1) Researchers uncover coordinated, online disinformation campaign on West Papua
Broadcast Mon 24 Oct 2022 at 7:00am
A coordinated, online disinformation campaign aimed at strengthening Indonesia's claims over West Papua has been uncovered by researchers at the University of Melbourne.
The research, published last week in the Harvard Kennedy School's Misinformation Review, scraped 1.25 million Indonesian language Twitter posts between December 2018 and May 2021.
It found a coordinated effort to flood Twitter with pro-government posts that suggest overwhelming support for special autonomy, the law under which Indonesia governs West Papua.
Dave McRae, a senior research fellow at the University of Melbourne's Asia Institute, said pro-Indonesian government groups were likely behind the campaign.
"We can't in this case, definitively say the Indonesian government was responsible for it even though other researchers have shown that the Indonesian government, in its own domestic politics also run this sort of disinformation campaign," he said.
"The most we can say is that it's a pro-government actor."
2) A pro-government disinformation campaign on Indonesian Papua
This research identifies an Indonesian-language Twitter disinformation campaign posting pro-government materials on Indonesian governance in Papua, site of a protracted ethno-nationalist, pro-independence insurgency. Curiously, the campaign does not employ common disinformation tactics such as hashtag flooding or the posting of clickbait with high engagement potential, nor does it seek to build user profiles that would make the accounts posting this material appear as important participants in a debate over Papua’s status. The campaign simply employs synchronous, duplicate posts by ostensibly distinct authors to ensure that a significant proportion of posts mentioning contentious special autonomy arrangements are pro-government. Despite lacking sophistication, the scale of this information campaign in overall Twitter discussion of special autonomy adds to concerns about the ability of pro-government actors to employ disinformation to constrict political discourse in Southeast Asia.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.