The Australian Associated Press emailed me asking my views on the role of social media in this year’s Indonesian elections and the role of digital natives as first times voters.

My long answer below

I don’t think social media can make or break a candidate by itself. Presence on social networks certainly help raise their profiles but it also opens them up to attacks.

While use of social media in Indonesia seems massive, the majority of things I see about this upcoming election and even Indonesian elections in the past, is about making fun of elections and candidates.

The primary driver of political campaigns remains television. The influence of TV is still significantly much larger than the likes of Twitter or Facebook but TV and other “traditional” media also take their news from social media, therefore social media presence and activities can help spearhead the image or intention that the candidates want to project. Television can amplify what is being said or what is happening on social media.

Look at the publicity on Aburizal Bakrie’s trip to the Maldives for example. That trip from four or so years ago first made the rounds on YouTube and Twitter a few days ago and within hours it was picked up by television as well as online news media and became a national talking point by the end of the day.

That being said, conversations on social media are also being driven by what is happening on TV so you have that full circle of coverage and talking points from both media amplifying each other until the masses are tired of the subject and move on to the next topic.

Another example is Farhat Abbas. The one time presidential hopeful and legislative candidate was on Twitter until recently, perhaps to deliver his campaign promises, to create a more popular image of himself, and to address people who talked about him. Ultimately it was a failed experiment because everyone saw right through him. His actions that had been reported across all media were amplified and ridiculed on Twitter so much that he eventually shut down his @farhatabbaslaw account, although as it turns out he reactivated it several days later.

The success of Jokowi and Ahok may have been driven by social media but to my eyes, the real driver was the relentless coverage on TV and newspapers about their campaigns and activities. Perhaps the final kicker was the flashmob at Bundaran HI shortly prior to the gubernatorial election day in 2012.

What’s good about this election is that the rise of software developers taking advantage of Pemilu API, which is the publicly available access to the KPU data about all of the legislative candidates and their parties. Spurred on by Perludem, these mobile applications and websites may not be massively popular but they provide far more useful and easier to access information so that the voters are better informed about their options.

The digital natives, in other words, people who are far more comfortable with the internet, mobile devices, and appications, most of which happen to be first time voters, apparently are increasingly looking for election information from the internet. They will scrounge news and info not just from social media but also from news websites and other sources including applications. It’s up to them to decide how to filter and process all that information.

Google is known to have provided a central repository of election news and information for other countries in the past and it’s just a matter of time before they launch an Indonesian version of it. It’s a bit of a shame that they haven’t so far with the election being so close now, just a matter of days. – Read on Path.