Posts Tagged ‘protest rally’
Twitter Statistics and Crowd Measurement of the Bersih 4 Rally
1. Background
On July 29th Bersih 2.0 announced that a rally entitlted ‘Bersih 4’ would be held on the streets of Kuala Lumpur, Kuching and Kota Kinabalu from August 29th, 2pm to August 30th. The demands of the rally are for Prime Minister Najib Razak to step down and the following institutional reforms to be implemented:
- Clean Elections
- Clean Governments
- Saving Malaysia’s Economy
- Right to Dissent
- Strengthening Parliamentary Democracy (added on August 14th)
On August 14th Bersih released a statement adding a demand for a transitional government to be formed after Najib’s resignation. This government would need to implement 10 institutional reforms within the next 18 months to ensure the next General Election would be conducted in a clean, free and fair manner:
- Reform of electoral system and process
- Reform of the Election Commission (EC)
- Separation of Prime Minister and Finance Minister
- Parliamentary Reform
- Separation of the functions of Attorney General and Director of Public Prosecution
- Reform of the MACC
- Freedom of Information laws
- Asset declaration by Ministers and senior state officials
- Abolishment of/Amendment to draconian laws
- Establishment of the Independent Police Complaints and Misconduct Commission (IPCMC)
On August 27th Opposition MPs from PKR, DAP and GHB released a joint statement declaring they would work with BN MPs to form a new government provided that Anwar Ibrahim and other prisoners of conscience be released; and political reforms be the core agenda of the new government.
2. Twitter Statistics
All statistics referring to tweets include retweets unless otherwise stated.
2.1 Basic Stats
111,879 users made 583,338 tweets about Bersih from July 28th – August 30th 2015.
96,890 users made 446,967 tweets about Bersih during the rally period (August 29th – August 30th 2015). In other words, 86.6% of the total users and 76.6% of total tweets were made during the rally.
The chart below shows a comparison in the number of users tweeting about the Bersih 2 (July 2011), Bersih 3 (April 2012) and Bersih 4 (August 2015) rallies in the days leading up to the event.
Analysis of Support for Bersih 4 by Twitter Users in Malaysia
1. Background
On July 29th Bersih 2.0 announced that a rally entitled ‘Bersih 4’ would be held on the streets of Kuala Lumpur, Kuching and Kota Kinabalu from August 29th, 2pm to August 30th. The demands of the rally are for Prime Minister Najib Razak to step down and the following institutional reforms to be implemented:
- Clean Elections
- Clean Governments
- Saving Malaysia’s Economy
- Right to Dissent
- Strengthening Parliamentary Democracy (added on August 14th)
On August 14th Bersih released a statement adding a demand for a transitional government to be formed after Najib’s resignation. This government would need to implement 10 institutional reforms within the next 18 months to ensure the next General Election would be conducted in a clean, free and fair manner:
- Reform of electoral system and process
- Reform of the Election Commission (EC)
- Separation of Prime Minister and Finance Minister
- Parliamentary Reform
- Separation of the functions of Attorney General and Director of Public Prosecution
- Reform of the MACC
- Freedom of Information laws
- Asset declaration by Ministers and senior state officials
- Abolishment of/Amendment to draconian laws
- Establishment of the Independent Police Complaints and Misconduct Commission (IPCMC)
On August 27th Opposition MPs from PKR, DAP and GHB released a joint statement declaring they would work with BN MPs to form a new government provided that Anwar Ibrahim and other prisoners of conscience be released; and political reforms be the core agenda of the new government.
2. Our Analysis
We performed opinion-based analysis on 385 users based in Malaysia who tweeted about Bersih 4 and related terms from July 28th – August 25th 2015. The margin of error is +/- 4.99%.
Users were selected based on their tweet content and activity during this period. Sampling was done per-state based on the current estimated user population.
Spammers, news agencies and accounts with automated tweets were not included in the sample.
From this dataset we analysed the individual Twitter user timelines to determine their opinion. This took their tweets, retweets and conversations into account.
Our goal was to gauge public support by Twitter users in Malaysia for the Bersih 4 rally taking place from August 29th – August 30th in Kuala Lumpur.
Based on this analysis we categorised users as belonging to one of the following categories:
- Support
- Neutral
- Don’t Support
These were further divided into the following categories:
- Support
- Support (Najib must resign)
- Neutral
- Don’t Support (general)
- Don’t Support (apathy)
The results are shown in the following charts.