Recent arrests of Muslim Cyber Army (MCA) members by the National Police’s cybercrime unit have shed light on the group’s network and its operations online, raising concerns about potentially rising sectarian sentiment, particularly in the lead up to the 2019 elections.

Last week, the national cyberpolice uncovered a syndicate called the Family MCA, which allegedly started the wildfire by spreading provocative information, from the rise of the Indonesia Communist Party (PKI) to persecutions of ulema, through various social media platforms.

Until Wednesday, the police had arrested six people from different areas in Indonesia, who were believed to be the brains behind the Family MCA group. Muhammad Luth, 40, was arrested in Tanjung Priok, North Jakarta, while Riski Surya Dharma, 35, in Pangkal Pinang, Bangka Belitung. Ramdani Saputra, 39, was arrested in Bali; Yuspiadin, 25, in Sumedang, West Java; and Ronny Sutrisno, 40, in Palu, Central
Sulawesi.

The last member to be detained was Tara Arsih Wijayani, 40, a contract lecturer at the Islamic University of Indonesia (UII) in Yogyakarta. Police said Tara was the initiator of the MCA group, which had existed for at least five years. Labelling itself a “Muslim” group, this network reportedly frequently produced and circulated false content mentioning names of important people in the country, including President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo and other state figures. The most recent hoax that they allegedly spread was that a mentally ill person had killed a muazin (a person who performs the call to prayer) in Majalengka, West Java. The police, however, have confirmed that the news was fake.

This was arguably the second-most crucial arrest of such false information manufacturing machines after the police arrested Saracen, whose members allegedly received millions of rupiah from clients to create and spread hoaxes and hate speech on media platforms, in August last year. Saracen has operated since 2015 and the investigation into source of their funding is still ongoing.

The police are yet to arrive at a conclusion on whether the MCA had similar business motives as Saracen, or if the group operated based on shared ideology.

“We are still investigating [the motive],” the National Police’s cybercrime director Brig. Gen. Fadil Imran told The Jakarta Post.

The Family MCA, as the mastermind behind the group, consisted of only nine people, who operated and organized the movement and content that would be spread across numerous media platforms. Outside the exclusive Family MCA, hundreds of thousands of members were part of at least nine different Whatsapp, Facebook and other social media groups affiliated with the Family MCA, some of them named Srikandi Muslim Cyber, the United MCA and Muslim Sniper.

Each subgroup has its own task. Muslim Sniper, for example, consisted of only around 170 members responsible for identifying accounts deemed enemies and taking them down by hacking their accounts or sending viruses to their digital devices.

According to preliminary investigations, hundreds of thousands of people could join and receive news in the United MCA group, but only the chosen ones could join the more exclusive groups, like Muslim Snipers and the MCA Family Group. Fadil said members had to be tech-savvy and have a shared vision and mission to join the MCA Family Group. Such recruitment processes did not exist in the Saracen operation.

“According to the suspect’s confession, one must take a baiat, or an oath of allegiance, to the organization to be the part of the core group,” he said.

Researchers were quick to disapprove speculation that the MCA was working on an ideological basis.

“If it’s ideological, they wouldn’t have apologized so easily after being arrested. They would’ve believed what they believed until the end,” Savic Ali, researcher with the department of communications and information of the Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), the country’s largest Muslim organization, told the Post on Sunday. Savic referred to the recent public apology made by the suspects following the arrests.

Savic, who had conducted research on the MCA’s operations between October 2016 and October 2017, said his findings unveiled the network’s political tendency more than any other possible motives.

“Their content was more political rather than ideological. They did not support the Islamic State [IS] movement, sharia or anything, for example, but nonetheless justified their actions by using Islamic expressions,” he said.

Indonesian media expert of Australian National University, Ross Tapsell, said the group and its various offshoots “were formed at the height of the 2017 Jakarta election in order to encourage people to gather on the streets of Jakarta at the major rallies, and also to produce anti-Ahok material.” Tapsell was referring to former Jakarta governor Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, who lost in the 2017 Jakarta gubernatorial election despite high approval ratings due to sectarian sentiment. Ahok is a Christian of Chinese descent.

Another piece of evidence of their political partisanship, Savic added, was the way politicians responded to the network.

“Some politicians have quickly joined the band. If it was a radical group, they wouldn’t have done it,” he said.

Savic went on by saying that, “Politicians are largely responsible for this mess in the digital sphere because these were done by their sympathizers. This is an even bigger threat to our nation-building process: an opportunist group that does whatever it takes for their interests.”

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