Alternative Tweeting

Abstract

The 2011 Singapore General Election was a watershed election that saw an unprecedented amount of political discourse on social media. It also marked the first time Twitter was used on a large-scale for political communication in Singapore. Interestingly, political discourse on Twitter was found to be different from other online media. This study drew upon framing theories to investigate the alternative frames in Twitter's public discourse about the elections. Using framing analysis a comparative study was carried out between the framing of the general elections in Twitter's public discourse and Singapore's government-regulated mainstream newspaper, The Straits Times. Consistent with previous findings, the study found that election coverage in both Twitter and the mainstream newspaper used game metaframing. However, Twitter and the mainstream newspaper used different subframes, where subframes in Twitter provided an alternative narrative to the official rhetoric in the mainstream newspaper.