagement with the Rohingya crisis in Arabic and English. The SAGE Handbook of Media and Migration, 192–204.
6. Al-Zaman, M. S., & Rashid, M. H. O. (2024). Global Media Sentiments on the Rohingya Crisis: A Comparative Analysis of News Articles from Ten Countries. Journalism and Media, 5(3), 1098–1111.
7. Ansar, A. (2020). The Unfolding of Belonging, Exclusion and Exile: A Reflection on the History of Rohingya Refugee Crisis in Southeast Asia. Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, 40(3), 441–456. https://doi.org/10.1080/13602004.2020.1819126
8. Ansar, A., & Maitra, J. (2024). Digital Diaspora Activism at the Margins: Unfolding Rohingya Diaspora Interactions on Facebook (2017–2022). Social Media + Society, 10(1), 20563051241228603. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051241228603
9. Atlani-Duault, L., Mercier, A., Rousseau, C., Guyot, P., & Moatti, J. P. (2015). Blood Libel Rebooted: Traditional Scapegoats, Online Media, and the H1N1 Epidemic. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry, 39(1), 43–61. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-014-9410-y
10. Azhar, A. A. (2025, January). Indonesian Political Communication Response in the Face of Radical Terrorists. In 1st Joint International Conference on Social and Political Sciences: Challenges and Opportunities in the Future (JICSPS 2023) (pp. 43-51). Atlantis Press. 10.2991/978-2-38476-350-4_5
11. Basri, F. K. H., Ahmad, A. L., Mohamad, E. M. W., Azlan, A. A., & Hashim, H. (2011). The survival of Malaysia’s national television within a changing mediascape. The Innovation Journal: The Public Sector Innovation Journal, 16(3), 1–13.
12. Berndsen, M., Thomas, E. F., & Tee, E. Y. J. (2024). The impact of religious identification on national identification and engagement in collective action to support Rohingya refugees: A comparison between Australia and Malaysia. Asian Journal of Social Psychology, ajsp.12622. https://doi.org/10.1111/ajsp.12622
13. Cambria, E., Song, Y., Wang, H., & Howard, N. (2012). Semantic multidimensional scaling for open-domain sentiment analysis. IEEE Intelligent Systems, 29(2), 44–51.
14. Castles, S. (2017). The forces driving global migration. In Human Trafficking (pp. 16–34). Routledge. https://api.taylorfrancis.com/content/chapters/edit/download?identifierName=doi&identifierValue=10.4324/9781315672427-5&type=chapterpdf
15. Chmutina, K., Von Meding, J., Williams, D. A., Vickery, J., & Purdum, C. (2023). From pity to fear: Security as a mechanism for (re)production of vulnerability. Disasters, 47(3), 546–562. https://doi.org/10.1111/disa.12568
16. Christensen, A. P., & Golino, H. (2021). Estimating the stability of psychological dimensions via bootstrap exploratory graph analysis: A Monte Carlo simulation and tutorial. Psych, 3(3), 479–500.
17. DataReportal. (2024). Digital 2024: South East Asia. DataReportal. https://datareportal.com/reports/digital-2024-indonesia
18. Doerfel, M. L., & Barnett, G. A. (1999). A semantic network analysis of the International Communication Association. Human Communication Research, 25(4), 589–603.
19. Drieger, P. (2013). Semantic network analysis as a method for visual text analytics. Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, 79, 4–17.
20. Fariadhi, M. H., Erawati, T., & Budiyanti, S. (2024). FRAMING THE ROHINGYA CRISIS: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF NEWS MEDIA DISCOURSE IN INDONESIA AND MALAYSIA. Cirebon International Conference on Education and Economics Proceeding, 1(1), 357–363. https://www.ejournalugj.com/index.php/cicee/article/view/9381
21. Gill, A. K., & Day, A. S. (2020). Moral Panic in the Media: Scapegoating South Asian Men in Cases of Sexual Exploitation and Grooming. In S. Ramon, M. Lloyd, & B. Penhale (Eds.), Gendered Domestic Violence and Abuse in Popular Culture (pp. 171–197). Emerald Publishing Limited. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-83867-781-720201011
22. Gunawan, Y., Novendra, C. S., & Febrila, A. (2024). Indonesia’s responsibility towards Rohingya refugees: Analysis of the 1951 Refugee Convention. Legality: Jurnal Ilmiah Hukum, 32(2), 182–194.
23. Haryanto, I. (2010). Media ownership and its implications for journalists and journalism in Indonesia. Politics and the Media in Twenty-First Century Indonesia: Decade of Democracy. https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=V2rFBQAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=RA2-PA24&ots=l-6N_4e4Lu&sig=BF-HbAgBL2vm7Sxi4eB8ChFlb8A
24. Heang, R. (2024). Digital Nationalism: Understanding the Power of Digital Technology in the Rise of Nationalism, National Identity, and National Narratives. Open Access Library Journal, 11(9), 1–26.
25. Hermele, K. (2021). The discourse on migration and development. In International migration, immobility and development (pp. 133–158). Routledge. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003136125-5/discourse-migration-development-kenneth-hermele
26. Huang, Q. (2023). The Discursive Construction of Populist and Misogynist Nationalism: Digital Vigilantism Against Unpatriotic Intellectual Women in China. Social Media + Society, 9(2), 20563051231170816. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231170816
27. Irom, B. (2023). Visual themes and frames of the Rohingya crisis: Newspaper content from three countries neighboring Myanmar. Visual Communication, 14703572231173077. https://doi.org/10.1177/14703572231173077
28. Jacobs, T., & Tschötschel, R. (2019). Topic models meet discourse analysis: A quantitative tool for a qualitative approach. International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 22(5), 469–485. https://doi.org/10.1080/13645579.2019.1576317
29. Jamil, S. N. M. (2023). “Reject Rohingya and Send Them Back!”: Digital discourses of nationalism and xenophobia in the time of a pandemic. In Discourse in the Digital Age (pp. 119-142). Routledge.
30. Jerome, C., Hie, T. S., Hadzmy, A. J. A., & Raslie, H. (2023). Accessing News in the Digital Era: The Case of Sarawak, Malaysia. International Journal of Business and Technology Management, 5(2), 20–29.
31. Jou, W., & Ooi, K. H. (2022). Political support in an ethnically divided society: a case study of Malaysia. Asian Journal of Political Science, 30(1), 61–81. https://doi.org/10.1080/02185377.2022.2048874
32. Khairi, A., Zainal, S., Tjoetra, A., & Wahab, A. A. (2024). From the Sea to the Land: Navigating the Ambiguity of Rohingya Refugees Boat People in Malaysia and Indonesia. Proceedings of International Conference on Social Science, Political Science, and Humanities (ICoSPOLHUM), 4, 00024–00024. https://proceedings.unimal.ac.id/icospolhum/article/view/397
33. Kinariwala, S., & Deshmukh, S. (2023). Short text topic modelling using local and global word-context semantic correlation. Multimedia Tools and Applications, 82(17), 26411–26433. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-023-14352-x
34. Kwilinski, A., Lyulyov, O., Pimonenko, T., Dzwigol, H., Abazov, R., & Pudryk, D. (2022). International migration drivers: Economic, environmental, social, and political effects. Sustainability, 14(11), 6413.
35. La Rosa, M., Fiannaca, A., Rizzo, R., & Urso, A. (2015). Probabilistic topic modeling for the analysis and classification of genomic sequences. BMC Bioinformatics, 16(S6), S2. https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2105-16-S6-S2
36. Lehman-Ludwig, A., Burke, A., Ambler, D., & Schroeder, R. (2023). Chinese Anti-Westernism on social media. Global Media and China, 8(2), 119–137. https://doi.org/10.1177/20594364231166541
37. Li, S., & Tsui, E. (2021). Serendipitous encounters to support innovations via knowledge visualizations. In A Research Agenda for Knowledge Management and Analytics (pp. 121–148). Edward Elgar Publishing. https://www.elgaronline.com/edcollchap/edcoll/9781800370616/9781800370616.00015.xml
38. Merry, M. K. (2022). Trump’s tweets as policy narratives: Constructing the immigration issue via social media. Politics & Policy, 50(4), 752–772. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12487
39. Miller, D., & Reeves, A. (2022). Pass the buck or the buck stops here? The public costs of claiming and deflecting blame in managing crises. Journal of Public Policy, 42(1), 63–91. doi:10.1017/S0143814X21000039
40. Mimno, D., Wallach, H., Talley, E., Leenders, M., & McCallum, A. (2011). Optimizing semantic coherence in topic models. Proceedings of the 2011 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, 262–272. https://aclanthology.org/D11-1024.Pdf
41. Missbach, A., & Stange, G. (2021). Muslim solidarity and the lack of effective protection for Rohingya refugees in Southeast Asia. Social Sciences, 10(5), 166.
42. Muhtadi, B. (2022). The Indonesian Military Enjoys Strong Public Trust and Support: Reasons and Implications. INTRODUCTION. In The Indonesian Military Enjoys Strong Public Trust and Support: Reasons and Implications (pp. 1-28). Singapore: ISEAS Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1355/9789815104004-003
43. Muller, D. (2021). Enemies of Democracy: Populism and Scapegoating. In: Journalism and the Future of Democracy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76761-7_3
44. Nikolenko, S. I., Koltcov, S., & Koltsova, O. (2017). Topic modelling for qualitative studies. Journal of Information Science, 43(1), 88–102. https://doi.org/10.1177/0165551515617393
45. Ó Séaghdha, D., & Korhonen, A. (2014). Probabilistic distributional semantics with latent variable models. Computational Linguistics, 40(3), 587–631.
46. Orosz, G., Faragó, L., Salamon, J., Goldberg, B., Roozenbeek, J., & Krekó, P. (2024, December 9). Counter-Scapegoating Inoculation: Lasting Effects on Manipulation Resistance, Trustworthiness Perception, and Sharing Intentions. https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/2z4c8
47. Ozduzen, O., Korkut, U., & Ozduzen, C. (2021). ‘Refugees are not welcome’: Digital racism, online place-making and the evolving categorization of Syrians in Turkey. New Media & Society, 23(11), 3349–3369. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820956341
48. Ozkul, D., & Jarrous, R. (2021). How do refugees navigate the UNHCR’s bureaucracy? The role of rumours in accessing humanitarian aid and resettlement. Third World Quarterly, 42(10), 2247–2264. https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2021.1928487
49. Sadjad, M. S. (2022). Solidarity and ‘social jealousy’: Emotions and affect in Indonesian host society’s situated encounters with refugees. Third World Quarterly, 43(3), 543–560. https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2021.1969228
50. Sakki, I., & Castrén, L. (2022). Dehumanization through humour and conspiracies in online hate towards Chinese people during the COVID-19 pandemic. British Journal of Social Psychology, 61, 1418–1438. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjso.12543
51. Schneider, F. (2023). China’s digital nationalism. In The Routledge Handbook of Nationalism in East and Southeast Asia (pp. 167–180). Routledge. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003111450-14/china-digital-nationalism-florian-schneider
52. Siddiquee, N. A., & Zafarullah, H. (2020). Absolute Power, Absolute Venality: The Politics of Corruption and Anti-corruption in Malaysia. Public Integrity, 24(1), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/10999922.2020.1830541
53. Shukri, S. (2021). The Rohingya refugee crisis in Southeast Asia: ASEAN’s role and way forward. Journal of International Studies, 17, 239–263.
54. Simons, G. (2019). The anatomy of a moral panic: Western mainstream media’s Russia scapegoat. Changing Societies & Personalities. 2019. Vol. 3. Iss. 3, 3(3), 189–206.
55. Siregar, S. N., Raffiudin, R., & Noor, F. (2022). Democratic regression in Indonesia: Police and low-capacity democracy in Jokowi's administration (2014–2020). Jurnal Ilmu Sosial dan Ilmu Politik, 26(2), 197-212. https://doi.org/10.22146/jsp.72129
56. Stenger, H. (2023). Victim versus villain: Repatriation policies for foreign fighters and the construction of gendered and racialised ‘threat narratives.’ European Journal of International Security, 8(1), 1–24.
57. Tesfai, A., Hynie, M., Karim, R., Kilicaslan, G., Ekmekcioglu, C., & Taylor, P. (2022). Social trust among refugees: Using a human rights lens to understand refugee experiences. In F. M. Moghaddam & M. J. Hendricks (Eds.), Contemporary immigration: Psychological perspectives to address challenges and inform solutions (pp. 243–261). American Psychological Association. https://doi.org/10.1037/0000294-013
58. Thunø, M., & Nielbo, K. L. (2024). The Initial Digitalization of Chinese Diplomacy (2019–2021): Establishing Global Communication Networks on Twitter. Journal of Contemporary China, 33(146), 244–266. https://doi.org/10.1080/10670564.2023.2195811
59. We Are Social. (2024). The Digital & Social Summit 2024—We Are Social Indonesia (pp. 1–136). We Are Social.
60. Wu, X.-K., Gu, G., Xie, T.-T., Zhao, T.-F., & Min, C. (2024). Unveiling evolving nationalistic discourses on social media: A cross-year analysis in pandemic. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 11(1), 1–12.
61. Yusoff, S. M. B., Nasir, M., Salleh, M. D. M. A., & Haque, M. M. (2019). Malaysian Policy towards refugees and asylum seekers: A case study of Rohingya refugees. International Journal of Academic Research in Progressive Education and Development, 8(3). https://ijarped.com/index.php/journal/article/view/2511
62. Zalatnai, C. (2023). The Scapegoat of Myanmar : A Historical and Comparative Analysis of the Rohingya Issue (Dissertation). Retrieved from https://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-506272 on May 18, 2025.
63. Zhang, T., Lee, B., Zhu, Q., Han, X., & Ye, E. M. (2020). Multi-dimension topic mining based on hierarchical semantic graph model. IEEE Access, 8, 64820–64835.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

How to cite

Huda, A. M., Nurwahid, A. F., Firmannandya, A., Tsuroyya, & Ismail, A. (2025). Who’s to blame for the rohingya refugee crisis? Analyzing ’Scapegoating’ narratives in youtube news channel commentaries from Indonesia and Malaysia. Multidisciplinary Science Journal, 8(2), 2026016. https://doi.org/10.31893/multiscience.2026016

[1] Abbas, A. H. (2024). A Critical Cognitive-Discourse Analysis of the Rohingya Crisis in the Press. International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue Internationale de Sémiotique Juridique, 37(7), 2417–2432. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-024-10147-x

[2] Abdelaaty, L. E. (2021). Discrimination and delegation: Explaining state responses to refugees. Oxford University Press. https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=pHEWEAAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PP1&dq=%22blame%22,+UNHCR,+international+organization,+accused+of+ignoring+the+concerns+of+host+populations+&ots=uAt42BkRsI&sig=OXxInqSTtFZnofm8lCVtqhtqn0g

[3] Abdelaaty, L. (2023, September 18). "The Greatest and Most Important Human Right": Citizenship and Bureaucratic Indifference in Refugee-UNHCR Correspondence. https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/eg73h

[4] Ahammad, T., Ahmed, S., & Sharmin, S. (2024). Decoding Online Narratives and Unraveling Complexities in the Rohingya Refugee Crisis. Social Media + Society, 10(4), 20563051241288942. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051241288942

[5] Al-Rawi, A. (2019). Twitter influentials and the networked publics’ engagement with the Rohingya crisis in Arabic and English. The SAGE Handbook of Media and Migration, 192–204.

[6] Al-Zaman, M. S., & Rashid, M. H. O. (2024). Global Media Sentiments on the Rohingya Crisis: A Comparative Analysis of News Articles from Ten Countries. Journalism and Media, 5(3), 1098–1111.

[7] Ansar, A. (2020). The Unfolding of Belonging, Exclusion and Exile: A Reflection on the History of Rohingya Refugee Crisis in Southeast Asia. Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, 40(3), 441–456. https://doi.org/10.1080/13602004.2020.1819126

[8] Ansar, A., & Maitra, J. (2024). Digital Diaspora Activism at the Margins: Unfolding Rohingya Diaspora Interactions on Facebook (2017–2022). Social Media + Society, 10(1), 20563051241228603. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051241228603

[9] Atlani-Duault, L., Mercier, A., Rousseau, C., Guyot, P., & Moatti, J. P. (2015). Blood Libel Rebooted: Traditional Scapegoats, Online Media, and the H1N1 Epidemic. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry, 39(1), 43–61. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-014-9410-y

[10] Azhar, A. A. (2025, January). Indonesian Political Communication Response in the Face of Radical Terrorists. In 1st Joint International Conference on Social and Political Sciences: Challenges and Opportunities in the Future (JICSPS 2023) (pp. 43-51). Atlantis Press. 10.2991/978-2-38476-350-4_5

[11] Basri, F. K. H., Ahmad, A. L., Mohamad, E. M. W., Azlan, A. A., & Hashim, H. (2011). The survival of Malaysia’s national television within a changing mediascape. The Innovation Journal: The Public Sector Innovation Journal, 16(3), 1–13.

[12] Berndsen, M., Thomas, E. F., & Tee, E. Y. J. (2024). The impact of religious identification on national identification and engagement in collective action to support Rohingya refugees: A comparison between Australia and Malaysia. Asian Journal of Social Psychology, ajsp.12622. https://doi.org/10.1111/ajsp.12622

[13] Cambria, E., Song, Y., Wang, H., & Howard, N. (2012). Semantic multidimensional scaling for open-domain sentiment analysis. IEEE Intelligent Systems, 29(2), 44–51.

[14] Castles, S. (2017). The forces driving global migration. In Human Trafficking (pp. 16–34). Routledge. https://api.taylorfrancis.com/content/chapters/edit/download?identifierName=doi&identifierValue=10.4324/9781315672427-5&type=chapterpdf

[15] Chmutina, K., Von Meding, J., Williams, D. A., Vickery, J., & Purdum, C. (2023). From pity to fear: Security as a mechanism for (re)production of vulnerability. Disasters, 47(3), 546–562. https://doi.org/10.1111/disa.12568

[16] Christensen, A. P., & Golino, H. (2021). Estimating the stability of psychological dimensions via bootstrap exploratory graph analysis: A Monte Carlo simulation and tutorial. Psych, 3(3), 479–500.

[17] DataReportal. (2024). Digital 2024: South East Asia. DataReportal. https://datareportal.com/reports/digital-2024-indonesia

[18] Doerfel, M. L., & Barnett, G. A. (1999). A semantic network analysis of the International Communication Association. Human Communication Research, 25(4), 589–603.

[19] Drieger, P. (2013). Semantic network analysis as a method for visual text analytics. Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, 79, 4–17.

[20] Fariadhi, M. H., Erawati, T., & Budiyanti, S. (2024). FRAMING THE ROHINGYA CRISIS: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF NEWS MEDIA DISCOURSE IN INDONESIA AND MALAYSIA. Cirebon International Conference on Education and Economics Proceeding, 1(1), 357–363. https://www.ejournalugj.com/index.php/cicee/article/view/9381

[21] Gill, A. K., & Day, A. S. (2020). Moral Panic in the Media: Scapegoating South Asian Men in Cases of Sexual Exploitation and Grooming. In S. Ramon, M. Lloyd, & B. Penhale (Eds.), Gendered Domestic Violence and Abuse in Popular Culture (pp. 171–197). Emerald Publishing Limited. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-83867-781-720201011

[22] Gunawan, Y., Novendra, C. S., & Febrila, A. (2024). Indonesia’s responsibility towards Rohingya refugees: Analysis of the 1951 Refugee Convention. Legality: Jurnal Ilmiah Hukum, 32(2), 182–194.

[23] Haryanto, I. (2010). Media ownership and its implications for journalists and journalism in Indonesia. Politics and the Media in Twenty-First Century Indonesia: Decade of Democracy. https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=V2rFBQAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=RA2-PA24&ots=l-6N_4e4Lu&sig=BF-HbAgBL2vm7Sxi4eB8ChFlb8A

[24] Heang, R. (2024). Digital Nationalism: Understanding the Power of Digital Technology in the Rise of Nationalism, National Identity, and National Narratives. Open Access Library Journal, 11(9), 1–26.

[25] Hermele, K. (2021). The discourse on migration and development. In International migration, immobility and development (pp. 133–158). Routledge. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003136125-5/discourse-migration-development-kenneth-hermele

[26] Huang, Q. (2023). The Discursive Construction of Populist and Misogynist Nationalism: Digital Vigilantism Against Unpatriotic Intellectual Women in China. Social Media + Society, 9(2), 20563051231170816. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231170816

[27] Irom, B. (2023). Visual themes and frames of the Rohingya crisis: Newspaper content from three countries neighboring Myanmar. Visual Communication, 14703572231173077. https://doi.org/10.1177/14703572231173077

[28] Jacobs, T., & Tschötschel, R. (2019). Topic models meet discourse analysis: A quantitative tool for a qualitative approach. International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 22(5), 469–485. https://doi.org/10.1080/13645579.2019.1576317

[29] Jamil, S. N. M. (2023). “Reject Rohingya and Send Them Back!”: Digital discourses of nationalism and xenophobia in the time of a pandemic. In Discourse in the Digital Age (pp. 119-142). Routledge.

[30] Jerome, C., Hie, T. S., Hadzmy, A. J. A., & Raslie, H. (2023). Accessing News in the Digital Era: The Case of Sarawak, Malaysia. International Journal of Business and Technology Management, 5(2), 20–29.

[31] Jou, W., & Ooi, K. H. (2022). Political support in an ethnically divided society: a case study of Malaysia. Asian Journal of Political Science, 30(1), 61–81. https://doi.org/10.1080/02185377.2022.2048874

[32] Khairi, A., Zainal, S., Tjoetra, A., & Wahab, A. A. (2024). From the Sea to the Land: Navigating the Ambiguity of Rohingya Refugees Boat People in Malaysia and Indonesia. Proceedings of International Conference on Social Science, Political Science, and Humanities (ICoSPOLHUM), 4, 00024–00024. https://proceedings.unimal.ac.id/icospolhum/article/view/397

[33] Kinariwala, S., & Deshmukh, S. (2023). Short text topic modelling using local and global word-context semantic correlation. Multimedia Tools and Applications, 82(17), 26411–26433. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-023-14352-x

[34] Kwilinski, A., Lyulyov, O., Pimonenko, T., Dzwigol, H., Abazov, R., & Pudryk, D. (2022). International migration drivers: Economic, environmental, social, and political effects. Sustainability, 14(11), 6413.

[35] La Rosa, M., Fiannaca, A., Rizzo, R., & Urso, A. (2015). Probabilistic topic modeling for the analysis and classification of genomic sequences. BMC Bioinformatics, 16(S6), S2. https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2105-16-S6-S2

[36] Lehman-Ludwig, A., Burke, A., Ambler, D., & Schroeder, R. (2023). Chinese Anti-Westernism on social media. Global Media and China, 8(2), 119–137. https://doi.org/10.1177/20594364231166541

[37] Li, S., & Tsui, E. (2021). Serendipitous encounters to support innovations via knowledge visualizations. In A Research Agenda for Knowledge Management and Analytics (pp. 121–148). Edward Elgar Publishing. https://www.elgaronline.com/edcollchap/edcoll/9781800370616/9781800370616.00015.xml

[38] Merry, M. K. (2022). Trump’s tweets as policy narratives: Constructing the immigration issue via social media. Politics & Policy, 50(4), 752–772. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12487

[39] Miller, D., & Reeves, A. (2022). Pass the buck or the buck stops here? The public costs of claiming and deflecting blame in managing crises. Journal of Public Policy, 42(1), 63–91. doi:10.1017/S0143814X21000039

[40] Mimno, D., Wallach, H., Talley, E., Leenders, M., & McCallum, A. (2011). Optimizing semantic coherence in topic models. Proceedings of the 2011 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, 262–272. https://aclanthology.org/D11-1024.Pdf

[41] Missbach, A., & Stange, G. (2021). Muslim solidarity and the lack of effective protection for Rohingya refugees in Southeast Asia. Social Sciences, 10(5), 166.

[42] Muhtadi, B. (2022). The Indonesian Military Enjoys Strong Public Trust and Support: Reasons and Implications. INTRODUCTION. In The Indonesian Military Enjoys Strong Public Trust and Support: Reasons and Implications (pp. 1-28). Singapore: ISEAS Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1355/9789815104004-003

[43] Muller, D. (2021). Enemies of Democracy: Populism and Scapegoating. In: Journalism and the Future of Democracy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76761-7_3

[44] Nikolenko, S. I., Koltcov, S., & Koltsova, O. (2017). Topic modelling for qualitative studies. Journal of Information Science, 43(1), 88–102. https://doi.org/10.1177/0165551515617393

[45] Ó Séaghdha, D., & Korhonen, A. (2014). Probabilistic distributional semantics with latent variable models. Computational Linguistics, 40(3), 587–631.

[46] Orosz, G., Faragó, L., Salamon, J., Goldberg, B., Roozenbeek, J., & Krekó, P. (2024, December 9). Counter-Scapegoating Inoculation: Lasting Effects on Manipulation Resistance, Trustworthiness Perception, and Sharing Intentions. https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/2z4c8

[47] Ozduzen, O., Korkut, U., & Ozduzen, C. (2021). ‘Refugees are not welcome’: Digital racism, online place-making and the evolving categorization of Syrians in Turkey. New Media & Society, 23(11), 3349–3369. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820956341

[48] Ozkul, D., & Jarrous, R. (2021). How do refugees navigate the UNHCR’s bureaucracy? The role of rumours in accessing humanitarian aid and resettlement. Third World Quarterly, 42(10), 2247–2264. https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2021.1928487

[49] Sadjad, M. S. (2022). Solidarity and ‘social jealousy’: Emotions and affect in Indonesian host society’s situated encounters with refugees. Third World Quarterly, 43(3), 543–560. https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2021.1969228

[50] Sakki, I., & Castrén, L. (2022). Dehumanization through humour and conspiracies in online hate towards Chinese people during the COVID-19 pandemic. British Journal of Social Psychology, 61, 1418–1438. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjso.12543

[51] Schneider, F. (2023). China’s digital nationalism. In The Routledge Handbook of Nationalism in East and Southeast Asia (pp. 167–180). Routledge. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003111450-14/china-digital-nationalism-florian-schneider

[52] Siddiquee, N. A., & Zafarullah, H. (2020). Absolute Power, Absolute Venality: The Politics of Corruption and Anti-corruption in Malaysia. Public Integrity, 24(1), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/10999922.2020.1830541

[53] Shukri, S. (2021). The Rohingya refugee crisis in Southeast Asia: ASEAN’s role and way forward. Journal of International Studies, 17, 239–263.

[54] Simons, G. (2019). The anatomy of a moral panic: Western mainstream media’s Russia scapegoat. Changing Societies & Personalities. 2019. Vol. 3. Iss. 3, 3(3), 189–206.

[55] Siregar, S. N., Raffiudin, R., & Noor, F. (2022). Democratic regression in Indonesia: Police and low-capacity democracy in Jokowi's administration (2014–2020). Jurnal Ilmu Sosial dan Ilmu Politik, 26(2), 197-212. https://doi.org/10.22146/jsp.72129

[56] Stenger, H. (2023). Victim versus villain: Repatriation policies for foreign fighters and the construction of gendered and racialised ‘threat narratives.’ European Journal of International Security, 8(1), 1–24.

[57] Tesfai, A., Hynie, M., Karim, R., Kilicaslan, G., Ekmekcioglu, C., & Taylor, P. (2022). Social trust among refugees: Using a human rights lens to understand refugee experiences. In F. M. Moghaddam & M. J. Hendricks (Eds.), Contemporary immigration: Psychological perspectives to address challenges and inform solutions (pp. 243–261). American Psychological Association. https://doi.org/10.1037/0000294-013

[58] Thunø, M., & Nielbo, K. L. (2024). The Initial Digitalization of Chinese Diplomacy (2019–2021): Establishing Global Communication Networks on Twitter. Journal of Contemporary China, 33(146), 244–266. https://doi.org/10.1080/10670564.2023.2195811

[59] We Are Social. (2024). The Digital & Social Summit 2024—We Are Social Indonesia (pp. 1–136). We Are Social.

[60] Wu, X.-K., Gu, G., Xie, T.-T., Zhao, T.-F., & Min, C. (2024). Unveiling evolving nationalistic discourses on social media: A cross-year analysis in pandemic. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 11(1), 1–12.

[61] Yusoff, S. M. B., Nasir, M., Salleh, M. D. M. A., & Haque, M. M. (2019). Malaysian Policy towards refugees and asylum seekers: A case study of Rohingya refugees. International Journal of Academic Research in Progressive Education and Development, 8(3). https://ijarped.com/index.php/journal/article/view/2511

[62] Zalatnai, C. (2023). The Scapegoat of Myanmar : A Historical and Comparative Analysis of the Rohingya Issue (Dissertation). Retrieved from https://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-506272 on May 18, 2025.

[63] Zhang, T., Lee, B., Zhu, Q., Han, X., & Ye, E. M. (2020). Multi-dimension topic mining based on hierarchical semantic graph model. IEEE Access, 8, 64820–64835.

Abstract

References

How to cite