The using of Facebook in Malaysia’s 14th General Election: An Analysis

of INVOKE

Zawiyah Mohd Zain and Zalinah Ahmad

School of Government, UUM COLGIS, Universiti Utara Malaysia, Kedah, Malaysia

Keywords:

Facebook, Barisan Nasional, General Election, Pakatan Harapan.

Abstract:

The Barisan Nasional coalition had dominated Malaysian election for more than 60 years. Most of the time,

the coalition party were able to have majority to form the government. However, Barisan Nasional had lost

their powers to Pakatan Harapan coalition during 14th election in year 2018. The usage of social media such as

Facebook may inﬂuence the result of the election. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to discuss the using

of Facebook as platform for political campaign in Malaysian 14th general election by using of INVOKE Face-

book as a discussion case. This paper uses secondary data such as books, journals, social media and research

reports. Information from secondary data is analyzed by using content analysis method and thematically dis-

cussed. This paper argues that Facebook is the effective medium to get support from the people in 14th general

election. This is due to two factors, ﬁrst, Facebook had easier and greatest platform to reach among potential

voters and it can be targeted very speciﬁcally to voters’ locations, demographics and interests. Second, via

Facebook, peoples had discussed various scandals that happened during Najib Razak’s premiership as Prime

Minister during May 2013 until May 2018. One of the popular Facebook account during 14th general election

campaign is INVOKE Facebook, the volunteer organization that supported Pakatan Harapan candidates.

1 INTRODUCTION

Social media is a medium used to promote social net-

working specially explore the usage of social network

websites, Majority of American citizens gather on-

line and ofﬂine social capital because the primary pur-

pose of social media use is to maintain and increase

one’s online and ofﬂine social networks (Ellison et al.,

2007). Social media is a popular media platform

around the world including Malaysia. This media is

synonym with the increasing number of internet users

around the world. In 2019, there are 4.44 billion of in-

ternet users and the number keeps increasing by 9.1%

year-by-year. In addition, the user of social media is

3.48 billion increased by 9.1% year-by-year also. In

Malaysia, the number of internet users in 2018 was

25.1 million, which represented 79% from 31.83 mil-

lion of Malaysian population (Smartinsights, ).

Political candidates may have limited control over

how mainstream news media may frame the elec-

tion. Therefore, they are using social media as a plat-

form to design and provide alternative election nar-

ratives (Howard et al., 2006)(Kreiss, 2012). Candi-

dates have adopted digital communication for strate-

gic purposes, allowing supporters to engage with the

campaign. The use of internet in Malaysia as a part

of political campaign has been widely applied since

the reformed era, known as Reformasi, in which, af-

ter Anwar Ibrahim was sacked from cabinet in 1998.

His supporters switched to alternative media, namely

Internet because government restricted the issue to

be broadcast in main media. The popular applica-

tion during reformed era and 1999 general election

was website. With the development of technology,

there have various applications of social media likes

blogs, Linked in, You Tube, Twitter, Facebook and

Instagram.

Social media has been popular for the purpose of

gaining supports from voters since 12th General Elec-

tion (GE12), through blogs and news portals (Sani

and Azizuddin, 2014). While in the 13th General

Election campaign (GE13), the most popular social

media is Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and twitter.

During the 14th General Election (GE14), the Inter-

net campaign is more focused on Facebook, and it

is one of the factors that BN lost its power in GE14

and no longer formed the government. The Internet

World Statistics in year 2017 estimated that out of

Malaysia’s 32 million people, some 22 million people

are Facebook users (Chinnasamy and Manaf, 2018).

Zain, Z. and Ahmad, Z.

The using of Facebook in Malaysia’s 14th General Election: An Analysis of INVOKE.

DOI: 10.5220/0009184904210425

In Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Social, Economy, Education and Humanity (ICoSEEH 2019) - Sustainable Development in Developing Country for Facing Industrial

Revolution 4.0, pages 421-425

ISBN: 978-989-758-464-0

421

Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to analyze the

use of Facebook in GE14 in Malaysia.

According to (Sani and Azizuddin, 2014), dur-

ing GE13 Barisan Nasional’s, also known as BN

(the political party that previously formed the govern-

ment) image was marred by the issues of graft and

abuse of power such as Port Klang Free Zone scan-

dal, National Feedlot Corporation scandal on cow-

and-condominium ﬁasco, and the Scorpene subma-

rine Saga. Pakatan Rakyat (PR) coalitions exploited

the issues through social media to gain votes, later

contributing to the signiﬁcant outcome of the election.

BN won 133 parliamentary seats and maintained the

federal power with seven seats fewer than 2008 elec-

tion. BN also lost popular votes to PR, and during

the following election in 2018, BN lost its power to

Pakatan Harapan (PH) coalitions (previously known

as PR).

Welsh (Welsh, 2018) argued there are two fac-

tors that contributed to the BN’s failure to retain the

power during GE14. The ﬁrst factor is the social po-

litical conditions which is political polarization and

anger among Malaysian about various issues (such

as 1MDB scandal, corruption, the implementation of

Goods and Services Tax - GST). The second factor is

the extensive use of modern campaign through social

media (such as Facebook and WhatsApp).

In addition, Nadzri (Nadzri, 2018), as identiﬁed

four major contributing factors, and all these factors

are interconnected to the fall of BN in GE14. First,

the existence of a much more credible, representative,

and stronger opposition during GE14 has inﬂuenced

the result of GE14 in which the inclusion of Mahathir,

Bersatu and Warisan within PH coalition. Second,

the rupture existed among the elites within the ruling

regime also contributed to the failure of BN to remain

in power. . Third, the existence of inﬂuential neg-

ative issues surrounding Najib’s administration. Fi-

nally, the advancement use of ICT and its impact on

the emergence of a digital had inﬂuenced on creating

more participative society in Malaysia.

2 RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

This section will discuss the method used by the au-

thors to study the using of internet in the political

campaign. The researchers used secondary data such

as articles from the selected journals, books that fo-

cus on social media as well as research reports pub-

lished by other scholars who are relevant to the topic

under study. Besides, the speciﬁc Facebook accounts

also have been monitored before and after the General

Election in order to gauge the extensive used of the

social media by political candidates. The INVOKE

Facebook also has been explored since the account

really inﬂuenced public in terms persuade public in

choosing the political candidates. All the information

derived has been analyzed by using the content anal-

ysis method and thematically discussed.

3 FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION

This section will discuss the ﬁndings based on sec-

ondary data that both authors used to get information

on usage of social media. The focus will be on the

using of Facebook, as a main social media instrument

used by the candidates in the general election.

3.1 Social Media and Facebook

Statistics showed that 29% of the entire world pop-

ulation has used social media (aresocial.sg). Out of

the 2.1 billion do have active social media accounts,

1.685 billion are the active mobile social accounts.

Among popular social media platforms, Facebook is

way ahead with more than 1.3 billion active user ac-

counts monthly. Thus, the scenario makes the social

network something akin to the largest virtual nation

of the world. It has close to 1 billion daily for active

users (Zai, 2016).

Kaplan and Heinlein (Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010)

deﬁned social media as “a group of Internet-based ap-

plications that build on the ideological and technolog-

ical foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the cre-

ation and exchange of user-generated content”. Ad-

ditionally, social media applications are websites that

“communicate with the users, while giving them in-

formation.” It is this two-way nature of social media

that make it preferable than the traditional media net-

works. The most popular social media application is

the Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg, a student in Harvard

University, had created Facebook in 2004 as a way to

connect with fellow students. Initially, the media was

adopted by high school and college students. How-

ever, during its initial public offering ﬁling in year

2012, there were 845 million active users of the so-

cial network worldwide. In addition, approximately

161 million active monthly users in the United States

of America and making it the leading social media

service in the world. If Facebook were a country it

would be the third largest country behind China and

India (Safranek, 2019). The Facebook users can com-

municate by sending the friends requests. They have

options to deny the requests or accept them. In case of

adding friends they can update their status, can write

on the friend’s time line, send private and public mes-

ICoSEEH 2019 - The Second International Conference on Social, Economy, Education, and Humanity

422

sages, share pictures and make audio and video calls.

The Facebook provides the facility of joining pages

and groups, liking, following and searching their in-

terest groups and events.

3.2 The using of Social Media in

General Election

During the 12th General Election in year 2008, op-

position parties highly depended on using internet for

political campaign because they were barred from us-

ing main media by the ruling government. The focus

was on news portal application and blogs. The ruling

party, BN had disregard and ignored the use of inter-

net since the printed media and electronic media were

under their controlled and believed that these two me-

dia had more advantages over the blogs (Ronasina,

2018). Consequently, BN failed to get two-thirds ma-

jority in Parliament (House of Representative).

The 13th General Election was considered as an

era of social media in election because the usage of

twitter, Instagram and Facebook for political cam-

paigns. Both contested parties (BN and PR) had ex-

tensively used the social media and took the opportu-

nities to interact and got support from public at large.

For instance, ex-Prime Minister, Najib Razak was ac-

tive in twitter and popular in Facebook as well. Simi-

lar like previous elections, opposition parties or coali-

tion, and social activists did not have access to dom-

inant mass media and they had to use the media so-

cial platform effectively. Towards 13th General Elec-

tion, they have used social media to express dissat-

isfaction towards Najib Razak and his ruling party

(BN) and urged public to reject UMNO and BN for

the coming election. There were several issues that

had been raised via media social. First, the luxurious

expenses recorded on Najib’s family during oversea

vacation and purchasing of expensive accessories by

Najib’s wife, Rosmah Mansur. Second, government

action in designing and implementing Akta Perhim-

punan Aman (Peaceful Assembly Act) and SOSMA

to replace Internal Security Act (ISA) that was abol-

ished in 2011. Third, public were dissatisﬁed with

government action on introducing new tax, known

as goods and services taxes while the costs of living

keep increasing from time to time. As a result, PR

had successfully reduced the number of seats won by

BN in the 13th General Election. The BN maintained

133 seats in which previously were 140 seats and PR

had achieved popular votes by 50% as opposed to BN

(47% of popular votes).

3.3 Facebook and 14th General Election

The 14th General Election was held on 9th May 2019.

This general election had witnessed three-cornered

contest among main political parties, namely Barisan

Nasional, Pakatan Harapan and Warisan, and Gagasan

Sejahtera (PAS). For the ﬁrst time, BN had lost the

power since 1957. PH had put a history by gaining

enough seats to form a government. PH and Warisan

had won simple majority by having 129 seats as com-

pared to BN (79 seats). PAS on the other hand, had

won 18 seats. In terms of percentage, PH had man-

aged to get 50.1% of votes, BN got 32% of votes

while PAS got 18% of votes (Cheng and Pey, 2018).

The main reason why BN had lost the election

was due to political campaign through social me-

dia speciﬁcally Facebook. Towards the 14th General

Election, social media, like Facebook had been ex-

tensively used for the purpose of the campaign. One

of the main reason of using Facebook because of its

characteristics such as less concern on distance and

time, borderless and the huge number of Facebook

users. Facebook can boradcast the political campaign

activities, forum, current news, live video coverages

to followers and targeted audience or public at large.

In fact, the posted video can be viewed at any time.

Previously, public relied on the dominant mass media

especially electronic media to get information about

current political news and it only showed news from

the ruling party. Thus, through Facebook, public can

get information from both sides – ruling and opposi-

tion parties. They can view the activities and news

from the opposition parties as well. Besides, candi-

date running for the election may show their political

campaign activities by uploading photos and news.

Moreover, by using smartphone, the process

would be faster and easier to upload the photos and

events and update the candidates’status from time to

time. All the displays about candidates’ activities

either formal or informal may create close relation-

ship between candidates and voters or public in gen-

eral. Indirectly, the voters may support the candidates.

This approach was consistent with the trend among

public who were the Facebook users by updating sta-

tus and uploading photos and sharing information.

During the 14th General Election, among the can-

didates who used Facebook account to deliver their

messages were Najib Razak, Dr. Mahathir Mohamad,

Wan Azizah Wan Ismail, Mohamad Sabu, Nurul Izzah

Anwar, Khairy Jamaluddin, Lim Guang Eng, Syed

Saddiq, Hannah Yeoh and others.

Furthermore, media social like Facebook offered

direct communication with followers and public at

large. Any questions or issues can be posted and get

The using of Facebook in Malaysia’s 14th General Election: An Analysis of INVOKE

423

the immediate answer or explanation by the candi-

dates. The candidates may display current news with-

out the help from reporters. The Facebook account

holders may update information, status, and news and

upload any other relevant materials by themselves.

They may not need the reporters or other people to up-

date their status. Besides, the communication among

followers also occurred and these interactions may ex-

pedite the process of delivering the messages.

Second reason was the issues and scandals that

overwhelmed the government administration that cre-

ated dissatisfaction from public towards BN and Najib

Razak. One of the issues was about the introduction

of GST in year 2016. GST imposed had increased the

price of goods and cost of living. Besides, the mis-

use of power within the administration of government

link corporation, such as 1MDB. There was a claim

that the money from 1MDB had been channeled to

Najib Razak’s personal bank account (Saravanamuttu,

2016)(Wright and Hope, 2018). Another issue was

corruption and misuse of power in other government

link corporations such as FELDA, Tabung Haji and

MARA. These issues were widely discussed among

Facebook users. According to Chinasamy & Norain

(Chinasamy, 2019) issues like GST, candidates’ rep-

utations and 1MDB scandal were the main causes of

political hatred expressed on social media platforms.

In gaining support and momentum for the 14th Gen-

eral Election, Facebook INVOKE has been developed

to expose and discuss the weaknesses of government

administration.

3.4 INVOKE

What is INVOKE? INVOKE is a non-governmental

organization created by Raﬁzi Ramli (an ex Mem-

ber of Parliament from Pandan and Vice President of

PKR). He developed INVOKE ofﬁcially in year 2016.

INVOKE had recruited nearly 42,000 volunteers to

assist PH to win the election (14th general election).

INVOKE had used multiple approaches or methods

such as doing political campaign for PR candidates,

and over the phone surveys covering almost 400,000

Malaysians. INVOKE had gathered data from social

media, petitions and online communication involved

huge numbers of voters. The weekly calls done by

volunteers were aimed to identify swing voters in or-

der to know their voting preferences. By having the

proﬁle of voters’ political preferences, INVOKE may

identify issues and provided messages that were ef-

fectively persuade these groups of voters. In fact, po-

litical campaigns are increasingly using sophisticated

data analytics to direct targeted messages to poten-

tial voters (Kreiss, 2016). Besides volunteers to help

in campaigns, INVOKE also mobilized polling and

counting agents (PACAs) nationwide to monitor the

election process. By doing so, it may contribute in

reducing incidents of reported electoral fraud in the

election.

INVOKE had interacted with public by using va-

rieties of social media platforms such as YouTube,

Facebook, twitter and Instagram. INVOKE estab-

lished its Facebook account on 28th December 2016

and received 105 million ‘LIKE” till May 2019. Some

of the activities showed were live events or activi-

ties on political campaign. INVOKE used a modi-

ﬁed truck as a vehicle to reach voters and bring all

political campaigns all over the country. INVOKE ar-

ranged series of talk and dialogues with public over

national issues, such as salary/pay rise, price increase

in goods and GST, illegal foreign workers. In addi-

tion, live press conference on issues in government

such as 1MDB, FELDA, MARA and Tabung Haji

also had been aired under INVOKE platform. For

instance, INVOKE had live press conference on is-

sues of Tabung Haji on 13th October 2017 and it had

reached up to 6.6 million viewers. Besides, INVOKE

also produced local and foreign news to public. For

instance, GST new was released on 27th July 2017

while news about Rohingya refugee crisis was also

uploaded on 17th September 2017. INVOKE also had

prime news at 8 in the evening, known as INV8. This

news program served as alternative news channel for

public since BN monopolized the entire mainstream

news channel during the campaign.

4 CONCLUSIONS

Before the general election, political campaigns did

play important role in gaining supports from the vot-

ers. In Malaysia, the used of varieties social media as

an interactive medium or platforms for political cam-

paigns had contributed to the winning of political par-

ties. Public or voters used social media to interact to

each other and also share information. During 13th

General Election, political actors had used You Tube,

Facebook, twitter, blog and portal news to share in-

formation. However, during the campaign for 14th

General Election, Facebook was a popular social me-

dia and effective platform that described the changes

result of the general election. Facebook had been cho-

sen due to its characteristics such as accessibility and

borderless.

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424

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