KUALA LUMPUR, Sept 18 — Datuk Seri Najib Razak called in sick to a 1MDB corruption trial for the second time in a month last week, but this was no barrier to his growing proclivity for needling opponents on social media.
Through it all, his 3.9 million Facebook followers lapped it up by the thousands and retransmitted his messages to their own networks, giving him a reach that most other politicians in the Opposition would envy. However, analysts told Malay Mail that Najib’s apparent popularity in the virtual world was unlikely to translate significantly into tangible support, and not nearly enough to usher him back to his previous position as prime minister of Malaysia.
Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad trails him with 3.6 million followers while PKR president Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim has on half of the prime minister’s followers. Wan Shawaluddin then pointed out that Najib’s social media strategy was not fundamentally different from that used by Pakatan Harapan leaders when they had still been the Opposition: rile up the electorate against the government.