Social Media

The next speaker at COMNEWS 2023 is Claudia Severesia, whose focus is on the 2024 elections in Indonesia (for the president and parliament in February, and for governors and local assemblies in November). This will see increasing participation from younger generations (including millennials and Generation Z voters), and political parties will need to find ways of addressing these groups.

Generation Z voters, in particular, will have no previous voting experience, and are highly influenced by information from social media; but they remain highly underresearched in Indonesia, especially with respect to their communication and political participation. They also grew up during …

The third speaker in this session at COMNEWS 2023 is Olivia Lewi Pramesti, whose interest is in hoaxes ahead of the 2024 Indonesian election. The volume of misinformation is expected to increase substantially during this time, and digital literacy in Indonesia has not kept track with this growth in problematic information; social media are being used substantially for storytelling, and have considerable influence on public opinion. How can local media push back against this?

The policies of media outlets have an important role to play in facilitating the fight against mis- and disinformation. This project used interviews with newsroom staff …

The next speaker in this COMNEWS 2023 session is Detta Rahmawan, whose interest is in the transmission of misinformation via WhatsApp in Indonesia. This platform is very popular in Indonesia, also because of its privacy and encryption features. But this also enables the spread of hoax content on the platform.

Fact-checkers have paid increasing attention to this; in Indonesia, MAFINDO is a pioneer in fact-checking activities. But there are still few studies of WhatsApp hoaxes and their debunking – there is indecision about what hoaxes on WhatsApp are worthy of fact-checks, especially also as a result of the limited resources …

The final paper session at COMNEWS 2023 today starts with Firma Qurratu’ain Abisono, whose interest is in responses to climate change misinformation. 72% of Indonesians rely on social media as their main source of information, but only 30% believe that social media is a reliable source. Younger people in particular are vulnerable to misinformation – they are highly influenced by digital media, and tend to expect information to find them rather than actively search for it.

Climate change is a major issue for Indonesia, and a considerable amount of misinformation is circulating online. The project engaged with some 100 individuals …

The final speaker in this COMNEWS 2023 session is Yohanes Adven Sarbani, whose focus is on the Tular Malar (‘Contagious Reasoning’) project, which provides digital literacy for the elderly in Indonesia. The Indonesian population is aging, and this increases the need for such literacy interventions in order to decrease the digital gap and especially also protect the elderly from falling prey to disinformation.

This study used mixed methods to engage with some 1,300 participants involved in the Tular Malar digital literacy training, in person and via WhatsApp. The gained knowledge about search engines, social media, and chat technologies, through a …

The fourth speaker in this COMNEWS 2023 session is Isma Adila, whose focus is on the ethics of activism on social media. Digital activism on Twitter and other platforms has become a well-established practice, but this may also include problematic practices like doxxing and identity breaches; these are very questionable from an ethical perspective, of course.

This paper used a range of computational content analysis approaches to analyse Twitter discourses surrounding such practices, for instance when the @PartaiSocmed account doxxed a senior customs officer to highlight his allegedly corrupt activities; such cases often generate supportive reactions and reposts from netizens …

The next speaker in this COMNEWS 2023 session is Nuria Astagini, whose focus is on the preservation of Indonesian cultural heritage in traditional dance through social media. Traditional dance is part of the country’s recognised cultural heritage, and offered as an extracurricular activity at school; this paper focusses on a dance studio in Depok, Ayodya Pala, that has been established for over 40 years and has developed a considerable social media presence.

The studio has a presence on facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok, and uses this for the promotion of traditional dance (rather than for commercial purposes). The research examined …

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 …

The next session at COMNEWS 2023 that I’m attending is on social media and activism, and starts with Pierre Mauritz Sundah, whose focus is on independent women in social media. Traditionally, women in Indonesia and elsewhere have often been depicted in stereotypical roles representing household and child-rearing activities, and have therefore not been expected to have high levels of education. Many societal stigmata remain, as a result of the country’s patriarchal culture.

This paper focusses on a community of women weavers in rural Indonesia, who have been empowered by their participation in Du Anyam, a social enterprise aiming to empower …