Political Discussion on Twitter: Attributes of Political Issues in Malaysian Media's Tweets during Pre and Post 14th General Election

This study examines the agenda-setting function of Malaysian media concerning political issues on social media during the pre and post-14th General Election (GE 14). This study analyzes the salience of political issue's attributes and examines the inter-media agenda setting on political issue's attributes among the mainstream media, alternative media and government media on Twitter. A total of 736 tweets related to political issues tweeted by mainstream media (Berita Harian and The Star), alternative media (Malaysiakini and FMT) and government media (RTM and BERNAMA) during the one-year period before and after the GE 14 were analysed using the descriptive analysis, Spearman's rho bivariate correlation analysis and cross-lagged correlation analysis. The study finds that a year before GE 14, the mainstream and the alternative media put conflict as their main attribute in political discussion, while the government media put more emphasis on the election attribute. After the GE 14 however, only the alternative media maintained the conflict attribute as the most important attribute in political discussion while the mainstream and the government media put the election attribute as their main attribute in political tweets. In the dimension of the causal relationship between the salience of political attribute's agendas, there was a shift in these relationships post-GE 14.