Public Opinion Dynamics on Twitter: A Preliminary Analysis of Conversations Related to the 2024 General Election in Indonesia

Abstract

Objective: Public opinion research related to general elections in Indonesia previously focused more on when the campaign period was officially carried out. In fact, before the official campaign period takes place, it is the right time to invite the public to actively participate in politics. In this article, we conducted research on conversations on Twitter (X) related to the 2024 general election “Pemilu 2024”. The research was conducted to determine the topic of conversation and the actors who played a role in the conversation.   Method: This research used social network analysis on social media Twitter (X) as method to analyze conversation about “Pemilu 2024”. There were 38,570 tweets collected from all over Indonesia using the keyword combination 2024 Election “Pemilu 2024” from January to March 2023.   Results: The results of social network analysis show that there were 6,275 hashtags used with 7,244 users involved in the conversation. The topics that emerged were dominated by the public's hopes for holding the “Pemilu 2024”, the names of figures, political parties, supporters of President Jokowi, the Election Supervisory Body and the General Election Commission. SNA was also used to assess network characteristics and found that the “Pemilu 2024” network had a non-centralized structure. In other words, the public has its own opinions. The influential actors based on the score of centrality are @aboebakar15, @NasDem, @RakyatBerisik. Meanwhile, the influential actors based on degree are @jokowi @cakimiNOW and @KPU_ID. Apart from that, there are accounts that are bubblereachers, namely @KPU_ID, @Bawaslu, @jpnncom.   Conclusions: In the context of conversations regarding the “Pemilu 2024”, Twitter users (X) apparently show different behavior in showing agreement. In future practice, it is hoped that accounts that become bubblereachers will not only follow the principles of information usefulness, but also apply the principles of dialogic communication. By implementing dialogical communication, public opinion can be influenced and ultimately public involvement in politics can also be affected. Twitter users (X) use the favorite feature more often than retweets. It is hoped that the implications of this research can become a reference for practitioners in the field of political communication and policy makers in order to increase public participation in politics.