Unretweeted Love? #KeluargaMalaysia Overtures Fall Flat

A month after his August 2021 inauguration, Malaysian Prime Minister Ismail Sabri officially launched the Keluarga Malaysia (Malaysia family) campaign. This vision, on which Ismail Sabri has based his premiership, aspires for the country to “achieve the status of a developed and high-income nation.” It focuses on economic recovery, particularly from the Covid-19 pandemic, while aiming to unite all Malaysians by putting aside differences and achieving political stability.

To boost its appeal and credibility, the government has created a fancy website, formed a Keluarga Malaysia Squad consisting of various ministries, private companies and NGOs, produced advertisements, and composed an official Keluarga Malaysia song. Since the launch, the government has also been profusely using the #KeluargaMalaysia hashtag to popularise Keluarga Malaysia on social media (Figure 1).  

Hashtagging is a social media marketing tool that helps group conversations on a similar topic together. Marketeers would want their hashtags to be used extensively to increase traction about their campaigns. On Twitter, words with hashtags are clickable and will lead users to other tweets with the hashtagged words. While there has been no official directive for a hashtag campaign, government Twitter accounts are clearly trying.

Driving a successful hashtag campaign is more complicated than blitzing social media. An analysis of tweets appending #KeluargaMalaysia suggests that such attempts have backfired because the hashtag has been appropriated by Twitter netizens to express their discontent with the government.

Utilising Twitter data from over 78,000 public tweets from 12 May to 10 June 2022, including retweets and quoted-retweets (retweets with the retweeters’ comments), Figure 2 shows that the hashtag #KeluargaMalaysia has spread mainly through retweets. On Twitter, users tend to retweet messages that resonate with them, sharing the information or sentiment portrayed in the tweets. Quoted-retweets on the other hand, may see criticism of the original tweet. This was the case for tweets containing #KeluargaMalaysia, where tweets were criticised in the form of quoted-retweets, which then received tens of thousands of retweets.

Not only have the number of original tweets been small, but they are also mostly posted by government agency accounts broadcasting general announcements or specific Keluarga Malaysia programmes. Given Ismail Sabri’s abrupt rise to Prime Ministership, the public clearly lacked awareness of the campaign. Most voluminously, Berita Radio Television Malaysia (@beritaRTM), the state-owned news agency, accounted for 687 of the 4880 original tweets that used #KeluargaMalaysia. This account attached the hashtag to every tweet that it posted. Other notable accounts include the Pusat Maklumat Rakyat (PMR, or the Citizen’s Information Hub) which are government-affiliated portals that provide online information and policy announcements, facilitating public access to social services. These accounts each posted over 200 tweets that used the hashtag throughout the period under analysis.

Twitter data can also be mapped in the form of a social network diagram, in this case, a retweet network, which appears as clusters. Each dot, or node, in Figure 3 represents one Twitter account that used the hashtag #KeluargaMalaysia while one line, or edge, represents a retweet each account has received. Retweet networks are used to visualise how tweets and retweets are shared.

Figure 3 shows that retweets have circulated within two bubbles; one that is critical of the Malaysian government, and one that is pro-government. The pro-government bubble, indicated by the blue box is filled with retweets by government-affiliated accounts. On top of PMR and @beritaRTM making up the accounts in the pro-government box, other government-affiliated accounts include @JPenerangan, @StatsMalaysia and @MyKeluargaMsia.

In addition to these government-affiliated accounts, there are also pro-government retweet accounts that look like personal accounts of individual citizens. However, these retweet accounts post very little personal content. Instead, their feed consists exclusively of retweets of tweets by government agencies garnished with praise for the government – a strong indication of bots and cybertrooper activity. Many of these accounts are older than the Keluarga Malaysia campaign, and appear to have been created to boost the image of Barisan Nasional before August 2021.

In contrast, the retweets in the bubble which is critical of the government, within the red box, emanate from non-government-affiliated accounts. These are public accounts of private individuals, the majority of whom are “big accounts” with tens of thousands of followers. A look at the activity on these accounts reveals that these individuals did not engage with the hashtag #KeluargaMalaysia multiple times, unlike the government-affiliated accounts in the blue box. These individuals only tweeted the hashtag one to three times, and yet, were retweeted many times, suggesting that their posts enjoyed strong resonance.

Retweets have circulated within two bubbles; one that is critical of the government, and one that is pro-government. The pro-government bubble… is filled with retweets by government-affiliated accounts.

The dark green nodes represent the accounts that received the most retweets, which also include quoted-retweets that “hijacked” original tweets by @beritaRTM. The most retweeted quoted-retweet during this period accused Berita RTM of “romanticising” a teacher who risks his life every day to commute to work. This hijacked tweet accused the government of being tone-deaf when discussing the lack of infrastructure in rural areas, resulting in a teacher having to travel on narrow makeshift bridges to get to school. This quoted-retweet received over 12,000 retweets.

Other popular accounts have similarly hijacked such tweets, and have achieved virality as a result of their quoted-retweets which are also critical of the government. Their criticism covers a broad range of topics from the government’s handling of inflation to Najib Razak’s 1MDB trials. In general, these tweets come in the form of jabs at the government. They underscore how difficult it is for the government to determine the trajectory of a tweet and to ensure that its hashtag campaigns receive the intended favourable responses.

It has been ten months since the launch of Keluarga Malaysia, and the campaign has gained little traction and support. This is a source of concern for the government, and analysts have pointed out that the Prime Minister would want to cement the concept before heading to elections. Hence, Ismail Sabri’s administration may want to find more meaningful ways to get the rakyat to see value in building Keluarga Malaysia. Then they might retweet with love.

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