While it might be surprising to some now, optimism about the internet’s power to democratise authoritarian regimes was once widespread in the West. This optimism arguably peaked during the 2009 Iranian uprisings, when many in the West witnessed, via Twitter, Iranians flooding the streets to protest an election seen as rigged by their country’s long-reigning theocracy. Much Western discourse about Iran’s ‘Green Movement’ highlighted the crucial role of Twitter, as an information outlet Iranian authorities couldn’t shut down or control. As Evgeny Morozov documents in The Net Delusion, leading Western outlets ran headlines like ‘The Revolution Will Be Twittered’, while others argued that autocrats around the world would ‘have a difficult time maintaining absolute control in the face of the technology’s chaotic democracy’. A Wall Street Journal editorial proclaimed that Twitter had done ‘more for regime change in the Islamic Republic than years of sanctions, threats and Geneva-based haggling put together’. While the movement lost much of its momentum within months and the Iranian regime wasn’t—and still hasn’t been—overthrown, it did reveal an ‘intense Western longing for a world where information technology is the liberator rather than the oppressor, a world where technology could be harvested to spread democracy around the globe rather than entrench existing autocracies’, Morozov writes. A similar dynamic played out during the 2010–2012 ‘Arab Spring’, with the central role of social media platforms in the uprisings being vastly overexaggerated, not least by the companies themselves. Such cyber-optimism is now a little more fringe, or at least adorned with caveats and qualifiers—a development that was perhaps inevitable, for reasons I will explain later.
However, even during the Arab Spring, those willing to take off their Google Glasses might have taken a slightly less Panglossian view of how the internet would be used to suppress democracy, rather than undermine authoritarianism. By 2013 a group of activists, bloggers, journalists and researchers in Indonesia were so concerned by the way digital technologies were being used to suppress democratic and civil liberties that they established the Southeast Asia Freedom of Expression Network (SAFEnet). One of the main catalysts for the group’s founding was a 2008 internet law (UU ITE) which was being used to clamp down on political or social criticism. One of the first high-profile UU ITE cases was the prosecution of a woman who had complained via a mailing list about the service she had received at a private hospital in West Jakarta. It was around this time that Indonesian pro-democracy activists ‘started to feel that something was going to change’, SAFEnet’s former executive director Damar Juniarto told me when we chatted in July. ‘I finally saw the dark side of internet freedom’, he said.
Damar, who like many Indonesians prefers to be referred to using his first name, was once more optimistic about the internet’s potential as a democratising force. As an activist in the Reformasi (Reform) movement that would eventually topple Suharto’s 30-year dictatorship in 1998, he saw the internet as a valuable way of evading government censorship. ‘The mainstream media—newspaper, radio, television—was being controlled by the government … so we chose the internet as another way to spread the ideas of democracy … ideas of freedom’, he said. Damar and his comrades used mailing lists and an e-magazine to spread these messages, although internet speeds were glacial and most could only access their samizdat from internet cafés. International observers also took note of the internet’s subversive potential. There was ‘little doubt that the internet had given opposition groups in the closing years of the Suharto regime the ability to control and direct their message … with far greater precision’, David T. Hill and Krishna Sen wrote in 2000. While the internet didn’t play ‘a big role’ in Suharto’s demise, Damar said, it ‘definitely had some impact … because [it made] the limitation of information by the government so obvious’. Indonesians living under Suharto ‘got their first taste of freedom because of the internet’.
Damar’s optimism was sustained through the early 2000s as he watched Indonesia’s community of political bloggers flourish in the liberalising political environment of what had become the world’s third largest democracy. While Indonesia’s entrenched oligarchy largely survived the democratic transition—and its parliament more or less remained a site of intra-elite horse trading—Damar saw the internet as a vital ‘counterpower’ against the political and military elites and the growing political strength of religious groups, which Suharto had long repressed so it wouldn’t threaten his power. But when the UU ITE was passed in 2008, Damar began to sense a ‘stagnation’ of the democratisation process. Many scholars have since come to a similar conclusion, dampening hopes for the nation that, following Suharto’s downfall, had become an exemplar for democratisation. Developments since haven’t done much to reinvigorate Damar’s optimism. SAFENet documented 287 cases of citizens, journalists and activists facing politically motivated prosecution under the UU ITE between 2008 and 2019. Between 2019 and 2022, that number rose to 332, according to Amnesty International. In 2014, the country was downgraded from ‘free’ to ‘partly free’ by US-based democracy watchdog Freedom House, where it has remained since.
By 2012, a malignant phenomenon that Indonesians refer to as ‘buzzing’ had also come to be ‘an indispensable element’ of the nation’s politics, according to journalist and researcher Ary Hermawan. ‘Buzzing’ is a catch-all term for the array of ‘political consultancy firms, public relations companies, social media influencers’ and anyone else ‘paid to disseminate political propaganda and make it look like genuine public sentiment’, Hermawan writes in ‘How Indonesia’s expanding cyberspace has become an oligarchic playground to entrench power’. These ‘cyber-troopers’ include ‘click-farm accounts, [such as] bots or individuals who are paid to interact with social media posts to create the appearance of positive engagement’. To give you some idea, imagine a popular Twitter profile run by a middle-aged man pretending to be an Indonesian housewife who shares cooking tips and mundane complaints about her neighbours, but also talks about how the government has greatly improved her life. When outgoing President Joko ‘Jokowi’ Widodo—the country’s first leader not to derive from the military or political elites—was swept into the presidency in 2014, it was on the back of a highly mobilised buzzing industry, Hermawan argues. When I arrived in Indonesia in that year, it seemed that Jokowi’s grassroots support was strong, but Hermawan, whom I later worked under at The Jakarta Post, argues that Jokowi’s image as a ‘man of the people’ was ‘manufactured by an army of cybertroopers’. Jokowi’s digital ‘volunteers’ during the 2014 elections, particularly their leaders, were financially compensated by oligarchic factions that considered him the best candidate to ‘further their respective interests’.
Outside of Indonesia, the cyber-optimism of the 2009–2012 period was also in decline. The Arab Spring largely failed to result in substantive regime change. And the 2018 Cambridge Analytica revelations showed that the Brexit Vote Leave campaign had used a network of subsidiaries to run a massive online disinformation campaign and perpetrate ‘one of the largest and most consequential breaches of campaign finance law in British history’, according to the whistleblower who broke the story. In the same year, the United Nations concluded that hate speech spread via Facebook had played a ‘determining role’ in the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya. Also in 2018, Shoshanna Zuboff’s much-hailed The Age of Surveillance Capitalism came out, raising further awareness of the risk to democratic and civil liberties when the twin logics of data monetisation and government surveillance were brought together. Although some of her arguments were akin to those made by writers like Morozov years earlier, she cogently explained how, in the post-9/11 security atmosphere, the US government and law enforcement agencies had turned away from imposing privacy regulations on tech platforms, as it came to see their vast stores of data as vital intel for the War on Terror. And such collaboration wasn’t just occurring between Silicon Valley and Washington. News about China’s assemblage of ‘a vast and unprecedented national surveillance system, with crucial help from its thriving technology industry’, began to be more widely reported.
Authorities in Indonesia, too, were seemingly taking advantage of new cybersurveillance capabilities. A 2024 Amnesty International research briefing found that between 2017 and 2023 there was ‘evidence of extensive sales and deployment of highly invasive spyware and other surveillance technologies’ to Indonesia. Activists suspect that such sophisticated surveillance tools were used in 2019 during public opposition to a bill that was widely seen as compromising the independence of the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK)—a Reformasi-era institution that had pursued powerful suspects and provided some hope that Indonesia could one day see the back of the nation’s pervasive cronyism. In addition to widespread street protests, a group of roughly 2,500 academics launched a public campaign protesting the bill. But the WhatsApp group chats the academics had set up to coordinate their dissent were subjected to cyberattacks, and many had their phones hacked. Considering the technological sophistication of the attacks, those behind them ‘must have significant resources’, a 2022 Yusof Ishak Institute paper argued. The cyberattacks revealed the presence of ‘predatory oligarchic forces consisting of corrupt politicians as well as corrupt businesspeople who are interested in weaking civil society and hijacking democracy to accumulate wealth and preserve their power’, Wijayanto, Fiona Suwana and Nur Hidayat Sardini wrote.
The KPK law eventually passed—after a 20-minute parliamentary debate—but protest continued, as then-president Jokowi still had the power to overturn the legislation. The protest coalition had by this time also launched massive online campaigns, including the nation’s ‘first hashtag-based movement’, according to experts Yatun Sastramidjaja and Wijayanto. While hashtags like #ReformasiDikorupsi (Reform Corrupted) went viral, ‘pro-government elites’ quickly launched buzzer countercampaigns, the authors write. One of the major themes of their counternarrative was an attempt to associate the KPK with religious extremism and terrorism through hashtags like #KPKTaliban, although there was no evidence of radical Islamism having infected the anticorruption body. Other popular hashtags were often ‘accompanied by memes designed to convince the public that the revision was broadly supported by leading public figures’.
In 2019, the country also went to presidential elections—a rematch of the 2014 election between Jokowi and Prabowo Subianto, a former New Order general who was discharged from the military in 1998 for his role in the disappearance of pro-democracy Reformasi activists. He is also suspected of being responsible for human rights abuses in Timor Leste when he was in the country’s special forces, and was for many years subject to travel bans to the United States and Australia. The 2019 Prabowo–Jokowi election also saw highly ‘polarised online discourse … created largely by partisan buzzer teams’, as media expert Ross Tapsell put it. Online rumours swirled about Jokowi’s alleged Chinese sympathies, communist ancestry and anti-Islamic agenda, but he prevailed once again. Prabowo, meanwhile, didn’t accept the legitimacy of the vote, and protests against Jokowi’s victory stirred up by online rumours and hoaxes claimed the lives of several people.
Digital repression continued in the following years. In 2020 a massive online campaign opposing a law (UU CK) designed to stimulate job creation—but which threatened to harm workers and Indigenous groups—was swamped by an even larger pro-UU CK buzzer campaign. In the same year, fifty sacked KPK officers were reportedly doxed, bombed with pornographic materials in Zoom calls and had their email accounts hacked. Also in 2021, the website of independent investigative media outlet Project Multatuli was taken offline by a volley of DDoS attacks after it launched a viral online hashtag criticising the police’s failure to properly investigate a rape case involving three minors. In 2021, the national police formed a Cyber Unit, forcing private digital platforms to register with the government and share user data with government agencies. Meanwhile, Jokowi remained a highly popular leader, with approval ratings largely remaining above 70 per cent, partly due to his ‘masterful use and control of the internet and social media, including effective and targeted use of bots and cyber armies’, as my former boss at The Jakarta Post, Endy Bayuni, recently wrote.
Jokowi was ineligible to run in the February 2024 election, although there had been an unsuccessful push to extend the constitutional limit of two presidential terms. Now there was a far clearer run for Prabowo, whom Jokowi had appointed defence minister in late 2019 (Yes, Indonesian politics works in a quite different way to Australia—and I don’t have the word count to go into it). One way to see Prabowo’s cabinet appointment is that it’s ‘better to have your enemies inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in’, as Duncan Graham wrote at the time, quoting Lyndon Johnson. Also, in late 2023, a court headed by Jokowi’s brother-in-law allowed the president’s constitutionally-too-young son to run alongside Prabowo as his vice-presidential candidate. The pair were successful and were inaugurated in October.
The 2024 presidential race also saw massive online campaigns committed to a re-branding of Prabowo from ‘a no-nonsense strongman to a humorous and cuddly grandpa’, Hermawan writes. Cybertroops and buzzers boosted images of Prabowo dancing, images of him with his cat and other such cutesy content. Meanwhile, negative campaigns targeting the former general’s chequered human rights record—a key issue in the 2014 and 2019 elections—were far less intense now that Jokowi was supporting Prabowo. This was largely because ‘a large section of the buzzing industry was paid to look the other way’, Hermawan argues. The Prabowo–Gibran camp’s official Facebook and Instagram campaign pages also spent more than double that of their nearest rival to boost their content, according to an investigation published in Project Multatuli, which I recently translated into English. Their campaign expenditure via unofficial social media channels may have been up to three times as much.
The 2024 contest also saw the emergence of AI-generated political deepfakes. One such video showed Prabowo—who has long been accused of being insufficiently religious—giving a speech in fluent Arabic. A similar video emerged of one of his competitors, Anies Baswedan, whose running mate was the chairman of Indonesia’s largest Islamic party. Such deepfake videos are watched millions of times within the first few days of them being uploaded, with journalists and fact-checkers trying to play catch-up with debunking articles that likely only reach a fraction of those who’ve already consumed them. Another deepfake showed a digitally resurrected Suharto—who died in in 2008—urging voters to back his old party. The party was supporting Prabowo, who also happens to be Suharto’s former son-in-law. Hopefully that one didn’t need debunking, but you never know.
Prabowo’s victory, and the tools used to support his victory, have left many with grim forebodings about Indonesia’s political trajectory. A two-hour long YouTube video launched just before the election argues in minute detail how Jokowi deployed state resources to support Prabowo’s campaign. At the time of writing, Jokowi and Prabowo’s Onward Indonesia coalition now includes all but one of the parties in parliament, suggesting that the nation’s political oligarchy is consolidating at a rapid pace. Post-election attempts to overrule a Constitutional Court ruling to make way for Jokowi’s other son to run in the next Jakarta gubernatorial election have been widely interpreted as an attempt by Jokowi to continue building his political dynasty from beyond the presidency. The Jakarta governorship is widely seen as a vital launching pad for presidential runs, and both Jokowi and Anies have previously served in the role.
While it’s not at all certain that Indonesia is headed back to New Order-style autocracy, the country’s democratic and civil backsliding is seemingly pushing it ever closer to the type of illiberal democratic populism seen in places like the Philippines or Brazil over the last decade. ‘All Indonesia’s democratic institutions have become virtually dysfunctional with almost all power residing in the hands of the president. There is no incentive for Prabowo or any other future president to change this,’ Bayuni argues. Meanwhile, the elite’s co-opting of the internet has created a ‘polarised online civil society incapable of facilitating the emergence of a cohesive and powerful counter-force … leaving Indonesian cyberspace as another site of political struggle dominated by competing elite interests’, Hermawan writes. Digital spaces are increasingly important in political contests. Logically, the side with the bigger war chest is more likely to win, for it is they who can outgun their opponents with more powerful social media Blitzkriegs and sophisticated cybersurveillance tools. Democratic contests like Australia’s Voice referendum—in which the losing Yes campaign had far more money than the No camp—form at least one counterexample. But if this logic does stand, at least in Indonesia, then it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the country’s oligarchy will only become more deeply entrenched, seeking to maintain its grip on power and its share of the spoils of the archipelago’s abundance of nickel, coal, oil, and gas reserves. ‘If you ask me, do I still have that optimism’, Damar told me, ‘my hati kecil—my voice inside my head—is still thinking that the optimism is there, the spark is there, but it’s getting harder and harder’.