KUALA LUMPUR – Datuk Seri Mohamed Azmin Ali, Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin and Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad are the most disliked politicians in the country, an analysis of tweets has found.
The study by the Kuala Lumpur School of Artificial Intelligence (KLSAI) used data gathered through “web scraping”, where bots are used to extract online content, over a five-day period last month.
“300k tweets related to political bases, from the period between October 21 and 25, were scraped and analysed. Various codes and crawlers were used to scrape all the related tweets, and the sentiments of these tweets were analysed, as well as the common languages used,” said a statement by the institution.
Tweets related to Azmin, who holds the international trade and industry portfolio, were 90.63% negative, followed by Prime Minister Muhyiddin (75.56%) and former prime minister Dr Mahathir (65.6%).
“Maybe, politicians don’t take the rakyat seriously, but the rakyat see right through them. In the suspense of commencing a state of emergency, the people were of the opinion that it was a move by Azmin and Muhyiddin to stay in power,” said the statement.
Other tweets pointed to Perikatan Nasional’s absence after the September 26 Sabah election, with civil society groups and residents having to fend for themselves amid the third Covid-19 wave.
KLSAI said if a general election is called, PN will likely find it tough to retain Putrajaya.
“At this rate, if the government were to call for elections at the expense of taxpayers’ money, Muhyiddin and his team will fail miserably.
“Netizens also expressed how they badly want a leader, not just a prime minister, hence the hashtag #MuhyiddinOut that has been trending for several days.”
With regard to Dr Mahathir, social media users believe him to be the cause of the “Sheraton Move” in February that led to the collapse of the Pakatan Harapan administration. – The Vibes, November 1, 2020
