DAP claims MCA’s Facebook ‘doctored’

Source: http://www.freemalaysiatoday.com/category/nation/2013/03/22/dap-claims-mcas-facebook-doctored/ (By G Lavendran, 22.3.2013)

The majority of people who are linked to the MCA fan page either have many accounts or are not tech-savvy, claims DAP.

The DAP claims that the MCA Facebook has been doctored. The party claims that MCA is using cyber troopers to increase the hits on its site. This accusation comes from DAP’s Taman Segambut branch chairman, Patrick Hoo, who claimed that the MCA Facebook page’s “likes” are disproportionate to the number of people who are “talking about it” on Facebook.

“They [MCA] have 31,230 likes but only 493 people are talking about it on Facebook,” he said.

“This means that either the majority of the people who liked the page are not tech-savvy or multiple duplicate accounts have been used to add likes to this page so it would look like they have a lot of support,” he added

Comparing to the DAP Facebook page which has 267,809 likes and 57,639 people talking about it, Hoo said,”Our numbers look more believable as we have a high number of likes and a proportionate number of people talking about us.”

The branch secretary, Yew Jia Haur said, “MCA’s percentage when comparing the number of likes with the number of people talking about them is only 1.63. But DAP has 18.52 percentage. It is clear that most of the accounts used to like their page were duplicates or people who are not tech-savvy,” he added.

Yew also said MCA Youth made a statement yesterday extracted from the China Press that the Pakatan Rakyat cybertroopers are attacking Barisan Nasional supporters who make comments on Facebook. “We have not hired people to do this. They are not linked to us in any way. They are just people who are Pakatan supporters opposing BN. It is not right to blame us without proper grounds,” he said.

“We also assume that their fan page likes will increase dramatically during the campaigning period,” he added.

Segambut MP Lim Lip Eng, who was also present at the press conference, said MCA had previously admitted that it had 1.1 million party members on its offical website. “This is highly doubtful, as of this morning MCA’s page only had 31,230 likes. The party is clearly exaggerating the figures,” said Lim.

“They [MCA] claim to have almost 282,000 male MCA Youth members. If they really had that much support, they wouldn’t need to over-exaggerate,” he added.