Negative Tweets Drastically Increases After the 2019 General Election

Yogyakarta, 29 April 2019—The Research Centre for Politics and Government (Polgov) of the Department of Politics and Government UGM held another press conference on the 2019 General Election. The featured data were obtained through a cooperation between the Big Data Analytics Laboratory and TIFA Foundation.

Taking place in Digilib Café, this was the fifth press conference that focuses on the spread of negative issues through Twitter. The research, which took place from the 12th until the 22nd of April 2019, has managed to find 15,486 negative tweets that attacked both presidential candidates, as well as the General Elections Commission.

“The research was focused on West Java and Maluku, as these two provinces are the most prone, according to the General Elections Superintendent Committee (Banwaslu),” as stated by Abdul Gaffar Karim, one of the speakers in this press conference.

Furthermore, this research has also managed to find 1,743 negative tweets that were tweeted before the general election. That number then decreased to 709 tweets during the voting day. However, after the end of the general election, the number of negative tweets increased again to 13,030 tweets. “Unfortunately, not all of the location sources of the tweets can be identified.” West Java and Jakarta were the provinces with the highest number of negative tweets,” as stated by Wegik Prasetyo, a researcher from Polgov.

This press conference was attended by 16 journalists. The files of this press conference is available to access at: https://ugm.id/IsuNegatifPemilu2019