Digital Solidarity and Crisis Mediation: How Malaysian TikTok Influencers Framed the Global Sumud Flotilla 2025

Suria Hani A.Rahman, Nur Syahirah Umar

Abstract


The digital landscape has fundamentally changed how global audiences experience humanitarian crises, shifting attention from traditional news to interactive, short-form video platforms like TikTok. While social media increasingly drives geopolitical discourse, we still know very little about how Southeast Asian content creators frame complex transnational conflicts to build digital solidarity. This study addresses this gap by analysing social media engagement in response to the Palestine-Israel conflict, focusing on the high-stakes Global Sumud Flotilla 2025 (GSF 2025) humanitarian mission. Grounded in Robert Entman’s four framing functions, this research uses a qualitative content analysis to evaluate the TikTok posts of three prominent Malaysian influencers who participated directly in the voyage: Ardell Aryana, Zainal Rashid Ahmad (ZRA), and Haroqs. A corpus of 49 TikTok posts was analysed across three chronological phases: pre-mission, during-mission, and post-mission. To understand audience reception, a thematic analysis was also conducted on the five most-liked comments from each selected post (N = 245). The findings reveal that framing strategies shifted fluidly alongside the journey’s timeline, moving from early calls for action to immersive, real-time moral and causal evaluations while at sea. The findings further demonstrate that localised social media narratives can serve as pathways for transnational solidarity, constructing a shared faith-based humanitarian identity, collective moral agency, and interactive spaces for global support of the Palestinian cause.

 

Keywords: Digital solidarity, media framing, TikTok influencers, Global Sumud Flotilla 2025, audience engagement.

 

https://doi.org/10.17576/JKMJC-2026-4203-31


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