Comments on Fire! Classifying Flaming Comments on YouTube Videos in Malaysia

Abstract

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.

The search for national identity in the discourse analysis of YouTube comments

“…These researchers focused more on using YouTube as a tool for language learning (Hasan, 2013;Juhary, 2012), as a place for teaching and education of performing arts (Dorothy, 2013), and analysing YouTube use in university levels (Danyaro, Jaafar, De Lara & Downe, 2010;Aripin et al, 2016). There was also one recent study by Lingam and Aripin (2017) that focused on flaming comments in Malaysian YouTube videos and discovered that racial and political attacks were the two most common YouTube comments. Therefore, there seems to be a gap in the literature for how the language is used in YouTube comments in relation to being a Malaysian, as well as a gap in linguistic representation or national identity of a nation based on YouTube comments.…”

“…These YouTubers acted in the videos to depict the scenarios found in Malaysia. The lists of videos used for analysis of their These videos were chosen as they fulfilled the requirements of having achieved the minimum number of views of 100,000 and have more than 100 comments as supported by Lingam & Aripin (2017) in a similar study. These videos were also selected as their content prompt comments on the Malaysian identity.…”

Proud to be a Malaysian!-Malaysian Identity in YouTube Comments

“…As for study of language use in YouTube comments, Jones and Schiefflin [28] have used comments to investigate language use associated with particular genres of video. In another study conducted by Lingam &Aripin [29], flaming YouTube comments in Malaysian themed YouTube videos were looked into. Their aims were to discover the types of flaming comments that are found in the YouTube videos and classify them accordingly using content and thematic analysis.…”

“…Four YouTube videos were selected by which their first hundred comments were analysed. These videos were selected as they have more than 100 comments and minimum 100,000 views based on the requirement of a similar research by [29] Lingam &Aripin. Overall, there were a total of more than 300 comments which were analysed and focused upon from these videos.…”

Examining the Relationship Between Factors Influencing Political Information Seeking-Behaviour through Social Media among Youths in Malaysia

“…Los jóvenes de hoy se están volviendo más receptivos a los nuevos medios por razones políticas. Por ejemplo, YouTube, una plataforma de video en línea, ha ganado popularidad como plataforma para compartir videos personales y se ha utilizado para descargar y publicar imágenes de discursos y actividades políticas (Eady et al, 2020;Lingam y Aripin, 2017). Otros sitios de redes sociales, como Facebook y Twitter, así como aplicaciones de mensajería instantánea como WhatsApp, juegan un papel importante en el contexto político como fuente de información y participación.…”