A Review of the Literature on Social Media Activism in Indonesia

The next speaker in this COMNEWS 2023 session is Benazir Bona Pratamawaty, who is presenting a long-term overview of digital activism in Indonesia. But digital activism remains a liquid, unsettled term: it describes social and political campaigning practices that draw on digital network infrastructure, often extending beyond standard representational politics.

Karatzogianni has identified four waves of digital activism: Web 1.0 activism since 1994; social-political mobilisation after 9/11 and other contemporary events in the early 2000s; the activism surrounding Obama’s election and the Green movement in Iran since 2007; and the activism of WikiLeaks, the Arab Spring, and the Occupy movement from 2010. In Indonesia, Merlyna Lim first thematised digital activism in 2003, and this activism might be traced further back to the era of the New Order after the democratic transformations of 1988.

But what would a more detailed history of digital activism in Indonesia since 2003 look like? Benazir conducted a semi-systematic review of available studies, and found some 67 articles covering this period by searching Google Scholar; 57 of these were found to be relevant. But as it turns out from this, first papers emerged only in 2016, and research really only took off from 2020 or so – at the beginning of the pandemic era –, with a peak in 2022. Taking into account the speed of scholarly publishing, this aligns with other reports of a significant increase in digital activism in the country since 2019.

The vast bulk of these studies came from the field of communication, with society and culture, social science, and politics also well represented. Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram are the most discussed platforms, and qualitative methods tend to dominate; quantitative or mixed-methods studies are far less prominent.

These studies also use a wide range of alternative terms that are interchangeably used to describe digital activism – there is no one term that is used consistently. This further confuses the picture. More, and more systematic, research is required here, especially given the widespread use of digital media in political contexts in Indonesia.