The Buzzers Who Drowned an Election
In the month before Indonesians voted in 2019, the government's communication ministry counted 700 election-related hoaxes. Paid operatives known as “buzzers,” working through fake accounts, helped push religious and ethnic smears against both presidential candidates.
Indonesia's presidential contest on 17 April 2019 pitted the incumbent, Joko Widodo, against the retired general Prabowo Subianto in a rematch of their 2014 race. It also unfolded across one of the world's largest social media populations, and much of the campaign was fought there.
The scale of the false content was documented by the state itself. “The Indonesian communication ministry reported 700 election-related hoaxes in the month before polls opened,” The Strategist, the commentary site of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, reported in May 2019. Much of it targeted the candidates' faith and ethnicity in a country where such lines carry heavy political weight.
Smears aimed at both candidates
The falsehoods ran in both directions. “Stories were spread depicting Jokowi as Chinese, Christian or communist, or maybe all three,” The Strategist noted, using the president's popular nickname. “Disinformation targeting Prabowo portrayed him as both irreligious and on a quest to create a caliphate.”
Belief in such claims was measurable. Survey data cited by Euronews found that 42 percent of Prabowo supporters believed Widodo was either a communist or a Christian, while 65 percent of Widodo supporters believed Prabowo had kidnapped democracy activists during his military career, according to its April 2019 report.
A paid industry of fake accounts
The amplification was not spontaneous. “Both presidential campaigns funded teams of people to produce and disseminate disinformation using fake identities created for social media accounts,” The Strategist wrote. The finding echoed a Reuters investigation. “A Reuters investigation in March found that both the Prabowo and Widodo campaigns were funding sophisticated social media operations to spread propaganda and disinformation through fake accounts on behalf of the candidates,” Euronews reported.
Fact-checkers likened the trade to an economy of its own. Aribowo Sasmito, head of fact-checking at the anti-hoax group Mafindo, described a chain of producers and consumers: “There are the factories, the dealers, and the victims. Most of the people who end up arrested are victims ... They read hoaxes and believed them to be true,” he told Euronews.
Platforms and the state respond
Some networks were dismantled before the vote. On 21 January 2019, Facebook said it had removed “207 Facebook Pages, 800 Facebook accounts, 546 Facebook Groups, and 208 Instagram accounts, for engaging in coordinated inauthentic behavior on Facebook in Indonesia, misleading others about who they were and what they were doing,” according to a statement by Nathaniel Gleicher, its head of cybersecurity policy, on the company's newsroom. The accounts “coordinated with one another and used fake accounts to misrepresent themselves,” Gleicher said, in reporting by The Jakarta Post that linked part of the network to a hoax-for-hire syndicate known as Saracen.
After the results were announced, unrest in Jakarta in which several people died prompted the government to curb social media temporarily. Chief Security Minister Wiranto said authorities would “limit access to certain features on social media” to slow “the spread of fake news,” Euronews reported in May 2019. Communications Minister Rudiantara said the restrictions were meant to slow visual content that could inflame emotions and would be temporary.
Indonesia's 2019 vote is now cited by researchers as an early, large-scale case of a national election contested as much through coordinated online falsehood as through campaigning, a pattern that monitoring groups have continued to track in the country's later polls.