SOCIAL MEDIA AND POLITICAL ELITES: AN ANALYSIS OF PALATAN HARAPAN AND BARISAN NASIONAL POLITICIANS' FACEBOOK POSTS

Abstract

This thesis seeks to address two issues. Firstly, it seeks to describe and analyse how politicians under the Pakatan Harapan (PH) regime had used social media to shore up political support. Since PH’s victory in GE14, domestic support for the administration had been in decline. At the same time, Barisan Nasional (BN) had turned ramped up racial politics on social media to rally political support and discredit PH. These two trends suggest PH’s immense pressure to shore up political support. As such this thesis seeks to analyse and rate their success in doing so. This issue will be studied by acquiring social media data using Facepager to draw Facebook posts made by all politicians from Malaysia’s lower house (Dewan Rakyat) with Facebook pages. My findings suggest that (1) since early 2019, UMNO has been a greater social media presence than other political parties (2) politicians such as Najib Razak and Syed Saddiq were popular social media figures due to their adept strategies in engaging their viewers. Addressing this issue was originally intended to speculate how the PH government might fare as they enter into their second half of their term. However, PH had fallen in Feburary 2020 and a new government – Perikatan Nasional (PN) has formed. The formation of PN allowed this thesis to address a second issue: to assess how sentiments towards PN, especially the new Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin, had evolved since they formed government in 1 March 2020. My findings suggest that since the first 30 days of government, Muhyiddin had achieved some successes in getting public acceptance of PN despite initial accusations of being a “backdoor government” due to its ability to craft a persona that is acceptable to the eyes of Malaysian citizens. By the end of this thesis, I seek to achieve four goals: (1) identify and describe the personalities that are popular and effective in political communication in Malaysia’s social mediascape, (2) describe and measure the success of Malaysian politicians, especially PH, using social media to shore up political support, (3) identify and explain any strategies that were successful in engaging users online, and (4) speculate the trajectory of popular support for PN in the months ahead.