Political Communication on Social Media in Indonesia

After a brief press conference involving us two keynote speakers, I’ve now joined the next session at COMNEWS 2023, which continues with a paper by Ika Rizki Yustisia, whose interest is in political discussion on social media in Indonesia. Her work attempts to assess the popularity of political leaders on social media – and social media here means Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, but now also TikTok and other new platforms. These require different approaches to symbolic communication, depending on platform affordances.

Different political figures have very divergent approaches to communication even on the same platforms; this paper focusses on the Instagram strategies of three key leaders, and coded their Instagram posts for a number of characteristics. One, Ridwan Kamil, mostly posted videos; focussed on policies, official messages, and his personal life; and often referred to popular culture aspects (including parodies of viral video clips). Anies Baswedan’s posts were dominated by posts about his activities as Governor, engagement with society, and connections with other political figures. Banjarmasin Pranowo mostly posted about himself, interactions in society, and often tagged the President, Jokowi.

This shows some very different messaging strategies. This also extends to the varying complexity of the language being used, and attempts to portray themselves as authentic leaders connected with everyday people. It points to the divergent image politics these candidates have adopted for themselves.