The Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) has been seriously busy lately, purging over 345,000 pieces of harmful online content in just six months.
According to Communications Minister Datuk Fahmi Fadzil, dealing with that massive backlog of digital junk required the equivalent of 19.7 years of non-stop working hours.
Between 1 January 2026 to 1 July 2026, the teams at MCMC had to individually flag and document every single piece of content before asking platforms to take it down. Because of all the necessary bureaucratic paperwork and justifications, each request ate up thirty to forty-five minutes of an officer’s time.
When you crunch the numbers on hundreds of thousands of requests, that adds up to an incredible amount of filing time just to keep the internet a bit safer.
It turns out that a whopping 91% of the flagged material was linked to gambling and scam syndicates. These criminals are constantly pumping out new content and using digital platforms to promote their schemes, which is why the manual workload became so overwhelming.
To tackle this never-ending cycle, Fahmi mentioned that the MCMC is currently looking into agentic AI to help manage complaints much faster and take the pressure off human officers.
At the same time, the ministry is urging social media platforms to step up and use their own artificial intelligence tools to spot and remove guideline-breaking content before it even becomes a problem.