By: Adli Maskur) *
The bad reality of social media has colored the long journey of democracy in Indonesia, including in the process of holding the 2019 presidential election (PILPRES), some time ago. Social media is a soft land for campaign activities of each candidate pair (PASLON). The effectiveness of campaigns on social media is no doubt, the more users of social media, the wider the audience affected by the campaign targets. In fact, long before the presidential election season came, social media had been boisterous first. What is the reason for the hubbub? One of them is news related to Paslon. The preaching that is disseminated is certainly divided into two types, kindness and unkindness. Of course, there are not a few reports that plunge and are not verified. Such information is what we know as hoaks.
The tension of political conversation is increasingly heated when the presidential election takes place. In fact, each short message is almost always accompanied by Paslon’s jargon from each sequence number. Not a few short messages that were felt so dropped one of Paslon. When the presidential election takes place, on the same day, various credible survey institutions do a quick count. The quick calculation that has been done since a few years back and proven credibility, just this year is doubted by the credibility of some groups. As soon as the results of the calculation quickly came out, supporters of one of Paslon were aggressively discussing on social media that survey institutions were now no longer tested, and were even considered to have patrolled one of the Paslon. The circulation of such news, increasingly raises political tension that is increasingly heated and makes people berate each other, even though what is disseminated through social media is not necessarily true fact. Then is this phenomenon said to be a hoax? We can agree carefully that this is the case, including the type of hoax.
Not only in text form, when the presidential election season takes place, hoaks are spread in visual form, to audio visuals. Many videos were cut and uploaded with comments that dropped one of the candidates so that the situation was increasingly not conducive. Then, what is the government doing to banish this increasingly sarcastic hoax? with full consideration and wisdom, the Ministry of Communication and Information (KOMINFO) was forced to block some access to social media such as, What’s App, Instagram and Facebook.
As soon as the blocking occurred for approximately two days, many people complained that they even berated the government for finding it difficult to exchange messages. Why do we have to raise each other’s tension when the government tries to find a solution? According to Dr. Gun Gun Heryanto, in his book entitled Against Hoax in Social Media and Mass Media, that one of the efforts to minimize hoaxes is by establishing cooperation between the government and the community. In the season of the presidential election yesterday, the blocking of some social media was felt as a form of cooperation between the government and the community to jointly try to minimize hoaxes.
Just like the principles of democracy, hoax also comes from us, by us, and for us. So, we are the ones who have a big contribution in the process of minimizing hoaxes.
) * The author is an activist at the Student Press House
