Public Perception Behind the Garuda Biru Issue: A Linguistic Corpus-Based Analysis

Abstract

In an era where almost everyone has access to social media, political discourse has been more public and widespread than ever before. Amidst the democratization of information, understanding public perception is crucial to portraying how certain political issues are perceived by the public. This corpus study aims to examine the frequency of positive and negative public sentiments towards the Garuda Biru political issue. The image of a Garuda with a blue background symbolizes resistance to dynastic politics and support for the Constitutional Court (MK) decision to reject the minimum age requirement for regional head candidates. The data were collected by crawling netizens’ comments under the top 10 most trending posts of account X. After the pre-processing stage, we analyzed the nouns and verbs used by netizens to reveal the central theme behind the Garuda Biru discourse. After the nouns and verbs were quantified, a concordance analysis was employed to reveal netizens’ perceptions using Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis framework. We observed that most netizens support the Garuda Biru action based on the verb analysis. The noun analysis reveals that netizens associated the Garuda Biru discourse with two themes: Law and injustice. From this research, we argue that social media may help the public express their views on a political issue. Further research can examine different perspectives of Garuda Biru discourse by analyzing opponents of the Garuda Biru issue to gain a more balanced and objective perspective.