Lemhannas: Government Prevents Disruption Of Information Ahead Of The 2024 General Election

Governor of the National Resilience Institute (Lemhannas) Andi Widjajanto/ANTARA/HO-Katadata.

JAKARTA - Governor of the National Resilience Institute (Lemhannas) Andi Widjajanto said the government was preventing information disruption ahead of the 2024 General Election by preparing six strategies.

"The first strategy is to expand public actions, including increasing public awareness of media literacy and critical thinking ability in accepting," said Andi Widjajanto in a statement quoted by ANTARA, Thursday, May 4.

Andi said the second strategy was to increase the country's ability to act like forming a team tasked with monitoring the spread of information and being able to respond quickly to various misinformation and disinformations spread across various platforms.

"Meanwhile, the third strategy is to carry out direct operations against the perpetrators of disinformation," said Andi.

Lemhannas' fourth strategy to ward off information disruption is to implement a transformation of election information where the KPU, Political Parties, and candidates must regularly release their activities to minimize the use of misinformation and disinformation to manipulate the public.

The fifth strategy is to collaborate across institutions, for example in collaboration with independent institutions to verify misinformation and disinformation spread across the community.

While the sixth strategy is to carry out international cooperation both bilateral and multilateral, to mitigate the disruption of information that is cross-border.

Country Representative The Asia Foundation Hana Satriyo said the 2024 election would be a test of the resilience of democracy in Indonesia. The lack of digital literacy in society makes hoaxes or fake news predicted to be increasingly difficult to dam.

Hana said, the 2024 election is a challenge in itself considering the many concerns that democratic contestation will also be accompanied by the strengthening of the contestation of narratives which actually reduce the quality of democracy, such as hoax news and also hate speech.

"A number of studies in the last few elections stated that ahead of the election there was a significant increase in the traffic of fake news, slander and incitement, especially through social media networks and messaging applications such as WhatsApp," said Hana.

According to Hana, The Asia Foundation continues to provide support for increasing digital literacy, including promoting anti-hoax movements through programs in the accompanying region.

Deputy for Strategic Studies, Lemhannas Reni Maryeni, said that the emergence of hoax news that affected people's lives was because the digital index of people in Indonesia was still very low. Therefore, preparations from the relevant ministries are needed to overcome this problem.

"Our lowest digital index. We conduct studies on digital architecture, ranging from doctrine, organization, operations, budget, then human resources, indeed we have a lot to do for its digital architecture. So that preparations must be made by the ministries associated with this," said Reni.

The Presidium of the Litbang Committee Mafindo Loina Lalolo Krina Perangin-angin explained that hoaxes that appear in Indonesia always follow the momentum, and the intensity of hoaxes related to the 2024 General Election appears in the last three months in 2022.

Surprisingly, there are three large platforms that have the potential to become hoax sources, namely Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. The discovery of three major platforms as a source of hoaxes is based on a study conducted by Mafindo.

"So if you ask, is it true that hoaxes are developing massively in the digital world? The answer is yes. So the data in Litbang Mafindo occurred. Hoaxes in Indonesia followed the momentum. The intensity of hoaxes related to the election appeared in the last three months, in the last three months of 2022," he said.

From January to March 2023, the hoax was almost 700. The highest was in February, almost 70 percent talking about politics. "So we can imagine how massive the hoax is circulating now in the digital world," said Loina.