Social Media Political Information Use and Voting Behavior of the Malaysian Youth

Abstract

The Malaysian lawmakers approved a legal amendment to lower the voting age from 21 to 18 years old on July 16, 2019. The new policy had empowered the very first batch of the 18 year-olds to cast their vote in the Johor state election which was held on March 12, 2022. Political analysts generally believe that what’s up in the near future would be the General Election 15 (GE15). For the first time ever Malaysians witnessed the transfer of power in the national political landscape since independence, politicians and big data analysts generally hailed the 2018 GE14 a ‘social media election’, given that social media had been used extensively by both the ruling and Opposition coalitions as major campaigning battleground, especially in their efforts to reach and sway the wired young voters. By employing an online self-administered survey questionnaire with 217 Malaysian first-time voters at a local university who rely heavily on social media for political information, this paper aims to learn how do these wired youth make use of social media platforms to learn about politics and observe voting. Findings of the current study suggest that social media political information use does not prompt the wired youth to be more likely to vote, but instead, distracts them from performing voters’ duty. On the contrary, voting behavior is more likely to be predicted by political variables such as party affiliation and political interest. Subsequently, research implications for practice and directions for future studies were discussed.