Fewer people tweeted about the EO6 detention because there is 'still a lack of understanding' about how the Emergency Order (EO) impacts our society.
The six, who were detained under the Emergency Order (EO,) were released last Friday but twitter discussions involving them paled in comparison to the buzz the Bersih 2.0 rally created on Twittersphere.
Even during the height of their detention, there were only 2,945 messages tweeted about them on Twitter. Throughout their detention, there were 2,009 users who tweeted 11,438 messages about the six detainees.
Bersih, on the other hand, recorded 28,721 users who sent out 204,284 tweets about the rally.
Politweet.org, a research organisation that studies Twitter interactions between Malaysian citizens and politicians agreed that the response for the EO six has been lukewarm.
With the release of the six PSM leaders, Politweet expects “interest to completely drop by this week”.
“The thing about people on Twitter is that they usually write about a topic when there are new developments, and the PSM EO6 story hasn’t developed much since they were arrested.
“Compare that with Bersih where there were new stories almost daily,” said politweet.org founder Ahmed Kamal Nava.
No consistency
He added that the poor response could also be due to the lack of organization and consistency.
“Part of the reason was a disorganised effort to spread awareness on Twitter.
“Consistent terms and tweets worth retweeting are key to spreading awareness on an issue on Twitter,” he said, adding that people were not consistent when using the same hashtag or term to tweet about the cause.
There had been an effort to consolidate the EO6 tweets.
It was called “@free_eo6″. However, it began only last Thursday, a day before the detainees were released.
Ahmed Kamal also added that people do not re-tweet messages about the EO6 frequently.
Retweets refer to how many times a single message is repeated by other users.
“That’s one clue about people’s lack of interest. Dedicated promoters would retweet regardless of content” he said.
He said during Bersih, the highest number of retweets of a single message was 679 times.
But in the case of the EO6, the message that was retweeted the most was only 76 times. That message was of their release.
Lack of understanding
As to why there was such a lukewarm response to EO6, Ahmed Kamal said it was because it affected a small group of people.
“Right now I think its unlikely EO6 will grow to even half of #Bersih, because for many people EO6 is seen as an issue affecting a minority (PSM) and not a majority (Bersih electoral reforms).
“The everyday citizen does not see himself as being a potential victim under EO, so why is it an issue (they might ask),” he said.
He said there was still a lack of understanding about how the use of EO or Internal Security Act (ISA) impacts our society and cultivates an environment where freedom of expression is limited.
“Until that changes, people will not be emotionally invested enough to campaign against it, or even bother talking about it.” he added.
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