Goods and Service Tax: Opinion Leaders Persuasion Strategies

The paper aims to identify the strategies and tactics used by opinion leaders in influencing public opinions. Based on GST implementation issues, which have sparked huge talks in the social media, thematic analysis method was used to identify strategies and tactics used by the politicians in influencing public opinions. Rank’s Model of Persuasion was used as a basis to determine the strategies and tactics. Using intensification strategy, the persuader can utilize repetition, association and composition tactics while the other strategy, downplaying, offers three more tactics which are diversion, omission and confusion. Twitter postings of Ahmad Maslan and Rafizi Ramli related to GST were used as the data source. The data were then processed and classified into themes according to Rank’s Model of Persuasion for further analysis. The results showed that even though both Ahmad Maslan and Rafizi prefer to use intensification strategy, there are differences in their approaches. While Ahmad Maslan chose to concentrate on repetition, Rafizi chose to be more diverse in applying tactics under the intensification strategy. Findings from this study provide a clearer understanding of online opinion leaders’ persuasion techniques, thus offering as a reference for future researchers.