Yogyakarta, 21 May 2019—CfDS Fisipol UGM released a research entitled “The 10 Most Influential Political Figures.” On Twitter, Prabowo’s influencers clearly dominated the topic of the 2019 General Election, with 8 out of 10 figures hailing from his side. However, President Joko Widodo was the most popular political figure, with a total of 5.67 million engagements in Twitter.
This press conference was held on BC 201 room, with Treviliana Eka Putri and Iradat Wirid as the speakers. Both speakers also took part in this research. The data show that the amount of engagements on Twitter correlates with the personalization of the Tweets. Thus, political figures such as Prabowo and Ma’ruf Amin were not present in the list of the 10 most influential political figures. “From our findings, Tweets with a high amount of personalization, such as idioms and typical tones from each political figure, tend to have high engagements”, as stated by Iradat, one of the researchers in CfDS.
Previously, the researchers expected that there will be a strong contestation between Jokowi and Prabowo on Twitter, with Jokowi being more popular (with 11 million followers as of May 2019). However, Prabowo’s side greatly utilized influencers such as Rocky Gerung, Fadli Zon, Fahri Hamzah and Dahnil Azhar. These influencers consistently voiced the same narration, which was the failure of Jokowi’s presidency and utilized popular hashtags such as #2019gantipresiden and #17aprilgoodbyejokowi. Meanwhile, Cak Khum and Haikal Hassan, in which both are not political figures, were also featured on the top 10 most influential political figures list.
Twitter was selected as the research object due to its high resonance, in which Tweets that emerge tend to spread faster in comparison to other social media platforms or even the television.
This research analysed Tweets from the 17th of January, which was the first presidential debate, and from the 16th of May, which was one week before the announcement of the election results. 64,000 original tweets from 109 political figures were mapped in this research, which provided additional data regarding engagement, Retweets and like or love replies. According to the researchers, WhatsApp is another platform that offers an even larger potential in terms of reach. However, WhatsApp is more personal, thus rendering data extraction to be more difficult.