| Summary: | With the development of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have seen a rise in digitalisation that includes receiving
and/or reading information online. There is a wealth of citizen journalism such as letters to editors that are
garnering wider readability based on availability of news offered online as well as netizens’ independence to
search for more credible sources on the web. The present study aims to examine a corpus of Malaysian online
letters to editors that reflect public expressions of the second community-wide containment, also known as the
Movement Control Order (MCO2.0) in the country. Following the corpus linguistics approach, frequency word
lists are firstly extracted from public online letters in a popular national newspaper, which are further investigated
in terms of collocational analysis and close inspection of words and phrases that are used in context via
concordancing. This analysis is comparable to highlighting any similarities or differences expressed among
Malaysians in a previous study conducted during the first MCO. Findings showed that letters during MCO2.0
were more about COVID-19 vaccines compared to the crisis and restricted movements in the first MCO. In-depth
speech acts analysis, according to Searle (1979), revealed that discussions related to vaccination are mostly in
favour of the government’s plan in making vaccines free and accessible regardless of citizenship.
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