A recent survey by Indonesia Indicator reveals that negative news articles are easily amplified online, especially via social media, with incumbent candidate pair Basuki “Ahok” Tjahaja Purnama and Djarot Saiful Hidayat receiving the largest amount of negative sentiments.

“The public is more receptive to negative issues. Furthermore, they would retweet a post without checking and rechecking facts, fueling a state of post-truth politics, especially via social media,” Indonesia Indicator communications director Rustika Herlambang told The Jakarta Post over the phone recently.

With “post-truth politics”, Rustika was referring to the sharing of information on social media platform Twitter, where objective facts are less influential while false claims tend to spread rapidly.

The survey, which looked at data throughout November, has found that 36 percent of a total of 67,385 online news articles about Ahok and Djarot contained negative sentiments directly aimed at the pair, including in the titles.

Meanwhile, of the 6,729 articles about the Anies Baswedan-Sandiaga Uno candidate pair only 4 percent were negative and of the 6,089 articles about Agus Harimurti Yudhoyno and Sylviana Murni only 2 percent were.

Throughout the month, Ahok-Djarot was tweeted 2,181,184 times, far more than Agus-Sylvi with 293,727 and Anies-Sandi with 64,168. Ahok and Djarot were mentioned by 694,967 Twitter users, Agus-Sylvi by 94,085 and Anies-Sandi by 38,158.

“What we found is that negative issues easily gained traction and thus amplified rapidly,” Rustika said. Clarification of stories that were found to be false would get far less attention in comparison, she added.

Yose Rizal, director of PoliticaWave, one of the nation’s first social media-monitoring sites, said the same thing.

“People have the tendency to read and spread online what supports their own beliefs, at times even without minding the credibility of the media from which they share the news,” Yose told the Post.

He also noted that conversations surrounding the elections have not yet focused on the programs promised by the candidate pairs, but instead have been dominated by ethnic, religious or racial sentiments, as well as talk about blasphemy.

Various recent polls have shown incumbent candidate Ahok struggling to regain the majority support he held before being named a suspect in a case of alleged blasphemy.

Some Muslims in Indonesia and abroad grew angry after an edited recording of Ahok, a Christian of Chinese descent, telling residents in the Thousand Islands regency last September that a verse of the Quran had been used for political purposes went viral.

The embattled governor is set to stand trial on Dec. 13 following several large protests by conservative Muslim groups.

Meanwhile, former military officer Agus appears to be a potential dark horse after at least three recent surveys by notable pollsters placed him as the frontrunner.

A political observer and the executive director of Charta Politika, Yunarto Wijaya, said misleading headlines and readership ignorance can deceive the public by creating a false impression about the quality of a candidate.

“The risk is that it’s not unlikely that the election of a candidate would not be based on facts, but on the formation of opinions often not based on correct data, which is dangerous,” Yunarto said.

Today’s social media usage and online news are not exclusive of each other, Yunarto said, adding that the unverified nature of identities on social media accounts makes it difficult to trust the credibility of any information.

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