Yogyakarta, September 27th 2023─In this digital era, a wide audience has adopted social media (including X) as the main channel for sharing political views, election information, and debates about candidates who will compete in the General Election (Pemilu) in 2024. Center for Digital Society (CfDS) FISIPOL UGM participated in the discussion ahead of this democratic party through a press conference with the theme “Bacapres Trends on Platform X: Opinion War, Cyber Troop, to Jokowi’s Cawe-cawe” held at Digital Intelligence Lab (DIL) Faculty of Social and Political Sciences UGM on Wednesday (27/09). This event presented Syaifa Tania as Executive Secretary of CfDS UGM and Agung Tri Nugraha as Research Manager of CfDS UGM to respond to the latest trends that affect online conversations and support for political figures in Indonesia.
To gain comprehensive insights, CfDS captured data from X social media platform from July to August of 2023. The data includes a wide range of tweets, comments and interactions related to the presidential election and current political issues. Agung said, “We have collected 59,155 posts using several keywords related to the 2024 elections, presidential candidates, and political parties. After removing duplicative posts, we are left with 50,503 posts.”
Through the data that has been obtained, CfDS found indications of the movement of ‘cyber troops’ in all presidential candidates monitored in this study. This reflects the similarity between the three presidential candidates who pay attention to campaigns on social media, this finding also strengthens the research released by the Oxford Internet Institute in 2019 entitled Global Inventory of Organized Social Media Manipulation and research conducted by Sastramidjaja and Wijayanto (2022) on Cyber Troops, Online Manipulation of Public Opinion and Co-Optation of Indonesia’s Cybersphere.
In addition, there was a significant level of negative sentiment towards President Joko Widodo (Jokowi) in online conversations. Agung revealed, “In the analysis of negative sentiment posts, the word ‘Jokowi’ emerged as one of the dominant words. As a result, further analysis of the word ‘Jokowi’ found the top 10 trigrams, which were dominated by ‘cawe-cawe jokowi’; ‘cawe-cawe kandidat presiden; ‘jokowi-supported presidential candidate’; and ‘jokowi supports ganjar’.”
Still related to netizens of X’s interactions regarding political figures in Indonesia, the presidential candidates who will compete ahead of the 2024 elections did not go unnoticed. Based on his study, Prabowo Subianto emerged as Gerindra’s most mentioned presidential candidate (name mentioned without mention/tag) in netizens of X’s tweets and comments. “After a deep dive, duplicative posts related to Prabowo were posted by one account 101 times. This pattern is different from duplicative posts with positive sentiments, which are duplicated by an average of more than five accounts,” Agung added.
Meanwhile, presidential candidate of PDIP, Ganjar Pranowo, from social network analysis, received the most mentions and replies compared to other presidential candidates, followed by Anies. “Ganjar is the presidential candidate who gets the most mentions and replies. Meanwhile, the association of posts related to Ganjar is dominated by the keyword and hashtag #ganjarcapres posted by five accounts. Meanwhile, negative sentiment posts involve more than seven accounts per post, in contrast to Prabowo,” Agung said.
Not inferior to other presidential candidates, Anies Baswedan’s audience cluster is alleged to have the highest level of interaction in posts and comments on social media X, compared to the audience clusters of other presidential candidates. Agung explained, “From the deepening of SNA, especially the top modularity classes, Anies’ audience cluster, which is dominated by @aniesbaswedan, @pdemokrat, and @bachrumachmadi accounts, creates a cluster with the most active interaction with a percentage of 12.28%.”
Based on these findings, CfDS believes that social media, especially X, will play a key role in the 2024 elections. The center also recommends increased digital literacy, active monitoring, and effective communication for political stakeholders. “This research is expected to provide a deeper insight into the dynamics of politics in the digital era, and encourage healthy and constructive discussions ahead of the 2024 elections in Indonesia,” Agung concluded.