Public Negative Sentiment Regarding Jokowi's Policy In Handling COVID-19

President Joko Widodo (YouTube @Setpres))

JAKARTA - The Institute for Development of Economics and Finance (Indef) conducted research on public sentiment regarding a number of policies issued by President Jokowi in the midst of the corona virus or COVID-19 pandemic. As a result, many of Jokowi's policies have been responded negatively by the community.

Indef's research and polls were conducted on Twitter's social media. For one month from 27 March to 25 April. Not a few netizens have responded negatively to policies issued by the government. Even some of them are confused and do not understand the purpose of handling COVID-19 in a broad sense.

"From this research, there are many responses related to analysis and government policy issues in handling COVID-19 with negative sentiments. The lack of socialization has made public understanding of these policies confusing and difficult to understand," said Indef Datalyst Center researcher Imam Maulana. in the webinar meeting, Sunday, April 26th.

Imam explained, of the 476 thousand conversations on social media, only two government policies related to COVID-19 were positively welcomed. While others received negative responses. The majority of netizens discussed the Large-Scale Social Restrictions (PSBB) policy, both in Jakarta and other areas.

Closely related to the PSBB policy, he continued, the rules for whether or not to go home were quite a large number of conversations with 44,879 conversations. This conversation about going home received a negative sentiment of 54 percent, the remaining 46 percent received a positive sentiment. Because it is closely related to the spread of COVID-19, the issue of going home has received great attention.

"That means the public, netizens pay attention while worrying about government policies, which are considered unclear. On the one hand, the spokesman for the President (Jokowi) said they could go home from self-quarantine. But this was denied by the cabinet secretary going home," he explained.

Then, Imam said, in contrast to the PSBB, Jokowi's policy to eliminate electricity bills for a number of customers on March 31, actually received 94 percent positive sentiment. The main topic of discussion was free electricity for the vulnerable.

"The policy of releasing prisoners on April 1, which was responded to by 54 percent of Twitter users positively. The key to the conversation that has emerged is the potential for community unrest, remission of corruptors, and release of prisoners due to humanity," he said.

Indef's explanation regarding Government Policy related to COVID-19 (Mery Handayani / VOI)

Imam said that the majority of the other four policies also received negative sentiment. Among them is unemployment due to COVID-19 with 84 percent negative sentiment. Then, the issue of the Pre-employment Card program also received 81 percent negative sentiment.

"The last two are the social safety net with 56 percent negative sentiment and the special rules for insulting the president with 89 percent negative sentiment by Twitter users," he said.

Luhut to Yasonna

The INDEF machine learning instrument also captures conversations about individual officials and government officials. As a result, President Joko Widodo or Jokowi was widely discussed and received negative sentiment from netizens.

"Of the total 248 thousand conversations on the COVID-19 issue, there were no less than 22,574 conversations about President Jokowi. From the results of the sentiment analysis on the data, 66 percent were negative sentiments," he said.

Furthermore, the official who talked about the most negatively was the Coordinating Minister for Maritime Affairs and Investment Luhut Binsar Panjaitan with 1,167 talks. Luhut received the highest negative sentiment with a percentage of 86 percent. Meanwhile, the most discussed topic from Luhut is regarding the online motorcycle taxi license of the Ministry of Transportation and the continued operation of intercity buses.

Not much different, the Minister of Law and Human Rights Yasonna Laoly also received negative sentiment with 6,895 conversations or 81 percent. The majority of conversations are about the release of prisoners (corruptors).

After Yasonna, there is the name of Minister of Health Terawan Agus Putranto with 2,384 talks and 76 percent negative sentiment. Most of the topics of discussion were about the bureaucracy of submitting the PSBB.

Meanwhile, unlike the previous four officials, Minister of Cooperatives and SMEs Teten Masduki actually received 97 percent positive sentiment, even though only with 463 conversations. However, the majority of the discussion is about Pre-employment Card funds that are better for the needs of the people.