The price paid for the serious misjudgment and ignore cyber-campaigning on the Internet is too high. It caused the powerful Barisan Nasional coalition suffered its worst-ever results in March 8 polls that left five states and a third of parliamentary seats in opposition hands.Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi today said his "biggest mistake" in disastrous elections was to ignore cyber-campaigning on the Internet which was seized by the opposition.
"We certainly lost the Internet war, the cyber-war," Abdullah said in a speech to an investment conference.
"It was a serious misjudgment. We made the biggest mistake in thinking that it was not important," he said.
"We thought that the newspapers, the print media, the television was supposed to be important, but the young people were looking at SMS and blogs."
"It was painful ... but it came at the right time, not too late," he said.
The foreign analysis observed that the opposition, which was largely ignored by government-linked mainstream media, instead waged an enormously successful online campaign using blogs, news websites and SMS text messages.
The comments are a major about-face for the government, which had vilified bloggers, calling them liars and threatening them with detention without trial under draconian internal security laws.
The mainstream media are "often compelled to ignore or to play down" opposition events.
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