PETALING JAYA, Aug 3 — Despite an apparent dip in the public’s interest in politics post-Election 2013, the DAP has remained the most active and “liked” party on Facebook, ahead even of its Pakatan Rakyat (PR) partners PKR and PAS.

Politweet.org, an independent online research house that tracks social media use in Malaysian politics, said after the divisive May 5 polls, Facebook activity on politics began to ease off, causing a dip in the number of “likes” for all parties across the board.

But while the DAP also recorded the most losses of “likes” from these “potential voters” on Facebook, the PR component party remained popular among users on the social media platform.

“PKR and Umno are tied for total likes though Umno has more likes from men and PKR has more likes from women.

“DAP continues to lead all other parties on FB with more likes in every age category for both genders,” Politweet.org wrote in a posting yesterday in its latest Facebook census.

“MCA is the only party whose [sic] total likes are currently lower than they were before #GE13,” it added.

In the accompanying chart with Politweet.org’s latest research finding, the DAP surged far ahead of its political peers with some 860,000 “likes” on Facebook from some 580,000 men and 260,000 women.

PKR and Umno tied at 620,000 “likes” each while PAS came in third with 580,000 likes.

Among the ruling Barisan Nasional (BN) coalition’s 12 other component parties, Gerakan appeared the most popular, recording 156,000 likes, ahead of the MIC’s 36,000 and the MCA’s 30,000.

Explaining the results, Politweet.org said these “likes” come from users aged 21 and above and who are residing in Malaysia.

The “likes”, it added, do not explicitly include the pages of politicians but also users who “share content about the party and members of supporter groups, party pages and party workers”.

“Male+female likes do not add up to the total because not all users state their gender,” it said.

The research house did not post the number of likes for the political parties prior to the May 5 polls but said the decline was likely due to a drop in interest for these political parties.

“If there was a decline in Malaysia’s FB population then this decrease in likes could be attributed to a ‘bot cleanup’ exercise.

“However Malaysia’s FB population has had a nett increase since July. So we can say the decrease in likes for political parties is more due to a decline in interest.”

Political parties in Malaysia have been relying heavily on social media to reach out to voters, preferring the speed and wide outreach of the Internet to traditional media tools like newspapers.

There are currently an estimated 13.6 million Facebook users in Malaysia, which is nearly half of the country’s 28 million population.

According to previous media reports, some 29 per cent of Facebook users in Malaysia are aged between 25 and 34 years.

Prior to the May 5 polls, Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak, in recognising the proliferation of web users, said that Election 2013 would be “social media election” with websites like Facebook and Twitter likely becoming the main battleground for parties to slug it out during their campaigns.

“The coming months will be a fascinating period for people in both politics and the Internet.

“I can confidently predict that this will be Malaysia’s first ‘social media elections’,” said Najib, who himself has more than one million Twitter followers and over 1.2 million “likes” on his Facebook page.