While MCMC data shows major platforms such as Facebook removed 92% of 697,061 harmful posts flagged between January 2024 and November 2025, deputy managing director Zurkarnain Yasin said 58,104 are still left online, and it is not a small number.

“If you take 1% of that total, you are already looking at almost 7,000 harmful posts that are still there,” he told FMT.

With 43 million social media users in Malaysia, he warned that “this represents a huge number of potential victims, so the compliance rate alone can be misleading”.

Zurkarnain said the gap in compliance reflects how platforms rely on their own global moderation rules rather than considering Malaysian laws and context.

“We highlight that these are harmful materials. But whether to take it down or not, it is up to them and their assessment,” he said.

“For example, the said content could be deemed not harmful material. So we have no control over that.”

According to MCMC data, most flagged content involved gambling, financial scams, and bullying.

Of 438,520 gambling-related posts, 421,245 were removed, leaving 17,275 online. For fraud and scams, 147,100 of 154,253 posts were taken down, leaving 7,153 still accessible.

Bullying and harassment posts saw a sharp rise, with 37,508 of 49,321 removed, leaving 11,813 online, as requests to remove such content increased 288% between 2024 and 2025.

Zurkarnain said the numbers represent only part of the online environment, as MCMC monitors a few major platforms while many other apps remain harder to track.

“This is what has been reported. What are those that are not reported are even more,” he said.

“What has not been reported, nobody really knows, except the platform providers.”

As such, with the ONSA coming into effect next month, Zurkarnain said Malaysia would have the authority to set clear standards for removal timelines and compliance, expecting platforms to achieve 100% adherence to any takedown requests.

Companies must also submit safety plans to make harmful content inaccessible.

“Now we can do more. With ONSA, we can impose a penalty on them,” he said.

“This Act is not about censorship. It’s about accountability. Profit cannot come at the expense of safety.”