The Perantau

Unveiling Narratives:

The Impact of Social Media on Journalism in Contemporary Indonesia and the Philippines

Southeast Asia has had a long history of curtailing press freedom to serve the interests of the state. ‘Post-World War II’ Southeast Asia, where most nations within the region experienced newly-found freedom from Western powers, saw journalists and media outlets generally used as an extension of the State, made to propagate nationalist ideas and ideologies in supporting ‘national unity’ and ‘stability’, as well as to serve the needs of the bureaucratic elite (Lent, 1981). In contemporary Southeast Asia, although strides have been made to improve the situation, state and non-state actors have still used legal mechanisms as well as violence to repress criticism against their respective governments or those within civil society wishing to express different perspectives from the nation-state’s cultural norms (Chaipipat, 2013).

Two Southeast Asian countries, Indonesia and the Philippines, share a similar environment, both past and present, in their respective journalistic landscapes. Reporters Without Borders ranks Indonesia at 117 of 180 on the World Press Index for 2022, arguing that most journalists resort to self-censorship to avoid various forms of intimidation by police or soldiers, or when they affect the private interests of the ten or so media conglomerates that dominate the mainstream media market (Reporters Without Borders [RSF], 2022a). The Philippines sits at 147, where much turmoil in media freedom owes to former president Rodigro Duterte’s six-year nearly-authoritarian tenure and the current transitional period to Ferdinand Marcos Jr., son of former Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos Sr., illustrating a period of terror for journalists in fear of a similar cycle of imprisonment and bodily harm in going against the state (Reporters Without Borders [RSF], 2022b).

On a global scale, social media has proliferated the spread and demand for news in an increasingly interconnected society between journalists and ordinary people, working collaboratively to share information (Van der Haak, Parks & Castells, 2012). Social media has given an alternative path for both professional and citizen journalists to give voice to perspectives that may be absent from the mainstream narrative, propagated by politically-aligned private broadcasters as well as state-sponsored broadcasters (see Mourão & Harlow, 2020; Park, 2017; Powers & Vera-Zambrano, 2017).

This essay will thus explore the extent to which social media has transformed the journalistic landscape in contemporary Indonesia and the Philippines by offering an alternative to state narratives. This essay argues that by examining the case of Indonesia’s ‘Free West Papua’ movement and the Philippines’ Rapper digital news outlet, social media does provide a platform for alternatives to the state narrative, however its success is limited and fails to usher major changes to the status quo, with its effectiveness constrained in that it still follows socio-cultural norms.

Theoretical Framework

It is important to revisit Hallin and Mancini’s (2011) theoretical framework of media systems, specifically of those outside the Western world, as a key point of contestation within the Indonesian and Philippine contexts.

As Hallin and Mancini (2011) discuss, their criterion of ‘the role of the state’ was initially intended to describe state involvement that serves public interest or in supporting an inclusive media market, another criterion in their framework. However, it falls short of considering how in other instances the media can be closely intertwined with the state and state actors, serving the business and political elite, in a coercive manner, which is characteristic of newer democracies (Hallin & Mancini, 2011). This is particularly true with Indonesia and the Philippines. Southeast Asian journalists work in an environment with journalistic roles and paradigms “that are quite different from those in the West or much of the Global North, rooting from authoritarian and semi-authoritarian governments and controlled media systems” (Estella, 2020, p. 26).

Considering the close relationship between the state and the media, it is then significant to evaluate not only how, but also the extent to which social media provides a voice that is ‘divergent’ from the mainstream narrative produced by the political elite of nation-states such as Indonesia and the Philippines.

Indonesia and the ‘Free West Papua’ Movement

The relationship between social media and Indonesia’s journalistic landscape is evident in the case of the ‘Free West Papua’ movement. Since its political integration with Indonesia in 1969, West Papua has undergone countless human rights abuses and political suppression, with the vast majority of those not reaching the rest of the Indonesian population due to West Papua’s repressive media landscape (Titifanue et al., 2020). Robie (2020) argues that the Indonesian government are persistent in keeping foreign media out of West Papua, mostly due in part to the belief that East Timor’s independence from Indonesia in 2002 was prompted by widespread regional and international coverage by both local and foreign press. Toward the end of 2019, the crackdown on local press saw police prevent three journalists, working for both local West Papuan media as well as The Jakarta Post – a daily English-language newspaper based in Jakarta – from reporting on student protests against military oppression (Robie, 2020). Traditional pathways to the West Papuan media landscape are thus, to a certain extent, repressed.

With the historical absence of a reliable regional media system, citizen journalism has taken prominence through social media, as Macleod (2016) notes that the 1998 attack by Indonesian military personnel in West Papua, in comparison to the relatively recent attacks in 2010 and 2011, news has for the first time been able to spread in real-time through citizen participatory journalism, both within West Papua as well as elsewhere in Indonesia. Twitter has become a crucial platform for West Papuans to contest the state narrative, yet it also gives space for pro-government actors to do the same (Titifanue et al., 2020). The ‘Free West Papua’ movement utilises hashtags such as but not limited to #freewestpapua, #merdeka, #letwestpapuadevelop, and #globalflagraising to organise the flow of information, effectively articulating these issues to a wider regional and even international audience (Titifanue et al., 2020). However, an investigation found that the Indonesian police force has used ‘bots’ – automated fake accounts – to promote pro-government rhetoric, reappropriating these hashtags to drown out and villanise pro-independence tweets (Pacific Media Watch, 2019). In this context, Twitter becomes a double-edged sword.

The issue with the West Papua case then returns to the question of how effective social media is in presenting and propagating an alternate perspective, or more specifically, the effectiveness for social media activism. Lim (2013) found that within the Indonesian context, a case such as ‘Free West Papua’ is less likely to succeed. The success of social media activism in Indonesia depends on mimicking closely the narratives and symbols dominant in contemporary pop culture and adhering to the principles of the contemporary culture of consumption: light, sensational and marketable (Lim, 2013). It cannot succeed if it contains “high-risk action” and “ideologies that challenge the dominant meta-narratives, such as nationalism and religiosity in Indonesia”, especially if it is also contested “by powerful competing narratives endorsed in mainstream media” (Lim, 2013, p. 653). This criteria of non-success are precisely what Titifanue et al. (2020) argue the ‘Free West Papua’ movement embodies; creating the necessary environment to nurture ‘bottom-up regionalism’ and a sense of regional consciousness. The stagnation, or rather lack of progress, of any tangible impact toward the ‘Free West Papua’ movement shows that although social media has presented a new opportunity to spread and seek out information that is otherwise not shown in mainstream media, adversarial forces are too strong for actors on social media to contest the mainstream narrative.

The Philippines: Rappler a Voice Against Authoritarianism

Rappler, a leading digital news outlet from the Philippines, is symbolic of the struggle of ordinary Philippine citizens in a repressive media landscape, where social media is at the core of how they operate. As vocal critics of former President Duterte’s regime, they, alongside major TV broadcaster ABS-CBN and the English-language newspaper the Philippine Daily Inquirer, were subject to public attacks by Duterte in 2016 (Hepworth, 2018). Maria Ressa, CEO and co-founder, says that the foundations of Rappler since its inception in 2012 was to combine investigative journalism and technology “to build communities of action”, realising “that the world had changed, that Filipinos were young and we wanted to use the technology to come to them” (as cited in Nieman Reports, 2020, p. 2). She argues that “an atom

bomb has gone off in our information ecosystem”, explaining how Duterte’s war against journalists and journalism threatens to rewrite Philippine history and create their own state narrative (Ressa, as cited in Nieman Reports, 2020, p. 3). As Ressa was featured as Time Magazine’s 2018 Person of the Year, in their editorial they described the situation well: “the news site turned into a global bellwether for free, accurate information at the vortex of two malign forces: one was the angry populism of an elected President with authoritarian inclinations, Rodrigo Duterte; the other was social media” (Vick, 2020, para. 1). Facebook has become the country’s leading social media platform, used by everyone ranging from members of the public to journalists to government officials, in which case Duterte and his administration have arguably authoritarian control over the space (Ressa, 2019). According to a Pew Research Center (2015) report, despite only 42% of the Philippine population has access to the Internet, nearly all of them at 93% use social media, the highest of the 32 countries surveyed. As an effect, Rappler also aims to become a platform for civic activism. As Walls (2015) found, an initiative by Rappler, a website called Move.ph, “allows activists to try to engage with others to build movements for social change” (para. 12), creating a system conducive to citizen journalism to tell stories without state censorship. Social media has become a crucial tool for any actors wishing to influence public opinion.

Journalists and editorial rooms have the ability to influence public opinion and instigate change, a notion not lost by Duterte and the political elite. Lorenzana (2021) found that the Philippines’ political elite are able to reconfigure and control the narrative of scandals and gain public support, whereas the affordances of social media can also be used to “intensify the consequences of public condemnation such as stigmatisation and disassociation” (p. 48). As Ragragio (2022) argues, Philippine news media can take political positions depending on their political alignment, creating the potential for populist ideology. Under too much threat, the normalisation of uncritical and pro-government voices reinforces ideas of the abuse of positions of privilege and social discrimination (Lorenzana, 2021; Ragragio, 2022). Duterte’s relatively recent attacks on Rappler, ABS-CBN and the Inquirer are indicative of a pattern analysed by Aguilar et al. (2014). Between 1998 to 2012, the death and murder of journalists had their coverage of politics and corruption in common, being caught as a political chess piece between the state government

and local, regional governments (Aguilar et al., 2014). Although the nature of ‘punishment’ has differed, political commentators were, are and always will be under threat of attack, regardless of the medium of news reportage.

Recurring Patterns in Southeast Asia

In both the Indonesian and Philippine contexts, a common theme emerges: platform convergence and the power that states yield. Platform convergence and the ‘convergence era’ refer to how new media technologies, such as social media, drive the media industry towards the interconnection of these technologies’ multi-platform accessibility of media content (Jenkins, 2006). However, it is more appropriate to use Tapsell’s (2015) framework of platform convergence, in which media companies that specialised in one platform such as print or TV are now “forming larger, multi-platform media conglomerates […] to create multi-platform news services” (p. 183). We return to the critique on Hallin and Mancini’s (2011) media systems. The role of the state in the governance of their respective media systems is not to promote a capitalistic definition of a competitive journalistic environment as Hallin and Mancini (2011) may suggest, but rather to uphold ideologies and state narratives of these so-called transitional democracies. Moreover, there is the competing element between the state and news outlets on social media that should also be considered. Flew and Waisbord (2015) argues the role of the state in Internet policies present an appropriate criteria to measure the value of media systems. States retain their control in shaping the legal boundaries of media systems, ‘nationalising’ the digital space and creating a case of digital sovereignty (Flew & Waisbord, 2015). As with legacy media, especially within the context of Indonesia and the Philippines, those that are seen as favourable by the government are those who will benefit the most within the journalistic landscape. However simultaneously, the ways in which it occurs are different in the two nation-states.

Despite the apparent state control over the West Papua narrative in Indonesia, Tapsell (2015) argues that through platform convergence, the kind of social media activism present in West Papua is indicative of a wider push towards civic engagement on social media. It is aligned with Lim’s (2013) argument where news that stray too far from societal norms are less likely to succeed within the broader national media landscape. However, Tapsell (2015) continues in explaining that through the ‘commenting’ process on social media platforms, it produces more ‘accountable’ commentary in the mainstream press, which simultaneously also demonstrates the public’s willingness for their opinions to be heard non-anonymously. Since the end of the authoritarian New Order regime in 1998, Indonesians have actively participated online, in which case media companies that successfully integrate with the use of social media and allows greater freedom of expression may be the most effective in competing within a capitalistic market (Tapsell, 2015). Social media has thus complicated matters of state narratives, either directly from the state or through media conglomerates with political incentives, yet to a limited extent.

The Philippine is somewhat similar in that state actors play a strong influence in what appears in mainstream news (Lorenzana, 2021; Ragragio, 2022). However, professional and citizen journalists are much more intertwined than in Indonesia, as seen through the back-and-forth engagement between Rappler and their audience. As David et al. (2019) found, social media teams are closely involved with the news making process, in the sense that they are able to guide how and which news stories are spread on social media with a specifc focus on audience influence, as compared to the more traditional marketing role that social media teams occupy in only using social media as an extension of the news outlet. Twitter and Facebook make much of the Philippine readership, which in this case social media teams relay to the editorial board what topics are being discussed online (David et al., 2019). However, the line for social media activism and the new roles journalists may play stops there. Unlike the Indonesian media landscape with albeit some self-censorship and restrictions, the Philippine context is much more constrained. Where Indonesian authorities coopt more subtle coercive and intimidation measures, the Philippines government and Duterte specifically, as seen with the Rappler case, publicly denounces major news platforms such as ABS-CBN and the Inquirer, creating and normalising a more hostile press and news environment.

Conclusion

Despite historical differences with their media systems and how they materialise in the contemporary era, the Indonesian and Philippine contexts share in common the potentials of social media to promote different perspectives to that of the state narrative, yet the same affordances also allow state actors to do the same. In both the ‘Free West Papua’ movement and the Rappler case, ordinary citizens have taken upon themselves to spread, share and access news that are not filtered through state apparatuses. However, this potential for activism ultimately fails due to unrelenting confrontations with the state, a power which has the capacity and, to an extent, the credibility to influence public opinion.

The implications of this essay show a recurring pattern in Southeast Asian countries, in which social media is rapidly adopted by non-state actors for a variety of purposes, from information to entertainment, but without governments that support this level of citizen agency and government criticism. A comparative study of Indonesia and the Philippines on how social media has changed the journalistic landscape answers the ‘Southeast Asian pattern’ question, however, the comparative nature limits the depth needed to effectively evaluate the journalistic landscape, both past and present, of the two countries individually. Scholarly literature on contemporary Philippine digital journalism and social activism is also very limited, thus constraining the arguments of this essay to existing literature. More research should be done on other cases that involve social media and journalism in Indonesia and the Philippines, as well as comparing with other neighbouring countries across maritime Southeast Asia.

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Originally submitted as coursework for the Bachelor of Arts, University of Melbourne