Thai tycoon forms new party

Billionaire hopes to challenge traditional powers through the Future Forward Party (Anakot Mai).

JAKARTA: Indonesia is battling a wave of fake news and online hate speech ahead of presidential elections in 2019, as a string of arrests underscore fears it could crack open social and religious fault lines in the world’s largest Muslim-majority country.

The pluralist nation’s reputation as a bastion of tolerance has been tested in recent months, as conservative groups exploit social media to spread lies and target minorities.

Police have cracked down, rounding up members of the Muslim Cyber Army, a cluster of loosely connected groups accused of using Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to attack the government and stoke religious extremism.

Two of the group’s most high-profile falsehoods were claims that dozens of Islamic clerics had been assaulted by leftists and that Indonesia’s outlawed communist party was on the rise, according to police.

Communism remains a taboo subject in Indonesia, where purges under the Suharto dictatorship in the mid-1960s killed half a million suspected leftists.

Gatot Eddy Pramono, the National Police’s head of social affairs, has said the group wants to destabilise government and “create social conflict”.

Although the South-East Asian nation has seen Internet hoaxes before – including smear campaigns against President Joko Widodo during the 2014 presidential elections – the recent clampdown reflects authorities’ mounting unease about their possible impact on election campaigning.

Indonesia will hold simultaneous regional elections in June, ahead of a presidential ballot in 2019.

Last month, the communications ministry announced it was deploying new software to identify fake news websites, while Widodo – who has battled false Internet claims that he is a communist – inaugurated a new cyber security agency in January.

Indonesia’s problem with Internet hoaxes and misinformation campaigns reached fever pitch in the lead up to elections in Jakarta in late 2016 and early 2017, with incumbent governor Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, nicknamed Ahok, bearing the brunt of it.—