A Political Discourse Analysis Of The twitter Posts Of Najibrazak Prior To 2018 General Elections

The microblogging site Twitter gives politicians greater autonomy and enables them to operate individually by easily communicating online and on a personal level with the public. Based on the framework of Political Discourse Analysis, this article analyses the language use on the Twitter posts of former Malaysian Prime Minister, Najib Razak – @NajibRazak. This paper attempts to discern discursive practices that may produce and reproduce unequal power relations between politicians and the public. This is done through analyses at both topical or macro level and lexical or micro level. Findings show that Najib’s tweets convey implicit common sense assumptions, which highlight a paternalistic and government-knows-best approach that is known as a common characteristic of Asian governance.