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How social media is polarizing politics
How exactly does an advanced digital technology influence political dynamics worldwide? And how is it manifested in the Indonesian context?
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Social media provides a convenient platform both for politicians and their audiences to shape the face of political events. (Shutterstock.com/File)
M
edia has long been accused of worsening political polarization throughout history. Multiple media reports, as echoed by the Oxford Internet Institute in 2017, have investigated how the forces of social media such as Facebook and Twitter may have influenced the 2016 United States election and propelled Donald Trump to the presidency.
How exactly does an advanced digital technology influence political dynamics worldwide? And how is it manifested in the Indonesian context?
Social media provides a convenient platform both for politicians and their audiences to shape the face of political events. Politicians are known to steer voters towards their political agenda before an election. What is new is the use of technology to alter voters’ attitude regarding the election.
Researchers have used the term “computational propaganda” to explain the accumulation of social media platforms, autonomous agents, and big data tasked with the manipulation of public opinion. The news site Rappler investigated the Philippines’s 2016 presidential election and discovered a “machine” of “paid trolls, fallacious reasoning and propaganda techniques” that had helped shift attitudes towards both candidates.
A survey by the Indonesian Information and Telecommunications Society (Mastel)in 2016 revealed social media as the main channel of hoax dispersal in Indonesia. These findings reaffirm the powerful role of digital technology in manipulating political dynamics.
On top of that, social media also enables citizens to influence the election, which is unparalleled to the pre-internet period. This is particularly true in the case of algorithms, which allows political news to be segregated based on its user’s behavior on social media that reflects their political spectrums.
The Indonesian researcher Merlyna Lim from the Digital Media & Global Network Society called this dynamic as “algorithmic enclaves”. This phenomenon occurs as a result of constant interactions with algorithms, attempt to create a superficial shared identity online for sharing with each other, defending their opinions and protecting their resources from both real and perceived threats.
In other words, a significant amount of content will never appear in a user’s newsfeed. To illustrate, Facebook displays an algorithmic selection based on several factors, which includes how the users have interacted with similar posts in the past by methods as simple as viewing the post, and also how much other people in their network have done the same. Unfortunately, this feature has a rather precarious side effect to political polarization.
Therefore opinions that do not match one’s own are not equally reflected in people’s respective social media. Social media algorithm prevents most alternating opinions to be delivered to users, while in the age of “post-truth” where false news runs unchecked, one can be blinded to alternating opinions that do appear on their newsfeed.
The manifestation of this phenomenon can be observed most vividly in the Jakarta governor election earlier this year. In this case, Indonesians witnessed how social media turned into a double-edged sword. On one side, social media managed to accelerate freedom of expression, enabling political discussion to flourish around the election. Sadly, social media also allowed hateful messages to disperse online, spreading fears among users. Merlyna argues that this mutual shaping between users and algorithms is an example of “algorithmic enclaves” that eventually generate multiple forms of “tribal nationalism”. The polarization between the two camps was so prominent that it silenced the rest of the society.
To conclude, social media has transformed into a platform where post-truth politics and computational propaganda overlap amidst the technology of algorithm, which change politics for good.
Alas, irresponsible utilization of social media as a political tool will further intensifies divisions between political groups, and even worse, magnifies narrow-mindedness among society. To some extent, it is safe to claim social media algorithm to contribute to the growing political polarization in Indonesian society.
Nevertheless, blaming social media alone is erroneous as politics and social media is also strongly entangled with its users. Hence, instead of waiting for social media platform to discover a technology which enables equal and reliable representation of political news, this problem might reiterate the indispensability of digital literacy among the cyber citizens.
Media impartiality might still be long way down the road, yet it is much more feasible that common sense, rationality and simple fact-checking should be applied whenever a user is being encountered by online political news.
The ability to filter vast amount of digital information should be a pre-requisite for all internet users in a world where social media is intertwined with electoral politics.
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The writer is a research associate and content writer at the Center for Digital Society (CfDS), Gadjah Mada University, Yogyakarta.
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