Social Media

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 …

The next speaker in this COMNEWS 2023 session is Ivan Taufiq, whose interest is in political branding on social media. Political uses of social media involve the display of personal identity, reputation management, branding, and perception control; this creates a hyperreality in the Baudrillardian sense, and means that political social media activities are simulacra that may or may not represent the actual personalities of the politicians involved.

This paper focusses on political branding ahead of the 2024 presidential election in Indonesia, focussing on the presidential candidate Ganjar Pranowo; a hashtag related to him, #ganjarpresiden2024, has emerged as the most prominent …

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 second keynote speaker at COMNEWS 2023 this morning is Claes de Vreese, whose focus is on AI; he notes that Artificial Intelligence has been a theme of discussion for many years, but has really been turbocharged in recent years by the emergence of new technologies. But these are normal developments in an emerging field, and we should not conclude from this that we are in the midst of a major AI revolution. There is also a great deal of self-serving rhetoric about AI from AI companies themselves, of course.

AI itself remains underdefined, too. Definitions being used in the …

It’s Wednesday, I think, and I’ve made it from AoIR in Philadelphia to the COMNEWS 2023 conference in Bali, Indonesia, where I’m giving one of the opening keynotes this morning. Here are the slides: