Exploring the Negative Criticism of Readers’ Comments on Online News on the Construction of a New Capital City of Indonesia (IKN)

A collaborative research article by lecturers from the Faculty of Cultural Sciences, Universitas Padjadjaran, has been published in Cogent Arts & Humanities (2025, Vol. 12, No. 1, 2450888). The article, entitled “Exploring the Negative Criticism of Readers’ Comments on Online News on the Construction of a New Capital City of Indonesia (IKN)”, was written by Dadang Suganda (Indonesian Literature), Susi Yuliawati (English Literature), Ani Rachmat (Russian Literature), and Tatang Suparman (Indonesian Literature).

The study investigates how readers’ comments on online political news about the construction of the new capital city, Ibu Kota Nusantara (IKN), reflect negative criticism shaped by differing political perspectives. Drawing on a corpus of 1000 comments, the authors employed lexical and pragmatic analyses to examine word frequency, the speech acts underlying the criticism, and the stance-taking positions of commenters.

The findings show that nouns, pronouns, and negation lexis are frequently used to intensify negative criticism. Evaluative speech acts were found to be the most dominant, followed by directive and analytical ones, often appearing in combination. The research highlights that divergent political views significantly influence public criticism of IKN.

This publication contributes to interdisciplinary studies in applied linguistics, pragmatics, and sociolinguistics, offering insights into how corpus-based approaches can be used to understand discourse and public opinion in digital communication spaces.

Ferli Hasanah