Davadason Peter, Abszra
(2025)
A critical discourse analysis of twitter posts during the Sheraton move: a case study of the online public sphere in Malaysia.
PhD thesis, University of Nottingham.
Abstract
My thesis is a study of Malaysian political communication on Twitter by political elites, media organisations, and societal users. Using the Sheraton Move as a case study, I deconstruct 102 872 tweets during the period which witnessed Pakatan Harapan losing its hard-fought victory of the 14th General Elections in 2018. An exploration of literature showed that research of the effect of Twitter usage remain fragmented. Against the theoretical backdrop of Habermas’ public sphere, I propose a framework to better understand the Malaysian Twittersphere. For this, I divide the Malaysian Twittersphere into three communicative levels: the structural, representational, and interactional. I used a mixed method approach that combined critical discourse analysis of expert interviews, focus group discussion of users, archival research with quantitative content analytics to examine the reactions during the Sheraton Move on Twitter.
At the interactional level, societal users report they ‘felt’ democratic agency, particularly in the use of hashtags, mentions and retweets. Findings elucidate how the platform’s architecture amplified and suppressed these vernaculars impacting the reach of tweets. Community detection analysis suggested ways to understand the formation of echo-chambers and illustrate how what each user sees on the platform is algorithmically curated to optimise engagement. Put differently, social media platforms allowed each citizen to exist in individualised media environments. At the representational level, my analysis demonstrated that political communication on Twitter is often constructed as ‘emancipatory’, although almost 90% of tweets were produced in the societal sphere, thematic analysis findings of narratives challenging oppressive structures of power were almost absent. At the structural level, I was able to explain the reinstatement of the political elites on top of the societal hierarchy challenging prevailing notions of net neutrality over themes of deliberative democracy on digital platforms. This suggests that while democratic agency was found to exist in the interactional and part of the representational level, democratic impediments were found to be rife at the structural level.
Overall, the integration of the interactional, representational, and structural levels into a framework provides a basis to advance the understanding of the historically contentious political communication in Malaysia considering the intersectionality of race, class, and technology. Findings from my research offer some reflections about why cautious optimism is needed when viewing technologies that offer the promise of transforming the public sphere.
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