<![CDATA[This study examines public sentiment among X users toward the proposal to return regional head elections (Pilkada) to an indirect electoral mechanism through the Regional People’s Representative Council (DPRD), using a decision-tree classifier based on the C4.5 approach. A dataset of 4,127 tweets collected via X API v2 between December 2024 and January 2026 was analyzed using a seven-stage text preprocessing pipeline. Sentiment labels were generated through a hybrid lexicon-based approach, followed by manual verification of 500 stratified tweets by two independent annotators, yielding substantial inter-annotator agreement (Cohen’s Kappa = 0.78). TF-IDF was used for feature extraction, and the dataset was divided using an 80:20 stratified train-test split. The classifier achieved 81% accuracy, 82% precision, 79% recall, and an F1-score of 80%, outperforming Naive Bayes (74%) and Support Vector Machine (79%) baselines on the same dataset. The sentiment distribution showed that 45% of tweets were negative, 32% were positive, and 23% were neutral, indicating a predominantly critical response among X users toward the proposal. These findings describe discourse on X during the study period and should not be interpreted as representative of broader public opinion. Overall, the study highlights the potential of machine learning methods for analyzing Indonesian political discourse on social media.]]>
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