How Political Interest is Divided by Language on Facebook in Malaysia (July 2017)

1. Introduction

This document provides a measurement of the political party interests of Facebook users in Malaysia. This is based on public information collected from Facebook.

Some important notes to remember when interpreting Facebook figures:

1. Total population refers to Facebook users aged 13 years and above.
2. Potential voters refer to Facebook users aged 21 years and above.
3. Youth refers to Facebook users aged 13 – 20 years.
4. Gender breakdown figures do not always add up to the total. This may be due to Facebook users not sharing their gender, and also due to rounding errors in statistics provided by Facebook. State breakdown figures also do not add up to the total due to the same rounding errors.
5. Detailed statistics on Putrajaya are not available due to the small number of users in the territory.
6. Figures provided by Facebook are estimates. Some inaccuracies are to be expected, e.g. the sum of state totals not being equal to the national total.
7. Facebook users residing in Malaysia are not necessarily Malaysian citizens.
8. Interest in a topic is equal to the number of users expressing interest in a topic.
   1. To measure interest we used a combination of Facebook Interests (a collection of interests, activities, groups, pages, status updates and job history identified by a common term determined by Facebook e.g. ‘United Malays National Organization’) and specific Group and Page names (e.g. Friends of BN).
   2. These are used to collect the number of users interested in a given party/coalition/politician/group. For example, a user mentioning a party name in a status update; sharing a news link related to the party or sharing content from a party-affiliated page would count towards the total interest in that party
   3. Interest in a political party does not indicate support for the party, only awareness
   4. It is currently assumed that interest in PAS includes some interest in AMANAH as PAS leaders and members migrated to AMANAH
9. Audience refers to the population of users that express interest in a topic. Unless indicated, the audiences used in this report are composed of potential voters (users in Malaysia aged 21 years and above).
10. Based on our research to date, Pages that are of type ‘politician’ are not always included under related Facebook Topics. For example, not all ‘Tony Pua’ (MP, PJ Utara, DAP) Page likes are included under interest in ‘DAP’. However, because Facebook does not make Topic details available we cannot easily determine which politicians, if any, were included.
11. Statistics on the Opposition primarily refer to component parties of the former Pakatan Rakyat – PKR, PAS and DAP. This includes the ‘Pakatan’ brand name.
12. July 2017 statistics were collected during a 2-week period in July 2017. As such there may be some differences in totals for political parties when comparing different sections due to changes in collected statistics.
13. Statistics on the 2017 1^st Quarter electoral roll are estimates based on published changes to the 2016 gazetted roll. Ethnic breakdown for new voters are based on profiling methods that we developed and should be considered estimates.

2. List of Acronyms

The following table shows a list of acronyms used in this document.

Acronym	Full name
PR	Pakatan Rakyat
PH	Pakatan Harapan
BN	Barisan Nasional
UMNO	United Malays National Organisation
GERAKAN	Parti Gerakan Rakyat Malaysia (also known as PGRM)
MCA	Malaysian Chinese Association
MIC	Malaysian Indian Congress
PBB	Parti Pesaka Bumiputra Bersatu Sarawak
PKR	Parti Keadilan Rakyat
DAP	Democratic Action Party
AMANAH	Parti Amanah Negara
PAS	Parti Islam Se-Malaysia
PPBM	Parti Pribumi Bersatu Malaysia

3. An Overview of Malaysia’s Facebook User Population (July 2017)

3.1 Division by Age and Gender

There are currently 24 million Facebook users in Malaysia. 54.17% are men and 45.83% are women.

From this total, 19 million users are aged 21 years and above. 52.63% are men and 47.37% are women. These are the potential voters on Facebook.

The chart below shows the population distribution by age group. The largest segment of the population is aged between 21 – 30 years.

The table below shows the distribution of Facebook users by state, sorted by the total population:

State	Total (13+ yrs)	Male (%)	Female (%)	% of Malaysia
Perlis	40,000	52.50	47.50	0.17
Labuan	170,000	52.35	46.47	0.71
Kelantan	290,000	51.72	44.83	1.21
Terengganu	370,000	51.35	48.65	1.54
Negeri Sembilan	380,000	55.26	47.37	1.58
Melaka	390,000	53.85	46.15	1.63
Pahang	500,000	54.00	48.00	2.08
Kedah	610,000	54.10	47.54	2.54
Perak	880,000	51.14	48.86	3.67
Penang	990,000	51.52	48.48	4.13
Sabah	1,000,000	53.00	47.00	4.17
Sarawak	1,100,000	51.82	45.45	4.58
Johor	1,900,000	57.89	45.79	7.92
KL + Selangor	15,000,000	56.67	42.67	62.50

 

The table below shows the distribution of Facebook users by state aged 21 years and above.

State	Total (>=21 yrs)	Male (%)	Female (%)	% of Msia (>=21 yrs)	% of State (>=21 yrs)
Perlis	33,000	51.52	48.48	0.17	82.50
Labuan	140,000	52.14	45.71	0.74	82.35
Kelantan	230,000	52.17	43.48	1.21	79.31
Terengganu	290,000	51.72	48.28	1.53	78.38
Negeri Sembilan	310,000	54.84	48.39	1.63	81.58
Melaka	320,000	53.13	46.88	1.68	82.05
Pahang	400,000	55.00	47.50	2.11	80.00
Kedah	490,000	53.06	46.94	2.58	80.33
Perak	710,000	50.70	47.89	3.74	80.68
Sabah	790,000	53.16	46.84	4.16	79.00
Penang	840,000	50.00	47.62	4.42	84.85
Sarawak	840,000	53.57	46.43	4.42	76.36
Johor	1,600,000	55.00	45.00	8.42	84.21
KL + Selangor	12,000,000	56.67	44.17	63.16	80.00

 

Based on the last column we can see that Sarawak, Terengganu, Kelantan and Sabah have the highest proportion of young users (below 21 years).

As of 2017 Quarter 1, an estimated 21.64% of registered voters reside in KL and Selangor. In the National Census 2010, 24.35% of Malaysia’s citizens and 24.11% of Malaysia’s total population reside in KL and Selangor.

However according to statistics from Facebook, 62.50% of Facebook users in Malaysia reside in KL and Selangor. This includes Malaysians and foreigners who live there. This is an increase from 50% in August 2016.

The heavy concentration of users in KL and Selangor means that trending content in Malaysia in terms of shares and likes might not reflect what the country is talking about. When it comes to the analysis of interest in local issues such as politics, it is therefore important to evaluate the interests of users in different states.

3.2 Division by Language

The chart below shows the number of potential voters by language used on Facebook, based on information they have shared with Facebook:

Hindi/Tamil = users who use Hindi or Tamil. Only 20 thousand users use both languages

If we added the totals together there would be 30 million users. Given that there are only 19 million Facebook users, there is an overlap between users from each group. Many users speak multiple languages.

93% of potential voters on Facebook use English, Malay or Chinese languages. Because of this high coverage, we were able to design a set of formulas to break up these users into smaller, identifiable groups based on different combinations of spoken languages. The population of users in these groups can then be estimated. The results of this analysis are in the table below:

Language Group	Code	% of Population (>=21 years)	Description
Bilingual Malay + English	BME	40.26	Users who speak Malay and English. May also speak other languages except Chinese.
English Only / English + Other languages	EO	19.21	Users who speak English but do not speak Malay or Chinese. May also speak other languages.
Malay Only / Malay + Other languages	MO	13.95	Users who speak Malay but do not speak English or Chinese. May also speak other languages.
Bilingual Chinese + English	BCE	12.37	Users who speak both Chinese and English. May also speak other languages except Malay.
Other Languages Only	OTH	7.11	Users who do not speak English, Malay or Chinese
Chinese Only / Chinese + Other languages	CO	3.42	Users who speak Chinese but do not speak English or Malay. May also speak other languages.
Bilingual Malay + Chinese	BMC	1.84	Users who speak both Malay and Chinese. May also speak other languages except English.
Trilingual Malay + English + Chinese	TRI	1.84	Users who speak English, Malay and Chinese. May also speak other languages.

 

The proportion of each group is summarised in the chart below.

From the chart we can observe that:

• The Bilingual Malay + English (BME) group is both the largest group of users and largest subset of Malay speakers in the country
• Most Malay speakers on Facebook understand English
• The Bilingual Chinese + English (BCE) group is the 4^th largest group of users and largest subset of Chinese speakers in the country
• Most Chinese speakers on Facebook understand English
• A minority of users (3.68%, 700 thousand) speak combinations of Malay and Chinese

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