Online Political Engagement using Twitter among Malaysian Parliamentary Members

There is a growing number of studies that highlighted the use of Twitter towards supporting better interaction between the wider audience in a variety of domains (e.g., business, education, and politics). Twitter has been found to be a useful tool to facilitate online engagement between politicians and their followers/voters. The aim of this study is to examine the political engagement using twitter among Malaysia Parliamentary members. 26,293 tweets posted by 12 parliamentary members were extracted. Social network analysis technique was used to analyze the data. The findings show that the Malaysia parliamentary members used Twitter to engage with its followers and voters. However, the platform was not utilized to its full capacity. This paper ends by suggesting future directions for this research topic.