TikTok's influence on Indonesia's 2024 election: From general to “gemoy”

Indonesian held its 13th general elections on February 14, 2024 when the president, legislative members and regional representatives were simultaneously elected. However, the focus of public attention was on the contest for presidential and vice-presidential positions. Holding the elections during the era of social media implied that all candidates used social media to campaign and seek public support. Indonesian people are savvy social media users. The six preferred social media platforms in Indonesia are WhatsApp, 92.1%; Instagram 86.5%; Facebook 83.8%; TikTok 70.8%; Telegram 64.3%, and X60.2% (kompas.com). Indonesia is touted as the country with the most TikTok users in the world, with an estimated 113 million users in April 2023, second only to the United States which has 116.5 million users (katadata.co.id). Incidentally, majority of young Indonesian TikTok users are also of voting age. The 2024 election witnessed the participation of 204.8 million people, 68.8 million people or 33.6% of voters who were born between 1980 and 1996 (rri.co.id). TikTok has many advantages owing to its extremely entertaining nature. Content creators can produce unique and interesting videos assisted by music, filters and special effects. This is a fact well understood by competing candidates and political parties in Indonesia. On TikTok, political campaign messages were not conveyed in a serious and boring way, rather through the power of light messages, jokes, comedy, dancing, and the like. Of the three pairs of competing presidential and vice-presidential candidates, Prabowo Subianto and his running mate Gibran Rakabuming Raka were the most popular on TikTok. Both won the elections. Prabowo (@PrabowoSubianto08) had 726 thousand followers on TikTok while Gibran (@gibran_rakabuming) garnered 3.4 million followers. Their supporters include artists, opinion leaders or influencers who used their own TikTok accounts to create new messages or repost messages for them. The following are the top influencers that threw their support for Prabowo and Gibran. List of top 10 Prabowo-Gibran influencers. In addition to above list, there were still many Prabowo's supporters who have lots of followers with personal accounts expressing their support for him. TikTok influencers turned out to be very effective in targeting young voters. In the 2024 elections, the millennial generation (born 1981−1996) with 68.8 million voters and generation Z (born 1997−2012) with 46.8 million voters, represented the largest percentage of voters (katadata.co.id). Prabowo Subianto, being the minister of defense, was the more popular candidate compared to his rivals. On TikTok he appeared as a jovial, friendly, funny figure that enjoyed dancing. He got the nickname “gemoy,” which means making funny expressions, funny sentences and likes dancing, which made him adorable. Accompanied by fast, rhythmic and melodic music, his videos invite the audience to dance along. Prabowo's impressions on TikTok often became FYP (For Your Page) which in Tiktok means a recommended content because the app thinks the user enjoyed the content a lot. This means Prabowo videos are likely to appear on the homepages of TikTok users. TikTok proves that emotions are powerful (Devito, 2020). On TikTok, sadness can be packaged as an “infectious” entertainment. This is exactly what happened during the first of the three scheduled presidential candidate debates. At that time, Prabowo Subianto received a barrage of probing questions from Anies Baswedan, another presidential candidate that touched on Prabowo past, particularly his ownership of 340,000 hectares of land. The size of land is above normal and inappropriate because more than half of the members of the Indonesian national army do not have homes. It was a fact which Prabowo could not deny (cnnindonesia.com). Another rival presidential candidate, Ganjar Pranowo, highlighted the defense ministry's plan to purchase 12 second-hand fighter planes from Qatar. The plan was decried for posing potential danger to Indonesian army (CNNindonesia.com). The perception of Prabowo supporters was that while allegations made against him had merit, the way they were delivered was tantamount to humiliating and insulting him because he was the oldest presidential aspirant. For Prabowo supporters, the criticisms were disrespectful of an elderly man. Videos of Prabowo's supporters crying began to appear on TikTok. An influencer, Adi Syahputra, made a crying video, dramatizing the debate and saying how evil Prabowo's rivals were (TikTok.com). The video has no texts, just a background sound of a melancholic hit song and with Adi Syahputra projecting how sad he was. The video managed to get 41,000 likes, 5000 comments, became the favorite of more than 2000 users, and was shared more than a thousand times (TikTok.com). A similar video emerged which featured Prabowo's supporters showing their unwillingness and displeasure for having their candidate ridiculed and belittled. On TikTok, their close-up faces were full of tears. Crying is generally a personal expression of sadness but on TikTok, crying has become public and viral. As a result, Prabowo's supporters were criticized as uneducated, having little understanding of politics and were easily misled by opinions of his campaign team that favored entertainment over political education. Prabowo critics also mentioned his sullied human rights records. Aside from being the defense minister of President Joko Widodo, also known as Jokowi, Prabowo is also the son-in-law of President Soeharto who ruled Indonesia for 32 years. He is married to one of Soeharto's daughters. Prabowo is not new to politics. He was the chairman of the Gerindra party, and he ran for vice president and presidential candidacy four times. In 2009, he ran for vice president; in 2014, 2019, and 2024 he ran for president. and he served as General of the Special Forces Command (Kopassus). While it is suspected that Prabowo used his authority as the head of Kopassus to mastermind the kidnapping of democracy activists, he wasn't brought to trial. The younger generation, especially generation Z, may not be knowledgeable about Indonesia's dark history or understood what really happened. In other words, TikTok has contributed to whitewashing Prabowo's tainted past by turning him into a “kind and cool uncle.” Prabowo running mate, the vice-presidential candidate Gibran Rakabuming Raka, also faced public scrutiny for several reasons. First, Gibran is the son of the current president, Jokowi. Second, Gibran, who is 36 years old, actually did not meet the minimum age requirement for a presidential candidate, which is at least 40 years. However, in adjudicating a lawsuit that queried the constitutionality of the provisions in the current general elections law on the minimum age requirement, the Constitutional Court (M. K.) ironically added a clause that in effect allowed candidates under 40 years of age on condition to run if they have held positions obtained through elections, including as the regional head of elections (aljazeera.com). The clause in effect paved the way for Gibran to fulfill the requirement to register as vice-presidential candidate. Gibran had only served as the town mayor of Solo for 2 years. The outcome of the lawsuit caused further controversy because the chief justice of M. K. at the time was Jokowi's brother-in-law or Gibran's uncle. Unsurprisingly, the MK's decision that cleared the way for Gibran to run as vice presidential candidate brought to the fore the issue of dynastic politics that Al Jazeera dubbed the “nepo (short for nepotism) baby” problem. (aljazeera.com) Thus, President Jokowi's impartiality during the elections was an issue because of his son is running as vice president. Studies show that TikTok has been used to campaign for either political parties, presidential candidates, members of parliament, or senate in other countries (Cervi, 2023; Cervi et al., 2021; Chen, 2022; Pradana et al., 2023). Europe is also in a dilemma over TikTok. On the one hand, the European Union is investigating TikTok and various other social media. On the other hand, politicians are using social media to campaign. During the 2024 elections in Europe, the EU is not only investigating TikTok, but also Facebook and Instagram under the Digital Services Act (kompas.id). That said, during the 2024 presidential elections in Indonesia, TikTok succeeded in becoming a powerful medium for winning a seat. Behind a victory is a record of TikTok's participation (Pradana et al., 2023). This reality is similar to the elections in the Philippines where Ferdinand Marcos Jr., the son of the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos, won through the power of networked disinformation in which Tiktok is among the social media platforms used. There is little doubt that the victory of Bongbong Marcos in the Philippines as that of Prabowo in Indonesia is inextricably linked with the way they leveraged TikTok during the elections (Gaw & Arugay, 2024; Mendoza, 2022; Sabalboro Ampon & Salathong, 2023). aljazeera.com. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/12/23/indonesian-leaders-son-brushes-off-nepo-baby-tag-in-solid-debate-showing bbc.com. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-68867732 cnnindonesia.com. https://www.cnnindonesia.com/ekonomi/20240108065321-92-1046536/melihat-pernyataan-jokowi-soal-tanah-Prabowo-yang-diungkit-anies indonesiabaik.id. https://indonesiabaik.id/infografis/hasil-rekapitulasi-pemilu-2024 kpu.go.id. https://www.kpu.go.id/page/read/12/pemilu-dalam-sejarah katadata.co.id. https://databoks.katadata.co.id/datapublish/2023/09/27/kelompok-anak-muda-jadi-pengguna-terbesar-TikTok-usia-berapa-mereka katadata.co.id. https://databoks.katadata.co.id/datapublish/2023/07/05/kpu-pemilih-pemilu-2024-didominasi-oleh-kelompok-gen-z-dan-milenial kompas.com. https://tekno.kompas.com/read/2023/02/14/10300097/15-medsos-favorit-orang-indonesia-nomor-1-bukan-instagram) kompas.com. https://www.kompas.com/tren/read/2024/02/04/150000865/daftar-artis-dan-influencer-yang-diklaim-dukung-prabowo-gibran kompas.id. https://www.kompas.id/baca/english/2024/05/01/menakar-dampak-medsos-di-pemilu-eropa?open_from=Translator_Mark tempo.co. https://pemilu.tempo.co/read/1808154/catatan-hitam-Prabowo-Subianto-soal-pelanggaran-ham-dianggap-sudah-kadaluwarsa?page_num=2 TikTok.com. https://www.TikTok.com/@adi.syahreza/video/7322016030375578885?q=adi%20syahresa%20menangis%20Prabowo&t=1716685548652 TikTok.com. https://www.TikTok.com/safety/en/election-integrity/ viva.co.id. https://www.viva.co.id/showbiz/gosip/1685233-deretan-artis-dan-influencer-dukung-Prabowo-gibran-di-pilpres-2024?page=2

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