Jakarta governor election is in the spotlight in various media and became a hot topic discussed in social media. Conversation in social media contains sentiments of perception of Internet users, or netizens against the candidate, be it positive or negative sentiment. Based on the observations of the Center for Digital Society (CfDS) UGM, for now the pair of candidates Tjahaja Basuki Purnama and Djarot Saiful Hidayat became the candidate with most consistent positive sentiment among netizens.
"Ahok-Djarot has the greatest positive sentiment with a percentage of 55% and 45% negative sentiment. It's more than Agus-Sylvi with positive sentiment as much as 41% as well as Anies-Sandi with 19% of positive comments," said Managing Director of CFDs, Dr. Dedy Permadi, in a press conference held on Tuesday (25/10) in FISIPOL UGM.
Dedy explained, CfDS held an online media research using mixed methods that combine digital methods and manual methods. Data include 687 online comments that were taken from three online news portals, namely Kompas.com, Detik.com, and TribunNews.com, and two social media platforms, Facebook and Twitter.
Although not incorporated with geographic and age of netizens, according to Dedy, the data obtained can sufficiently describe the preferences of the voters. This is evident from the similarity between the results obtained in this study with the results of a survey conducted by the Saiful Mujani Research Center which puts Basuki-Djarot at the top position, followed by Agus-Sylvi and Anies-Sandi.
Judging from the number of social media followers, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama is the most popular with 5,482,843 followers on Twitter, 1,264,387 followers on Facebook, as well 1,187,433 Instagram followers.
"Ahok’s Twitter is the account with the most followers which reaches more than 5 million, almost equal to the number of followers of President Joko Widodo. For another, Agus Yudhoyono looks quite active on Instagram with 1,638,325 followers, and Anies’s Twitter with 1,123,942 followers. Meanwhile, another candidate is considered normal," said Dedy.
Judging from the analysis of gender, there is visible gap between men and women netizens. It appears that the comments related to the gubernatorial elections were dominated by men and not too many women found in the comments.
Another thing that can be observed from the study of activity on social media is the presence of racism. In the observations, the researchers found Buzzer accounts, i.e. those who perform the same post in multiple media by disguising some personal information.
"Characteristics of Buzzer accounts include eliminating add friend buttons and follow on Facebook, disguising personal information such as gender or age, there is also a tendency of posts that contain racial issues, exaggerated nationalism and dubious results of a survey of certain institutions," said research assistant of CfDS, Lodang Kusumo Jati.