Until a few years ago, political actors relied mainly on surveys and pollsters to measure their electability and capture voters’ aspirations — but things have moved on from there. Today, computer algorithms and big data analysis play a new yet crucial role in offering a basis for political maneuver.

Politicians and strategists interviewed by The Jakarta Post acknowledge that their political parties are considering big data analysis to devise campaign messages and political strategies, and they believe other parties, if not all of them, are doing the same.

Big data is believed to have played a significant role in the United States presidential election in 2016, won by President Donald Trump, and in the Brexit referendum in the same year. Consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, believed to have harvested data of millions of Facebook users to sway voters in both events, has been under fire following reports on its operations.

“I think it’s obvious that political parties need to use big data today, otherwise you will be rendered irrelevant,” Irvan Nasrun, who leads the United Indonesia Party‘s (Perindo) IT department, told the Post recently. Perindo is one of four new political parties that will contest the 2019 elections.

Yose Rizal, director of PoliticaWave, one of the nation’s first social media-monitoring company, believes so-called big data analysis had been used for political purposes since 2012, the year Joko “Jokowi” Widodo and running mate Basuki “Ahok” Tjahaja Purnama won Jakarta’s gubernatorial election.

Budiman Sudjatmiko of the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P), one of the oldest parties in the country, confirmed the importance of computational analysis for practical use.

“Big data is the hottest tool for understanding voters’ behavior today,” he said.

Indonesia has the fourth-largest population of internet users in the world with a total of 132 million people, or half the population, using the internet, according to market statistics portal Statista. Indonesia recorded 66 million mobile internet users in 2016. Of that figure, 52 million people aged 20 to 35 accessed Facebook, while half of the same age group also used Twitter.

Andy Budiman, campaign manager for the Indonesian Solidarity Party (PSI), another rookie in next year’s elections, pointed to big data as an economic resource, particularly for newbies on the political scene.

Big data consultants in Indonesia typically crawl social media outlets like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram as well as online news sites for a wealth of public data that can be computationally analyzed to reveal trends or patterns. The data processing may involve computer scientists and experts with various backgrounds, including statistics, politics and communication science.

Indradhi Nugraha, an IT consultant with big data consultant Sazbuzz, said the company had developed a program to crawl, manage and interpret big data.

“Say we want to know what [netizens] think about the President. We use the keyword ‘president’ and see what other words are mostly used with it. We divide the keywords into positive and negative categories, so we can map out public sentiment,” he said, adding that the company had also developed a library of words from different languages, including Indonesian, local languages and slang.

In the process, computers might easily identify social media accounts often used to, for instance, criticize a political actor.

“We are currently developing a tool to analyze image content, as netizens often use screen-captured text or memes in social media conversations,” he said.

Meanwhile, Drone Emprit, another consultant, used favorability and popularity as the main categories when analyzing public sentiment.

“Popularity does not always reflect favorability,” Ismail Fahmi, Drone Emprit’s founder, said.

Mining and storing extremely large data sets as well as developing tools to analyze them requires significant resources.

Jakarta-based big data consultant Astramaya invested around Rp 23 billion (US$1.66 million) to procure the hardware and purchase a license to use the software. The data they collect will be stored for an undetermined time period, because Astramaya believes the same data set can be used for different clients and purposes.

“Big data is like wine, the older the better,” Astramaya director Hari Ambari said.

Sentiment analysis remains crucial during and beyond political campaign periods. Candidates use such analysis to grasp voter preferences and incorporate them into strategies.

This was the case when the PSI declared its stance against the revised Legislative Institutions (MD3) Law, which expands lawmakers’ impunity.

“We learned from sentiment analysis that the public was generally against it. We believe that it was the right choice to oppose the law,” the PSI’s Andy said.

Big data analysis has also been used to maintain the image of political actors. In 2016, Perindo used big data to track down a Twitter user, Dede Budhyarto, whose tweets they believed had tarnished the party’s image. In his tweets, Dede accused Perindo’s chairman, Hary Tanoesoedibjo, of using his media company to bring down former Jakarta governor Basuki “Ahok” Tjahaja Purnama.

“We later reported the account’s owner to the police for defamation,” Irvan said.

Big data consultants hired by political actors also agreed that big data provided real-time information for capturing the latest public sentiment, something that polling fell short to provide. “Thus, big data analysis and polling complement each other,” Drone Emprit’s Ismail said.

While it takes large manpower to conduct scientifically sound surveys, one only needs a few computer scientists and statistics experts to crawl and manage big data. PSI’s Andy, for example, said he had only three members in his big data team.

Most consulting firms refused to reveal the fees for their services, but some mentioned that the basic service may cost at least Rp 40 million per month. Another company said fees varied depending on the client’s requirements. “The value of information can be different depending on the purpose,” one said.

Big data consulting firms also apply similar policies in protecting the identities of their clients. “Confidentiality is important, because every client has personalized needs,” Sazbuzz founder Oka Riyadi Syahputra said.

Nukman Luthfie, the founder of the Social Media Literacy Institution, suggested that the trend to use big data for political purposes was likely to prevail. He also warned internet users to be more vigilant in sharing their thoughts and personal information.

Despite limitations of using social media as a source of data, PoliticaWave’s Yose believes
the trend will not wane in the near future.

“A US-based survey in 2012 showed that the outcome of three of four elections can be predicted from social media — the winner was most likely the candidate who gained the most positive sentiment. I was wondering whether the same algorithm could be applied in Indonesia, and it turned out that it’s true more than 90 percent [of the time],” Yose said.

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