Jenny, a journalist who declined to be named for safety reasons, was never a heavy social media user. But when a story her team did in 2020 at the height of Covid-19 incited backlash from netizens, she deactivated her social media account to preserve her mental health.

“The harassment was quite overwhelming. We had a lot of netizens commenting on social media pages,” she said. “There were death threats. People were doxxing us and putting our office address on Facebook and threatening to burn down the office, coming to kill us.”

She did not feel safe, she told Bernama.

Luckily, and perhaps ironically, the Coid-19 lockdown that may have contributed to the netizens’ over-zealous reaction to the story she...