Using Text Analytics to Discover Online Newspapers’ Role in Disseminating Government Policy — A Malaysian PDPA Context

As there are many cases on data misused, Malaysia government has enforced Personal Data Protection Act (PDPA) to regulate the processing of personal data in commercial transactions. However, it is found that many individuals have little knowledge on what is PDPA. According to literature, newspaper is the primary source for public knowledge on justice/legal affair. However, previous survey shows that 16% of Malaysian individuals gained PDPA knowledge through newspaper. Each aspect in the newspaper such as news category, news source, headline, frequency of relevant news and time gap between each relevant news being published plays a major role in affecting individual knowledge acquisition. This paper presents the discovery of the PDPA publication trend from online news portal and identify the attributes of current newspaper framing that affects the dissemination of news. In our studies, a total of 830 Malaysia English news from 29 different web portals has been collected. Descriptive analysis has been performed in each news aspects. The findings of this research project show that most online news are not focused on PDPA. Moreover, the framing, agenda setting and priming of the news indicates that personal data protection information had not been disseminating effectively.