TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - In this digital era, the size of public support for electoral candidates on social media can be engineered with a fingertip. It is easy to produce fake reports, insults or exaggerated good news about a candidate. Facebook, Twitter, Path, blogs and YouTube, to name a few, are media that can carry any news be it true or false. With a little tinkering of an algorithm, bogus information can be kept at the top of Internet search results. In this way, reports of uncertain veracity can attract large numbers of readers.
All candidates for Jakarta governor and their campaign teams are now competing for domination of the Internet. They have established cyber teams, deployed influential web people known as buzzers, and created hashtags in an effort to produce trending topics.
Social media has changed the way people talk, including communicating political objectives. Research has shown that most city dwellers access information through handheld gadgets. This trend is even more true for people aged 25-40, the largest group among Jakarta voters who will be going to the polls on February 15, 2017.
As a result, for the Jakarta gubernatorial election campaign teams, social media is an important battleground they need to control. And topics that are widely discussed on social media are often taken from conventional media reports. The Internet in turn can have a psychological influence on voters, especially those who wait until polling day to decide who to pick.
The power of social media is nothing new. It has been shown to influence the process of democratization in several Arab nations, in a phenomenon known as the Arab Spring. Calls for democracy spread through millions of tweets on Twitter, hundreds of gigabytes of videos on YouTube, and words on thousands of blogs. The effects of social media crossed borders, and led to the overthrow of heads of state in a number of Middle East nations.
In Indonesia, social media also determined the victory of Joko Widodo and Jusuf Kalla in the 2014 presidential election. Their campaign team even involved international celebrities like Sting and Jason Miraz to produce positive messages about them on social media in the days before the election.
In the United States, social media also influenced the results of the presidential election. It is fair to say that the victory of Donald Trump from the Republican Party, was the result of his campaign team spreading 'inaccurate reports' on social media. This trend has been seen in Jakarta.
Fake news reports, spread via dubious websites, with bombastic headlines have flooded social media usually from anonymous accounts. Perhaps to conceal the identity of the owners, many sites have names very similar to official web portals and overseas domains. It is difficult to verify the accuracy of these sites spreading bogus reports to attack opposing candidates.
It is time candidates stopped using these dirty tricks. They should use social media to announce their ideas and programs for the betterment of Jakarta. The Regional General Elections Commission (KPU) has asked all candidates to report their official social media accounts. They should not use other accounts for negative campaigning.
The online forces of the candidates should be filling social media with positive content. The public should be skeptical of information on the Internet. They need to recheck all reports, especially those from unclear sites or accounts. This is not easy, given the tendency for many to simply read the headlines not all the contents then quickly share it on social media.
Social media represents an opportunity to strengthen democracy as well as to wreck it. The three candidates Agus Harimurti, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama and Anies Baswedan and their campaign teams should make social media a tool for strengthening democracy. (*)
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