Political ‘Buzzers’ on WhatsApp in Indonesian Elections

The final speaker in this AoIR 2019 session is Emma Baulch, who shifts our focus to Indonesian activist uses of WhatsApp. She focusses on ‘buzzers’: content creators who work especially in the context of Indonesian election campaigns and promote specific political candidates across various social media platforms.

Such buzzers produce and promote political memes throughout social media, and in Indonesia also especially on WhatsApp, the top messaging app in the country. This also includes political misinformation, and to address such issues WhatsApp has now placed a limit on users’ ability to share on messages to larger numbers of people: it is now possible only to on-share messages to a maximum of 20 other users.

WhatsApp also makes it possible for campaigns to target new publics outside the urban middle classes, and this has led to the emergence of specific campaigning teams within the political campaign organisations. In the 2019 campaign, incumbent president Joko Widodo responded to the rise in Islamic fundamentalism in Indonesia by emphasising his Islamic credentials and undermining those of his opponent Prabowo.

The present project conducted interviews with the meme creators and team leaders in the campaign organisations, and found a strongly hierarchical organisation in these teams; these are not leaderless flat organisations. The campaigns established centralised planning groups, local teams across the different provinces, unofficial volunteer groups, and possibly other special interest groups that addressed religious, ethnic, or sporting groups. Some of these also addressed expatriate Indonesians, for instance in Australia.