Become An Agent For The Promotion Of Peaceful Elections In The Digital Space

Photo: Special

JAKARTA - Approaching the 2024 General Election, digital spaces are increasingly crowded with various news and information, including hoaxes and disinformation. The KPU itself has determined the List of Permanent Voters or DPT for the 2024 General Election, which amounts to 204.8 million voters. Of the total, 113 million are young voters consisting of Gen Z and Millennials.

The campaign event has started from November 28, 2023, until February 10, 2024. The reason is, digital spaces are still filled with negative speech, hatred, threats, hoaxes, and so on.

Therefore, the Ministry of Communication and Information (Kominfo) and Commission I of the Indonesian House of Representatives held a Webinar on Chat with Legislators (NGOBRAS) with the theme The Role of Digital Fighters in Maintaining Peaceful Elections' on Wednesday, January 31, 2024. This activity is even more complete with the main remarks from the Director General of Aptika Kominfo RI Semuel Abrijani who continues to promote digital literacy to all Indonesian people.

Subarna, Member of Commission I DPR RI, stated that the mass media plays an important role in maintaining information integrity and creating a conducive situation in the midst of society towards a peaceful 2024 election. With that goal, Kominfo itself has made various efforts and calls.

"Kominfo has also designed concrete steps to answer various issues that arise in the implementation of elections: increasing voter participation, strengthening voter rights, and efforts to anticipate conflicts that could arise, exercising voting rights, and maintaining a conducive situation during calculations and voting," explained Subarna.

Widodo Muktiyo, Expert Staff of the Minister of Communication and Mass Media, said that peaceful elections mean elections as a means of national interlativity and means of unity. Meanwhile, the younger generation has new media preferences, such as live streaming, social media, and others. Therefore, in overcoming hoaxes, for example, Widodo offers a pentahelix model approach that involves all stakeholders.

"There is a pentahelix approach. All components of the nation together. From literacy, from collaboration, to law enforcement," said Widodo.

In line with that, Fajar Eri Dianto, Chairman of the Indonesian ICT Volunteers, quoted one study as saying Generation Z has good digital skills even though it rarely looks for political information. This is shown by the behavior of verification and finding the truth of information on the internet properly.

"The habit of Gen Z and Millennials as digital fighters that deserves thumbs up is to have quite good digital skills," said Fajar.

In the context of elections, the younger generation can seek the truth of the people's representatives' information, such as profile checks, track records, ideas, and paying attention to debate forums.

With 52 percent of the younger generation interested in the issue of the 2024 election, they can verify information sources in s.id/cekhoaks. In addition, they can also report the context of hoaxes and stop using only one source of information.