‘Fake News’ and Affective Polarisation in Indonesia

The next speaker in this ECREA 2024 session is Nuri Sadida, whose focus is on the impact of ‘fake news’ and media literacy on affective polarisation in Indonesia. Such affective polarisation has increased in Indonesia over the past ten years, especially in the context of elections; derogatory nicknames for out-groups, such as ‘tadpole’ or ‘desert lizard’, are common especially in social media conversations.

This may be seen as merely playful, but could also point to a residue of hate speech in Indonesian public discourse. Indeed, there are signs of increasing divorce rates in Indonesia due to poltical differences between spouses, and vaccination hesitancy during COVID-19 due to distrust of government actions.

Further, there is a widespread use of ‘buzzers’ in Indonesian politics: cyber-activists who spread mis- and disinformation in favour of specific political parties. They spread negative nicknames and slurs against opposing politicians and parties, and promote uncivil narratives; this is likely to lead to further political, affective polarisation in Indonesia. Can critical media literacy be used to address these developments?

Nuri’s study explores whether exposure to real or ‘fake’ news increases affective polarisation, either directly or as moderated by perceptions of intergroup threats; social media literacy levels may further influence this. Levels of political knowledge and social media use are also likely to play a role in this context. She operationalised these questions through an online survey experiment that exposed participants to ‘fake news’-style Twitter content (no source, derogatory words, informal style, false information) as well as recognisably real news content.

However, there was no direct effect of exposure to derogatory information on affective polarisation; this may be due to a lack of controlling for other variables in the participant group. Further research will need to explore these factors and their influence on affective polarisation.