What Happened in the Group Chat

I am writing this because I want a record of what happened. Not to perform victimhood. Not for sympathy. Just because what happened was wrong, and I want to be clear about it.

How it started

I joined a Sabahan developer WhatsApp group in late March 2026. It is part of a larger dev community — around 500+ members, focused on teaching Sabahans about AI, vibe coding, and building things.

In the weeks I was there, I contributed. I explained what domain names are to someone who did not understand. I gave a detailed breakdown of web deployment — VPS, Docker, Nginx, reverse proxy, domain management — because someone asked where to deploy their code and deserved a real answer. I shared my own experience of a Mastodon instance breaking during an update because it was not containerised. I told people I was confused at first too and kept trying with help from tutorials and AI tools.

I was one of the few people in that group with actual hands-on self-hosting experience. I was sharing that knowledge freely.

On 9 April, a group member posted an image about Sabah's MA63 rights — specifically the 40% revenue issue. I responded:

"kembalikan hak 40%! Sabah! Hak bukan untuk dijadikan sebagai 'optional'! Hak adalah hak!"

I did not start the topic. I responded to something that was already in the group.

What happened next

Someone told me not to "spam politic here."

I said: "said the one who consistently had complete 3 meals every day."

That was not just a retort. It was an observation. The ability to treat rights advocacy as optional noise is a privilege of people whose basic needs are already met. For Sabahans dealing with the real consequences of underfunding and rights denial, this is not a topic you can just move past.

I was then told repeatedly to keep it in the off-topic chat, to make a separate group, to stop "projecting views." Someone tagged the admin.

I said I was stressed. I said this was causing me unnecessary distress. I said this was the harsh treatment I received for raising a humanity issue.

The pile-on

What followed was not disagreement. It was coordinated mockery from multiple people.

Stickers sent in rapid succession while I was saying I was in distress. People calling me a "mentally ill scammer." People calling me "deranged." Multiple members joining in, each one making it easier for the next.

That is a pile-on. Once the group has decided someone is "the problem," everything that person says gets filtered through hostility. It becomes casual. Easy. The stickers and short mocking messages make it feel consequence-free.

The admin then pinned a message about keeping things on topic. No mention of the bullying. No warning to anyone who had called me mentally ill or mocked me while I was expressing distress.

I was removed from the group. Everyone who mocked me stayed.

What I said that was true and went unheard

Rights are rights. Sabah's 40% revenue entitlement under MA63 is a legal matter. Calling the demand for it "political spam" is itself a political act — it delegitimises the claim and protects the status quo.

Political apathy is a privilege. If you can dismiss rights advocacy as "spam," you are probably not the one being directly harmed by the denial of those rights.

Systemic injustice is intergenerational. Accepting the current arrangement today means your descendants inherit it. That was what I meant when I said "I don't think your descendants want to get bullied too." Nobody engaged with that point. It was ignored.

Tech and politics are not separate. Government funding, infrastructure, education access, economic conditions — these determine who gets to learn, to build, to code. You cannot have a tech community that claims to care about Sabahans while telling Sabahans to leave their reality at the door.

None of these points were addressed. They were mocked and dismissed.

The pattern

This is not just about one WhatsApp group.

"No politics" rules in tech communities almost always function to protect the comfort of the majority while silencing the people most affected by systemic issues. The rule is not neutral. It defines challenges to the status quo as disruptive and lets the status quo continue undisturbed.

In this case, the original image was posted by someone else and not challenged. I responded and became the sole target. The rule was applied selectively — to me specifically, not to the topic generally.

There is also something called lateral violence: oppressed people attacking each other instead of the systems that oppress them. It is easier and safer to turn on the person beside you than on the power above you. I have seen this pattern before. I saw it here.

What should have happened

The admin should have addressed the bullying, not just the topic. The person who called me a mentally ill scammer should have been warned or removed. The sticker pile-on should have been stopped. My distress should have been acknowledged by someone — anyone — in a group of 500 people.

None of that happened.

Where I am now

I am tired. Not just from this incident — from the pattern it fits into. Genuine engagement gets punished. Contributions get erased the moment you become inconvenient. Emotional support is not available when you actually need it.

I contributed nearly three weeks of real technical knowledge to that group. It counted for nothing when it was time to decide whose behaviour was the problem.

What happened was wrong. My distress was legitimate. My arguments were sound. And I am writing this down because these things deserve to be on record, even if no one in that group chat was willing to say so.

Personal record of a cyberbullying incident, 9 April 2026.