A preliminary study of social media application: case study of political influence towards the public perception in Malaysia / Md Ranzi Abdullah

In modern society today, social media have become a popular communication channel for people to share information. People use social media for open discussion, shares information, news, pictures, video while other viewer posts their thought, opinion and like comments the posting. The concern arose and later drive more intention from the government after social media widely share 'unethical' contents especially the posting may political consequence. Social media could be a good medium for building concern society with such good norm of caring, proactive engagement, concern but regrettably, they are also inflicting social risk, exhibit a bad attitude, stimulate racism, hatred ,negative sentiments and propaganda among our society. This research has select Facebook as a social media platform to investigate ethical behaviour among Malaysian in social media with the issue in focus is about the implementation of Good and Service Tax (GST). The study makes use quantitative method and collects primary data from 138respondents for analysis. A qualitative method also applied by interview expertise in thein politics and social media. The study expected to find an answer on how Malaysian's netizen behave, response towards political issues in social media and find suitable countermeasures through a use of social media application. A Theory Planned Behaviour and top five personality model to investigate the relationship among factors and the result showed personalities traits of Intellectual, Emotionally Stability and Conscientiousness have positive correlation while Extraversion, and Agreeableness show no correlation with the intention to abuse Facebook. The study also found out that unethical Facebook political posting more likely posted by individuals with a higher education level of individual compared to those whose are not. External influences factors also found proven as associated with posting abuse news on Facebook. Furthermore, the study identified a number of possible countermeasures to reduce unethical posting on Facebook. Based on the finding, the study recommended to a developer to develop more education software to teach about the ethical use of social media. A recommendation for future study in this subject should focus on contents of education material that could bring the biggest impact to user .