Needdem Asks KPU To Prepare 3 Steps To Supervise Regional Election Campaigns On Social Media, Including Collaborating With Platforms

Illustration of the use of smartphones in daily life. (Unsplash-Angela Franklin)

JAKARTA - Researcher of the Association for Elections and Democracy (Perludem) Annisa Alfath said the General Elections Commission (KPU) must prepare at least three steps to organize campaigns on social media (medsos) during the 2024 Pilkada campaign period.

He explained that there are many regulations that need to be made further by the KPU, in order to organize the campaign process for the winning team of regional head candidates, so as to reduce the spread of fake news or hoaxes, slander, and black campaigns.

"The first is to conduct socialization related to campaign timelines, especially campaigns on social media, which are often lost in their campaign timelines. In peace times, many campaigns circulated," Annisa said in Jakarta, Friday, September 27, which was confiscated by Antara.

Furthermore, he explained, the second step is that the KPU must actively cooperate with social media platform providers, in order to prevent disinformation and hate speech to one of the candidate pairs (paslon).

However, Annisa continued, in order to implement this, the KPU must also make a clear definition regarding content that is categorized as being taken down.

"Thirdly, there needs to be transparency regarding campaign funds that are transparent, open as wide as possible for the purposes of prebunking and debuting, and to realize campaigns with integrity," said Annisa.

In addition to these three things, according to Annisa, the KPU must also cooperate with the General Elections Supervisory Agency (Bawaslu), to supervise the campaign process.

In addition, the KPU has announced the reuse of the Recapitulation Information System (Sirekap) which had previously been problematic when used.

"In the last election, there were many problems, both technical and data-related, which were not transparent," he said.

Therefore, the system must also be carefully prepared so that it will not cause problems again in the future.