Jayapura, Jubi – Senior Papuan journalist and chief editor of Jubi, Victor Mambor, said Papuan students should start writing about Papua’s conflict as clear writing was important in the midst of the current noise and flood of information on problems that occur in Papua.
This was conveyed by Mambor as a presenter in the webinar “Yournalism: You are the future of Papua Journalist” held by the Papuan Student Association in Russia (IMAPA) on Saturday, December 3, 2022.
Mambor said writing was a way to win the battle of information about Papua’s problems. Currently, not all media in Papua have the capacity to write about the conflict in Papua, therefore, Papuan students can fill in that role.
“We Papuans are constantly being killed and arrested unlawfully. In the context of the violence we experience every day, Jubi, for example, always writes about human rights and military and police brutality against Papuans. The last case was the shooting of Pastor Yeremia Zanambani and the murder of Makilon Tabuni in Sinak. We have to write about it, otherwise, people wouldn’t know,” said Mambor.
Mambor said that many things can be written about Papua, be it the economy, politics, law, security, sports, and human rights issues. However, the writing must be based on strong research and data to make it accountable.
“We hope you Papuan students can gather information and write the truth, not hoaxes. Hoaxes circulate in Papua every day, for example, recently someone showed the video of Filep Karma’s funeral procession and tweaked it, saying it was a protest on December 1, 2022. This is an irresponsible provocation,” he said.
If you want a change for Papua, you have to do something extraordinary by providing the truth about Papua. Mambor emphasized that this could be done through journalism.
Jayapura, Jubi – As many as 20 residents of Kiwirok District who fled to Oksibil, the capital of Bintang Mountains Regency, Mountainous Papua Province, returned to their hometowns on Tuesday, November 29, 2022. The Cartenz Peace Task Force sent health workers to treat the displaced people.
This was conveyed by the Commander of the Cartenz Peace Task Force, Adj. Comr. Budi Suryono, in Jayapura City on Saturday, December 3. According to him, the medics who were flown from Oksibil to Kiwirok were led by the Head of the Oksibil Health Center.
“The medical team will provide health services, especially for Kiwirok residents. They returned to their hometowns on foot from Oksibil to Kiwirok,” Budi said, explaining the condition of the displaced people,
Fourteen months ago, around 500 residents of Kiwirok District fled to Oksibil. At that time, they fled to avoid the armed conflict between the security forces and the West Papua National Liberation Army (TPNPB) in Kiwirok. As the armed conflict subsided, the displaced residents began to return to their hometowns.
According to Budi, in the near future, his party will assist the return of eight Kiwirok village officials. “We are doing it gradually and in stages according to the capacity of the aircraft. After that, we will rearrange the schedule to send the rest of the Kiwirok community who are still in refugee camps,” he said.
Deputy Head of the Cartenz Peace Task Force Adj. Sr. Comr. Arif Irawan said that in sending displaced people home, his party prioritized a number of people who serve important roles in helping displaced people such as health workers, village officials, and several community leaders. (*)
Rumondang Naibaho, Jakarta – The Papua Student Alliance (AMP) has shrugged off accusations that protesters threw rocks at police during a demonstration near the Horse Statue in Central Jakarta yesterday. The AMP believes that the accusations are designed to paint the demonstration in a bad light.
Papuan Central Highlands Indonesian Student Association (AMPTPI) Secretary General Ambrosius Mulait gave a chronology of the demonstration on Thursday December 1. Mulait explained that the protest action was to commemorate 61 years since the declaration of West Papuan independence, but that it was blocked by police.
"The West Papua independence declaration was made in front of the American Embassy followed by a long-march to the Presidential Palace, but we were blocked the police and the peaceful demonstration redirected to the Arjuna Wijaya [Horse] Statue at Monas [National Monument] in Central Jakarta", Mulait explained to journalists on Friday December 2.
According to Mulait, at around 9.30 am the police provoked one of the Papuan students who was wearing a T-shirt with a picture of the Morning Star independence flag. He claimed that the police tried to force them to take off the shirt, but the student refused.
"Twenty-five minutes later the police again ordered the protesters to take down one of the West Papua National Committee (KNPB) flags. The students did not heed his because the KNPB and AMP flags are not banned flags", he said.
Mulait said that initially the demonstration proceeded smoothly and peacefully. He claimed that the police then arrived with a lawyer and told them that one of the police officers had been hit by a rock thrown by the protesters.
"Meanwhile the Horse Statue area is an area where there are hardly any stones at all. How could the protesters have got out of the circle and gathered stones, while the demonstrators were surrounded by a combination of TNI [Indonesian military] and Polri [Indonesian police] officers as well as intelligence [agents] who were on the ground since [the action at the] USA Embassy through to the Horse Statue", he explained.
Mulait is asking the police to provide evidence that the students threw rocks at them. "The police must also show evidence of a victim and also the perpetrator of the stone throwing so that it's clear cut", he said.
As reported earlier, the AMP held a demonstration at the Horse Statue on Thursday. The protest action was marred by a clash with police.
Central Jakarta Metro Jaya district police operations division chief Assistance Superintendent Saufi Salamun was reportedly injured by a stone that was thrown while he was guarding the demonstration.
"Correct (the Central Jakarta Metro Jaya district police operations division chief was injured)", said Central Jakarta Metro Jaya district police chief Senior Commissioner Komarudin when contacted Thursday.
Komarudin said that Saufi Salamun was injured by stone that was thrown when police wanted to remove a flag that had been brought by the demonstrators. "It's suspected that the rock was thrown when we wanted to remove a flag they brought", he said.
He said that Salamun suffered a head injury and received first-aid treatment at a security coordination post. (mea/dhn)
[Translated by James Balowski. The original title of the article was " Aliansi Mahasiswa Papua Bantah Polisi soal Lemparan Batu di Demo".]
Protesters from the Papuan Student Alliance (AMP), the Papuan Central Highlands Indonesian Student Association (AMPTPI) and the Indonesian People's Front for West Papua (FRI-WP) held a protest action in front of the Horse Statue in Central Jakarta on Thursday December 1.
In the middle of the action however, they were involved in a clash with police who were guarding the demonstration.
According to Kumparan's observations at the location, in the beginning, the demonstration proceeded peacefully. The demonstrators could be seen standing in a circle listening to speeches from the command vehicle. The police meanwhile, stood guard outside the circle.
During one of the speeches however, a uniformed officer suddenly entered the circle and tried to climb up onto the command vehicle, and then remove protest materials such as a flag pole and the like.
Seeing this, the protesters tried to hold on to the materials. In the midst of the chaos, Central Jakarta district police operations division chief Assistant Superintendent Saufi Salamun was hit by a rock.
The situation however did not continue for long and after a few moments returned to normal.
The demonstration was held to convey a number of demands including opposing Special Autonomy and the creation of new autonomous regions (DOB) in Papua.
[Translated by James Balowski. The original title of the article was " Mahasiswa Asal Papua Bentrok dengan Polisi saat Demo di Patung Kuda".]
Online discussion about the conflict over independence in Indonesia’s easternmost provinces — the Papua conflict — is a fiercely contested space.
The Indonesian government has employed internet shutdowns and taken punitive action against government critics to obstruct the free flow of information. Critics of Indonesian governance in Papua also frequently face online harassment.
In our new paper published in the Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review, we highlight a flood of Indonesian-language pro-government disinformation on Twitter since February 2021, promoting Indonesian government narratives on special autonomy.
Along with repression of the independence movement, special autonomy has been a key element of Indonesian governance in Papua. Dissatisfaction with special autonomy has grown over time in Papua, with Papuan activists rejecting the policy.
Ahead of the July 2021 decision by Indonesian authorities to extend special autonomy for a further 20 years, thousands of Twitter users engaged in a large-scale campaign on the platform in support of the policy.
Our study observes that although these Twitter users were ostensibly unconnected, their posts and profiles strongly suggest that a single entity was directing all these accounts.
Inauthentic pro-government posts on Twitter
There are three key reasons behind that observation:
First, these accounts mostly posted at the same time of day. Initially, their posts were concentrated in the minute starting 6:55am (Jakarta time). Then, once the Islamic fasting month began on April 13 2021, the accounts abruptly switched en masse to posting in the minute starting 8am (Figure 1).
The concentration of tweets in these two minutes in early 2021 is so anomalous that they show up as dark vertical bands if we plot the time of day that Twitter users posted all 1.25 million Indonesian language tweets in our dataset, over the course of 2.5 years (Figure 2).
Second, beyond their synchronicity, the tweets shared an additional characteristic – most contain nearly identical text. At face value, 22,479 of the 23,853 tweets in our dataset posted in these two minutes are “original” tweets (not retweets) about special autonomy, posted by 2,668 different authors.
Only 760 of these original tweets are unique, as measured by a test that checks how similar two pieces of texts are, called a Jaccard similarity test. The remainder are duplicates or near duplicates of only 1,329 distinct tweets, with the most duplicated example repeated in 286 versions.
Figure 3 presents an example of one such set of 10 duplicates. The content of these 1,329 sets of duplicates aligns closely with contemporaneous Indonesian government messaging on Papua. Two-thirds praise Indonesian government policy, including the staging for the first time of Indonesia’s National Games (PON) in Papua in 2021. A substantial proportion — around 17% — also either quote indigenous Papuans expressing pro-government positions or assert that indigenous Papuans support special autonomy.
Third, the accounts posting original tweets about special autonomy in these two minutes of the day differed in systematic ways from other Twitter users in our dataset.
Half of the accounts (50.9%) had a blank author description, compared to just 18.7% of accounts in the rest of the dataset. Only 32% used a profile picture featuring an identifiable person – based on a random sample of 100 accounts – and scrutiny of these pictures suggested many were unlikely to be the account holders.
The accounts were also of atypically recent provenance. By the time of their median date for account creation on 28 March 2021, 99.1% of accounts in the dataset had been created. As of October 2022, Twitter had suspended 64% of these accounts since we scraped the dataset in June 2021, compared to 2.2% of accounts in the rest of our dataset.
Together, these features clearly mark this set of tweets and accounts as inauthentic: the notion that they are distinct accounts, making spontaneous posts about special autonomy, is untenable. It is this false notion about the nature of the tweets and accounts that marks this campaign as disinformation, rather than the content of the tweets being mostly false.
Some of the duplicated tweets are demonstrably false, and others make dubious but unverifiable statements. But many others are factual statements of elements of Indonesian government policy on Papua, albeit combined with a contested statement that these details show that special autonomy should continue.
How does this affect social media users?
So the inauthentic tweets are there – but what effect did they have on their intended audience’s views of Papua?
Such a question might be even more pointed in the case of a disinformation campaign lacking sophistication, where duplicate tweets were insufficiently paraphrased to evade detection by a simple similarity test, and most received almost no engagement from other Twitter users. Certainly, the campaign lacks a clear mechanism to change the minds of social media users who happen upon it.
Nevertheless, this campaign’s sheer scale means it cannot easily be discounted as insignificant: the 1,329 sets of duplicate or near duplicate tweets posted in just two minutes of the day make up 14.0% of all original tweets mentioning special autonomy over the 2.5 years of our dataset, and 7.9% of all tweets on special autonomy including retweets.
These tweets are so numerous that they make it nigh on impossible for all but the most committed reader to understand the true outlines of the debate on special autonomy – so-called “zone-flooding”.
Coupled with restrictions on genuinely independent reportage and free expression in Papua, the scale of this campaign thus demonstrates the ability of pro-government actors to employ social media disinformation to constrict democratic discourse.
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Dave McRae, Associate, Centre for Indonesian Law, Islam and Society, The University of Melbourne; Daniel Russo-Batterham, Research Data Specialist; Kim Doyle, Research Data Specialist, dan Maria del Mar Quiroga, Research Data Specialist, The University of Melbourne
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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