Discourse of Power and Identity in Selected Malaysian Netizens’ Tiktok Comments: A Critical Discourse Analysis

Abstract

The rapid growth of social media, particularly TikTok, has created a new digital discursive space in which identity construction, power negotiation, and ideological formation unfold through everyday user interactions. This study examines how discourses of power and identity are enacted in 50 comments purposively selected from five TikTok videos concerning selected social, political, and cultural issues in Malaysia. Grounded in Fairclough’s (1995) Critical Discourse Analysis framework and Tajfel and Turner’s (1986) Social Identity Theory, the analysis focuses on the linguistic and discursive strategies used by the selected commenters to articulate stances, delineate identity boundaries, and position social groups. The findings indicate that the sampled comments contain recurring strategies of digital cynicism, moral evaluation, stereotyping, us–them positioning, perceptions of algorithmic visibility, and collective affiliation. These patterns suggest that, within this limited dataset, TikTok comments may function as sites where social dominance is reinforced, challenged, or negotiated. References to algorithms are interpreted as users’ perceptions of platform visibility rather than as evidence of TikTok’s actual algorithmic operations, because no direct platform or algorithmic data were analysed. Accordingly, the findings are exploratory and should not be generalised to Malaysian netizens as a whole. The study contributes a context-specific account of how language, identity, and perceived platform power intersect in selected Malaysian TikTok comment threads.