TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - The portal posmetro.co is also very active in publishing the issue of workers from China. This portal used to be posmetro.info, an abbreviation for Posting Mahasiswa Elektro, in 2015. Its owner, Abdul Hamdi Mustafa, was a 2010 electrical engineering student at Padang State University. He initially created the blog because he enjoyed writing.

Hamdi admitted he copies contents from many other portals, such as www.intelijen.co.id. "We just copy and paste it," he said last week. Before publishing reports from other media, Hamdi and four of his friends change the headlines to make them catchy and to grab readers' attention.

Read the previous story: 'Anti-Hoax Movement; Behind the Hoax (1)'

Hamdi said he was inspired by pkspiyungan.org, which often criticizes the government and is favored by social media followers. The most hits to posmetro.co happened during the protest held on November 4 last year. From October to November, Hamdi received Rp30 million per month from Google Adsense. His portal had a million hits and page views reaching 300,000 for 50-70 "copy-pasted" news items a day.

This 25-year-old from Padang disagrees that he was spreading anti-Chinese sentiment through the modified news content on his website, but admitted to posting many comments of public figures who were critical of the ethnic Chinese dominance in the economy. He openly supports Prabowo Subianto, Jokowi's rival in the last presidential election.

There was also a commotion on social media about the conflict in Syria, which had been going on for six years when the government forces retook the city of Allepo from terrorist rebels. According to the analysis done by Ismail Fahmi, there are two related hashtags from December 12-19, 2016: #SaveAleppo and #AleppoSaved.

In Indonesia, @maspiyungan and @condetwarriors anonymous accounts being monitored by the police describe the conflict in Syria as a battle between two major divisions in Islam, namely the Sunni (the rebels) and Shi'ites (the camp of the Bashar al-Assad government). Portalpiyungan.co quotes news reports which claim government forces are acting brutally. "This could spark division in Indonesia," said Ismail.

According to A.M. Sidqi, a Consular official who doubles as the official for Information and Socio-Cultural Affairs at the Indonesian Embassy in Damascus, the conflict in Syria cannot be simplified down into a black-and-white war between those two groups. "That the fighting in Syria was caused by a conflict between Sunni and Shiites is a false," he told Tempo reporter Reza Maulana. "The Syrian head of state has long been a follower of the Alawi, which is close to Sunni Islam. Why has this become a hot topic now?"

Tempo Team

(Read the complete story in January 2017 first edition of Tempo magazine with the main story entitled 'Twitter Tussle in Social Media.')