2024 Election and Tiktok: Computational Propaganda and Hegemony

Arjuna Putra Aldino
General Chairperson of the GMNI DPP

USAGE social media in the 2024 Election has become an inevitable fact. The We Are Social report shows that the number of active social media users in Indonesia will be 167 million people in January 2023. This number is equivalent to 60.4 percent of Indonesia’s population.

The role of social media in the 2024 election is increasingly important amidst the voter pyramid in the 2024 election being dominated by generation Z and millennial groups, namely 56.45 percent of the total voters. On the other hand, social media users in Indonesia are mostly from the gen-z and millennial groups.

The Statista report notes that the largest number of social media users in Indonesia are aged 25-34 years. The next position is users aged 18-24 years. Social media is increasingly playing a key role in the 2024 election when social media becomes the main source of information for most young people in getting to know the figure of the presidential candidate (capres) for the 2024 election.

Populix survey results show that 28 percent of young people use social media as their main source of getting to know the 2024 election presidential candidate. Tiktok is the most popular social media in Indonesia. According to the application research company Business of Apps, TikTok will be the most downloaded application in Indonesia in 2023. It is recorded that this short video platform under the auspices of ByteDance has been downloaded 67.4 million times in Indonesia last year.

Indonesia is in second place with the highest number of TikTok users in the world, reaching 112.97 million users. The largest number of TikTok users in Indonesia are in the 18-24 year age group. So it is not surprising that presidential and vice presidential candidates spend quite a lot of money to campaign on this social media platform from China. Because seen in terms of reach, the reach of Tiktok advertising is quite promising.

According to the We Are Social report, in January 2024 TikTok advertisements in Indonesia could reach around 126.83 million audiences. This figure makes Indonesia the country with the 2nd largest TikTok advertising reach in the world.

From Computational Propaganda Leading to Hegemony

Almost all presidential and vice presidential candidates in the 2024 election use Tiktok media as a campaign instrument. However, the amount of TikTok campaign funding determines the volume and intensity of this online campaign. Referring to Ad Library data from Meta Platform in the last three months (August 2023-October 2023), Prabowo’s ad spending valuation was ranked first. The value of advertising spending transactions related to Prabowo reached IDR 8.67 billion. The average value of advertisements related to Prabowo in a month reaches IDR 1 billion.

With spending this big, the keywords “prabowo” and “gemoy” dominate the Tiktok universe. Netray Media Monitoring’s findings show that there was 1,070 content with the keyword “gemoy” in the monitoring period 24 November-4 December 2023. This video content with the keyword “gemoy” was watched 57.3 million times with a total impression of 2.6 million reactions. .