Factors Influencing Young Malaysians’ Political Information Seeking Behaviour on Twitter

Abstract

Youth participation in political discourses is an important element that needs to be looked into urgently in Malaysia. This is especially so with the historical milestone of the Undi18 constitutional amendment allowing youth from 18 years old to vote in the 15th General Election. This research was initiated to investigate the youth's behaviour in terms of attitude, awareness, and involvement in politics via social media, specifically Twitter. In this study, involvement in politics is described as youths' political information seeking behaviour on Twitter in relation to political attitudes such as political self-efficacy, situational political involvement, government trust, and processing of information, that is perceived information quality. An online survey form was disseminated across Twitter using snowball sampling for Klang Valley Twitter users aged between 18 to 30. The results garnered from 314 respondents revealed significant relationships between independent variables (self-efficacy, situational, political involvement, government trust, and information quality) and the dependent variable (Twitter motivation). It was hoped that this study would help researchers better grasp the pattern on how Malaysian youth use Twitter to get political information. This study may also provide important information on the online diffusion and consumption of political information through social media like Twitter. Keywords: Political information-seeking behaviour, processing information, youth, Twitter, Malaysia.