How Indonesia Shapes Online Debate About Papua

Anyone who has written critically about the Indonesian government’s policy in the country’s easternmost region – Papua – will most likely have some glancing experience with Jakarta’s elaborate attempts to shape the online debate about the subject. 

After writing recent articles about the growing unrest in the two provinces of Indonesian Papua, I have received private messages via Twitter or Facebook from accounts claiming to belong to ordinary Papuans, but bearing suspiciously scant user information. These messages have usually chided me for misinterpreting the Indonesian government’s policies in Papua and for taking at face value the claims of those fighting for the region’s independence from Indonesia. 

While I have no binding evidence, it is very likely that these messages have been part of a campaign coordinated by the Indonesian government or its proxies. Such campaigns have been understood for some time. In 2019, the researchers Benjamin Strick and Elise Thomas identified “a well-funded and coordinated social media campaign aimed at distorting the truth about events in the restive Indonesian province of Papua.” 

The campaign they uncovered, which was coordinated by the Jakarta-based media company InsightID, involved the creation of an entire pipeline of English-language content that fed a pro-Indonesian narrative to an international audience, while condemning the separatist cause. This began with content, “including articles, infographics, and videos,” posted on websites. The authors wrote that this content “was then promoted by core branded accounts on Twitter, and amplified by a network of inauthentic and/or automated accounts.” 

In October of that year, following the release of the report, Facebook deleted more than 100 accounts and pages, saying that they were “involved in domestic-focused coordinated inauthentic behavior in Indonesia” and that the campaigns “created networks of accounts to mislead others about who they were and what they were doing.” 

Campaigns like this make a certain degree of sense for the Indonesian government. As Strick and Thomas note, the Indonesian government has gone to considerable efforts to restrict access to Papua for journalists, researchers, and foreign diplomats. The result is that social media “has become a key source of information about what’s happening in West Papua, and has become a battleground for propaganda and control over the narrative from both sides.” This also explains why the Indonesian government has imposed internet blackouts during periods of unrest in Papua, and made attempts to prosecute human rights activists that post online frequently about the situation there.

While these tactics have been well documented, for the first time, new research shed light on the use of these tactics aimed at an Indonesian-speaking audience. In October, the Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review published an article examining the “flood of Indonesian-language pro-government disinformation on Twitter since February 2021,” particularly involving the promotion of government narratives around Papua’s controversial “special autonomy” status.

The article, which was co-authored by Dave McRae, Maria Del Mar Quiroga, Daniel Russo-Batterham, and Kim Doyle of the University of Melbourne, claimed to have identified a “coordinated, automated information campaign posting pro-government Indonesian-language material in support of special autonomy for the two provinces comprising Indonesian Papua.”

In July 2021, the Indonesian parliament voted to revise and extend for 20 years the Special Autonomy Law for Papua and West Papua. Originally passed in 2001, the law was intended as a response to growing demands for independence in Papua, where a low-level insurgency has simmered for decades. But many independence-inclined Papuans have opposed the law’s renewal, claiming that it has been used to short circuit aspirations for true independence while doing little to improve the lot of ordinary Papuans.

The exiled Papuan separatist leader Benny Wenda went so far as to refer to the law as a “second Act of No Choice” – a reference to the so-called “Act of Free Choice,” the 1969 United Nations referendum that led to Papua joining the Indonesian republic, which Papuan separatists claim was deeply flawed.

The renewal came after several years in which Papua province in particular has become increasingly militarized as Indonesian security forces deploy in growing numbers to respond to attacks by the guerilla fighters of the West Papua National Liberation Army, displacing tens of thousands.

The research by McRae et al claims that ahead of the extension of the special autonomy law in July 2021, thousands of Twitter users engaged in a large-scale campaign on the platform in support of the policy. The authors outlined a number of reasons why this swarm of ostensibly unconnected tweets was most likely directed by a single entity (i.e. the Indonesian government). The tweets were all tightly coordinated, many being posted within a couple of minutes, and most “contain[ed] nearly identical text.” The accounts that beamed them out were also of “atypically recent provenance,” and more than half of them had a blank author description. Only 32 percent used a profile picture featuring an identifiable person.

The overall impression one gets from the report is of a campaign with a crude grasp on the mechanics of social media. But as the authors note, the brute impact of so many tweets on a single subject being sent out in a two-minute window could well have had an impact on debate about the special autonomy law, if only by blotting out opposing views and muddying the waters on the issue.

As with the English-language campaigns identified in 2019, not all of the messages are bald lies. While some of the coordinated tweets were demonstrably false, others made “dubious but unverifiable statements,” and others were straightforward statements of Indonesian government policy on Papua, presented with a supportive slant.

Taken as a whole, the Indonesian government’s online war against the Papuan separatist movement offers another example of how governments and pro-government actors have adapted to the potentially insurrectionary potential of social media. 

It also illustrates the lengths to which Jakarta in particular is going in order to constrict open discussions about the separatist issue. Whereas offline the government has taken a “traditional” approach of physically restricting access to Papua, especially those areas that have seen the most instability, the online equivalent involves blanketing social media platforms in a haze of vaguely supportive white noise.