Zoo visitor Achmad Januddin, 29, a resident of Tomang, West Jakarta, sat watching the Twitter handlers picking up the trash.

Achmad came with his relatives to relax at the zoo, sitting on a bench, sheltering from the afternoon rain. “I still see some people littering, but now there are more people that are aware and help clean up the place. I don’t know who they are though, perhaps college students,” Achmad told The Jakarta Post on Sunday.

The group of youngsters, who chose Ragunan Zoo as their venue on Sunday, started when Fauziah Fitri, 23, was having an evening picnic in Kota Tua, West Jakarta, back in 2017.

She noticed that the place was really packed but littered with trash at the same time. She and her companion Reza Eka Prasetyo, 24, then picked up the trash and took some pictures of their work on their phones.

However, it was not until this year that the hashtag #trashtag went popular on Twitter, with netizens posting pictures of themselves picking up litter.

“I shared the photos of what I did in Kota Tua in 2017 [using the hashtag #trashtag], and then my friends told me to make a similar movement,” Fauziah told the Post on Sunday.

On March 10, Fauziah tweeted with the hashtag #anaktwittermulung for the first time, inviting netizens to come picking up litter in Kota Tua.

The tweet was retweeted by over 1,300 users, and on the day of the event around 50 people from Greater Jakarta participated, Reza said.

“We only promoted this on Twitter, and then it got retweeted by others. We also used the hashtag #anaktwittermulung,” Reza said.

He said that besides picking up trash, the participants also occasionally reminded visitors at the venue not to litter.

He said that around 130 people had joined the group chat to discuss #anaktwittermulung and to get to know each other, while their events were usually attended by 50 to 60 people who did not necessarily know each other until they met at the venue.

“This is a voluntary thing anyway so it’s not always the same people that show up,” Reza said.

Besides Kota Tua, the group also met at Blok M mall in South Jakarta on April 11.

Fauziah said the #anaktwittermulung events were held in tourist spots as those places usually had a large crowd, especially young children, who might see what the Twitter users were doing and later follow suit in their daily life.

“Some people ask what we are doing. Nobody immediately joins us [in picking up trash]. Maybe because we don’t show our identity,” Fauziah said.

The movement has also inspired people in other big cities such as Bandung in West Java, Yogyakarta, Magelang in Central Java and Kediri in East Java, who in turn have also held their own #anaktwittermulung events.

Fauziah expected her movement to be noticed by more people and in turn they would do the bare minimum of picking up their own litter, as currently #anaktwittermulung is still independently organized and promoted only on social media.

“All people should be aware that they should dispose of their trash in the right place,” she added.

Participants of #anaktwittermulung, such as 21-year-old college student Marlian Saputra,

usually just turn up at the venue without having made prior arrangements with the others.

“I was scrolling on Twitter and suddenly came across the poster and hashtag [of #anaktwittermulung],” Marlian said.

He said he always tried to go to #anaktwittermulung events as it was a positive way to spend his free time, even though his nearest friends on campus or in his neighborhood did not know about it.

“This is to raise awareness that the environment is important and that we should not litter,” Marlian said.

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