Cyberbullying on Social Media in Indonesia and Its Legal Impact: Analysis of Language Use in Ethnicity, Religious, Racial, and Primordial Issues

Abstract

This study aims to reveal the phenomenon of cyberbullying in Indonesia targeted group of people and its legal impact based on pragmatics analysis. It mainly focused on issues that are related with ethnicity, religion, race, and intergroup on social media activities. The lingual data are the expressions by defendants on social media. They were collected from the copies of six court verdicts for such cases that have been settled between 2018 and 2020. The study employed a qualitative method with a forensic linguistic approach as a framework to reveal, trace, and show the phenomenon of cyberbullying on social media and the legal impact caused by the action. The results show that cyberbullying on social media in Indonesia not only targets individuals but it also targets certain group of people. Based on the pragmatics analysis, the illocutionary speech acts by defendants includes expressive, directive, assertive, and commissive. The utterances of cyberbullying aim to insult, humiliate, harass, slander, threaten/warn, accuse, and spread hatred on certain groups of community based on Ethnicity, Religious, Racial, and Primordial issues. The legal implication of cyberbullying is that the defendants can be charged based on the Law of the Republic of Indonesia, Article 28 paragraph (2) in conjunction with Article 45A paragraph (2) Law Number 19 of 2016 on Information and Electronic Transactions.