How Did People Tweet in the 2018 Malaysian General Election: Analysis of Top Tweets in #PRU14

Abstract

Since 2008, Malaysian General Elections were often dubbed as “social media election”. Twitter's combination of brevity, immediacy, interactivity and virility has enabled it to become a go-to platform for political communication among politicians, journalists and citizens. To understand Twitter uptake among Malaysian citizen during the 2018 general election, this article adopts Shoemaker and Reese’s hierarchy-of-influences model. The top 50 tweets from the political hashtag #pru14 between 28 April 2018 until 10 May 2018 will be analysed. The analysis will be based on two types of influences that may affect this mediation process; influences of political reality, the influences based on individual characteristics of users and the nature of communication on Twitter. This study found that when the mediated political event cannot be accessed directly by the public, tweets from influencers dominates the Top Tweets. However, when the public can get access to the mediated events directly, tweets from the public are catching the attention on the #PRU14. This study also found that there are more male twitters than female, and most of them appeared to be in their youth.