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resident Joko “Jokowi” Widodo may have retained his lead in many election surveys, but the incumbent might be losing ground on social media to his rival, Prabowo Subianto, who is backed by an army of cyber volunteers hell-bent on replacing the President in April’s election.

Both camps have devised strategies and deployed resources to win the political battle on social media, seen as key to gaining the support of millennial voters.

The Jokowi-Ma’ruf Amin camp claimed it has conquered its rival on the web, saying that the political hashtag #01JokowiLagi (01JokowiAgain) is more popular than the opposition’s offensive hashtag: #2019GantiPresiden (2019ChangePresident).

However, analysis by big data consultancy Drone Emprit has found that Jokowi’s cyber army appears to be losing the hashtag war against Prabowo’s digital warriors. The #2019GantiPresiden hashtag, which began trending in early April, has been mentioned more than 6 million times online and has since served as a uniting slogan for Jokowi’s detractors.

“This is not an ordinary hashtag; #2019GantiPresiden has survived many kinds of controversies, including resistance from pro-Jokowi factions,” Drone Emprit founder Ismail Fahmi told The Jakarta Post recently.

“But the more [the hashtag] faces pressure, the stronger it arises as a symbol of struggle.”

In analyzing digital campaign patterns, Drone Emprit crawls through social media outlets, including Twitter and Instagram, as well as online news sites for data by searching certain keywords, which is then further digitally analyzed.

It found that from January to Dec. 5 this year, at least 6.6 million mentions of the hashtag were recorded on Twitter, far exceeding the 1 million mentions of the counter-hashtag #2019TetapJokowi (2019StillJokowi).

Other counter-hashtags from pro-Jokowi factions, which included #01IndonesiaMaju (#01DevelopedIndonesia) and #01JokowiLagi, only recorded 382,929 and 322,735 mentions respectively on Twitter during the period.

“The #2019GantiPresiden campaign is always on a high and it is dangerous for Jokowi,” Ismail said, “There may be no direct correlation to his electability rating, but the [hashtag] can help to consolidate [the opposition] in being more militant in their campaign.”

“[Jokowi] may have many teams of supporters, but the problem is that they don’t have one unifying hashtag.”

As an incumbent candidate, Jokowi has mobilized backers to promote his administration’s concrete achievements and programs in his digital campaign, in addition to his targets for a second term in office. Jokowi’s cyber troops are well organized and able to produce good campaign materials, Ismail said. “Each group has teams who analyze issues, create content, such as memes, text or videos, which are then promoted through social media. It’s well organized,” Ismail said.

Drone Emprit’s data, however, revealed that the pro-Jokowi cyber teams are likely to be using many bots, or automated accounts controlled by a software program that could send out Twitter posts to make a hashtag or topic trend on the platform.

Many bot-generated tweets were found in the posts of hashtag #01IndonesiaMaju, the data shows. From the period of Nov. 6 to Dec. 6, 34.6 percent of 293,318 tweets that mentioned the hashtag were identified as posted on Twitter by users with a small number of followers, from zero to 25, many of whom posted the same message at the same time.

Jokowi national campaign team spokesperson Abdul Kadir Karding denied using bots. “The organic troops [real users] backing Jokowi [on social media] are many and they are widespread.”

He acknowledged that the cyber teams backing Jokowi’s campaign were still not consolidated enough and were now working to address the issue.

Prabowo’s cyber troops have been found to be more militant and organized despite having no leadership structure.

In the #2019GantiPresiden campaign, the hashtag was mostly promoted by real users, according to Drone Emprit’s data.

Only 7.14 percent of 823,028 tweets mentioning the hashtag were posted by users with zero to 25 followers from the period of Nov. 6 to Dec. 6. The majority, namely 43.34 percent or 356,736 tweets, were posted by users with 101 to 500 followers.

The proportion of retweets was also far higher at 80.99 percent, compared to 13 percent of new tweets, showing high engagement between real users who were interested in the political conversation surrounding the campaign, the data showed.

“On social networks, engagement and interaction is highly important and we can see it happening more in Prabowo’s camp than Jokowi’s,” Ismail said.

Meanwhile, PoliticaWave, a social media monitoring site, claimed that Jokowi was still more popular than Prabowo on social media, Antara reported.

But unlike Drone Emprit, which analyzes social media conversations throughout the year, PoliticaWave drew the conclusion after studying election conversations on social media from Dec. 6 to 13. It found 1.16 million conversations related to election contenders, with about 64 percent of them related to Jokowi and the rest to Prabowo.