<![CDATA[Background: In April 2026, the fifth cabinet reshuffle under President Prabowo’s administration caused significant polarization of public opinion in the digital sphere. Although this event highlights critical political dynamics within the red and White Cabinet, the resulting fragmentation of public perception and collective sentiment remain computationally unmapped. Purpose: this study aims to analyze sentiment trends, identify opinion biases, and map the reception of Indonesian netizens on YouTube concerning the fifth cabinet reshuffle. Methods: This descriptive quantitative study applies computationally based sentiment analysis. A total of 1.232 clean comment from the Tribun News YouTube channel, titled “6 Pejabat Terdampak Perombakan Kabinet Presiden Prabowo, Mantan Kasad Dudung Dilantik sebagai KSP,” were collected via data scraping. The dataset underwent structured text preprocessing including case folding, filtering, tokenization, and stemming and was subsequently classified using the Support Vector Machine 9SVM) algorithm. Results: Public opinion sits mostly in a negotiated position (neutral sentiment) at 65,3%. An oppositional position (negative sentiment) follows at 31,8%, and the dominant hegemonic position (positive sentiment) accounts for 2,9%. The SVM model reaches an overall accuracy of 89,47% and detects critical (negative) text with a precision of 96%. Conclusion: Using Audience Reception and Affective Publics as theoretical frameworks, this study finds that the government’s official narrative did not shape public sentiment. Netizens rejected the reshuffle’s claim to objectivity and mocked the decision as a political “power sharing” maneuver. Implications: To preserve its political legitimacy, the government must prioritize transparency when it communicates about its performance. For digital democracy research, this study shows that networked affective publics use online satire as political resistance.]]>
