TheJakartaPost
Please Update your browser
Your browser is out of date, and may not be compatible with our website. A list of the most popular web browsers can be found below.
Just click on the icons to get to the download page.
Jokowi turns to social media to maintain popularity
Change Size
Not my style: A YouTube clip shows President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo poking fun at his son Kaesang Pangarep’s haircut. (YouTube/@kaesangp/-)
A
brief video showing a father and his son engaging in an arm-wrestling duel went viral on YouTube a month ago. Such videos featuring the warm relations of a father and son are common.
But this arm-wrestling video was unusual because the main actors were President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo and his second son Kaesang Pangarep.
The video was posted by Kaesang, who like any other person of his young generation is growing up with social media.
The short video attracted about 1.9 million viewers and many comments, if not jokes, like “[...] and tomorrow the President will go to the gym” and “Jokowi is a President, but he still has good ties with his son.”
Whether Jokowi is a populist president is up for debate, but there is no doubt the man is the most likeable president on social media with the President and his social-media savvy son becoming a recent internet sensation with their antics on YouTube.
Kaesang and his jokes have several times gained popularity on social media, including when he posted on Instagram a picture of himself lying on the floor near his mother, First Lady Iriana, who is sitting in a chair.
Trying to crack a joke, Kaesang tagged the picture with a comment that he had been about to give Iriana a hug but he was too tired. Kaesang also often plays it cool when it comes to harsh criticisms launched at him on social media.
Early this month, in a move some might see as his effort to keep up with Kaesang’s sense of humor, Jokowi posted on Twitter a picture showing him trying to paint what others commonly perceived as art, but failing. The President called it an “abstract” painting.
The attempt, which he made on the sidelines of an opening ceremony of an exhibition of historical paintings kept in several state palaces, attracted various comments on social media, with some applauding Jokowi for having a good sense of humor.
As president, Jokowi has used Twitter for more than a year and now he has about 5.57 million followers on his account @jokowi, while his son has managed to attract 210,000 followers to @kaesangp since joining Twitter in 2010.
In this country, a message delivered in a modest way could attract more people than complicated lines such as in a state address or some speeches during the New Order regime, said social media strategist Shafiq Pontoh.
“And he is a president who uses simple ways to reach the people, the ways ordinary people can relate to, so that his message can be delivered to them,” Shafiq added.
A recent study by Burson-Marsteller called Twiplomacy Study 2016 put Jokowi, who received an average of 1,224 retweets for every tweet he posted on his account, in the ninth rank in the category of 50 most influential world leaders. The official @POTUS account topped the list with an average of 12,350 retweets, followed by Pope Francis @Pontifex with 9,905 retweets.
Jokowi was in 11th place with 5 million followers, while US President Barack Obama’s Twitter account
@BarackObama remains “an uncontested leader of the digital world” with 75 million followers, followed by India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi with 21 million followers.
Yet, Jokowi was not in the list of 50 most connected world leaders, unlike the other leaders that top the two other categories.
The President follows only 59 accounts, mostly Cabinet members and official ministry accounts, but, ironically, none of his family members —not even Kaesang although the latter, as one of Jokowi’s followers, has several times mentioned his father.
Having posted 424 messages, Jokowi, however, was not among the 10 most conversational world leaders in the Twiplomacy study. Although Twitter allows citizen to have direct access to their leaders, Jokowi has almost never replied to his followers’ posts.
Just on Tuesday, Jokowi invited 13 famous YouTube account holders and bloggers, like Fathia Izzati and Arief Muhammad, to the State Palace.
Jokowi allowed them to record short videos that have him commenting on simple but inspirational issues, like who the President considered his role model. Jokowi told them that, for him, role models could be common people like sellers in the market and fishermen who worked hard.
However, the meeting was held behind closed doors and under the traditional media’s radar.
About eight months after he took office, Jokowi used his 54th birthday on June 21, 2015, to mark his return to Twitter, which he used as a campaign tool during the 2014 presidential election, under the account @jokowi_do2.
