Politics

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

The second and final speaker in this AoIR 2023 session is Theresa Seipp, whose interest is in the notion of counterpower. Online, power has now shifted from legacy organisations to platform companies; this is exacerbated by the severe industrial concentration, with a few transnational companies dominating the industry. Current legal frameworks in a number of countries and regions appear unable to address this effectively, not least because they define size by audience metrics rather than control of technologies.