Emotionally charged or politically rational? The preferences of digital users for the presidential candidates

Adaptations of political actors and organizations in Asian democratic countries to the media and social media logics have been increasingly visible. This article is specified to answer the following questions of how Indonesian political parties’ leaders and presidential candidates after 2004 Indonesian presidential election adapted to the news and social media logics and what drove such adaptations. Focusing on such questions, this article adopts theoretical models of mediatisation of politics formulated by Mazzoleni and Schulz, Strömbäck and Stromback and Van Aelts and extracts in-depth interview data derived from six Indonesian political parties’ leaders, two political consultants and six senior journalists associated with Indonesian media using the qualitative content and thematic analyses. The findings are as follows. These political parties’ leaders and presidential candidates favoured adapting to the news and social media logics when they got to deal with political issues and affairs, formulate political policies and secure their personal images in Indonesian political sphere. Such development was driven by the following factors, including establishing democratic political and media systems, increasing the roles of the media as sources of political information, escalating freedoms of Indonesian media and journalists to manage the media logic. Theoretical implications are chronicled and research recommendations are displayed.

Rationality (Online Discussions/Discussion Quality)

The phenomenon of the power of figures as a voter getter in democracy impacts the selection of candidates who will be nominated in the general election contest. Candidate pairs are not seen based on their abilities, but rather on how the candidates can win the general election. The use of figures as a means of attracting voters can be seen from the nomination of presidential and vice presidential candidate pairs in the 2024 presidential election. Two of the three candidate pairs have brought together figures from Nahdlatul Ulama as candidate pairs as a winning strategy. In the discipline of socio-political science, a person's voting behavior in a general election is not just a five-yearly activity; there are reasons and backgrounds as to why someone chooses a particular pair. This study aims to analyze more specifically the influence of Islamic boarding school identification on the choice of presidential and vice presidential candidates based on religion. This study uses a survey method with a correlational approach. The subjects in this study were students of the Al-Amien Islamic boarding school with a sample size of 207 students. The results of the analysis show that Islamic boarding school identification has a significant influence on voting behavior. However, the magnitude of the contribution of santri identification is relatively weak, reflected in the regression coefficient of 0.07, while the rational consideration variable, which includes the evaluation of the vision, mission, programs, and track records of the candidates, is proven to have a more substantial influence, with a regression coefficient reaching 0.43. Based on these findings, it can be concluded that although santri identification contributes to santri political preferences, rational considerations play a more dominant role in their decision-making process.

Introduction: The mainstream media used political and media logic on religious populism to reinforce ideological changes in contemporary society. This study investigated how media mediatize the 212 rally (aksi 212) and the 2017 Jakarta Governorial Election as religious populism cases. This study also compared how media in Indonesia and India delivered the content based on the majority identity.Methods: This study applied a qualitative approach. Detik.com, Metro TV, and Republika Daily were selected based on their delivery content platform and media ownership. The qualitative content analysis was applied to explore the concepts of political and media logic. Then, the results of Islamic populism in Indonesia were compared with Hindu populism in India.Findings: This study found that the three media mediatized aksi 212 and the 2017 Jakarta Governorial Election as religious populism by using direct interaction. Detik.com was applying media logic while Metro TV and Republika Daily performed political logic. In comparing religious populism between Indonesia and India, the finding confirmed that populism came from a major identity. The finding showed that economic motivation could be escalated in parallel with religious identity. Originality: This study become a novelty since no previous studies investigate the different delivery content platforms and the media ownership including comparing the mediatization process between two countries. Previous studies focused on the media concentration based on media ownership, platform, media landscape, and media policy without a mediatization process and religious populism. The previous studies of the mediatization of religious populism were conducted in a single case.

This article discusses hate speech on Facebook from two groups of supporters for the presidential candidates in the 2019 Presidential Election in Indonesia. The study used a virtual ethnography approach to analyze cultural groups or communities through their conversations on the Facebook platform. Data collection was conducted by observing and collecting words, phrases, and sentences in the Official Facebook account of two presidential candidates in the 2019 Presidential Election and statements of both presidential and vice-presidential candidates in 2019. In addition, researchers also observed three voluntary group accounts for each candidate. Therefore, the total number of accounts observed was eight. Data was analysed with Nvivo 12+ to obtain statistics on the strength of the chosen speech word and the dominant phrase or word that appears. The result shows that specific phrases or terms to intimidate each supporter of both parties in massive numbers appeared in the form of hate speech during the campaign. The purpose of the hate speech is to insult/humiliate, intimidate or accuse others of doing something inappropriate or evil (accusation which involves sarcasm and foul language directed to the opponent. Candidates also provoked each other by accusing the other party of being stupid, disgusting, pathetic, ugly, and retarded. The implication was that hate speech has disunited the public on the social media space. Accusing and attaching bad characters to other groups through hate speech has strengthened inter-group stereotypes and formed an unhealthy democratic climate. Keywords: Provocation, hate speech, verbal message, virtual ethnography, communication.

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) attract thousands of participants who each exercise autonomy by engaging with resources and with other participants to whatever degree they wish. When analyzing participants’ patterns of engagement in MOOCs it is possible to notice that certain participants exhibit high levels of participation, actively engaging with others in forums. This study focuses on characterizing these highly active participants, and understanding their contributions back to the network in a MOOC designed for teachers’ professional development. Connectivism is used as theoretical lens to describe super-posters’ engagement in forums. Data from participants’ demographics, click-data, and forum posts are used to identify these highly active users. Qualitative content analysis is used to categorize the content of their posts, and social network analysis is used to represent their patterns of engagement. Results show that super-posters are generators of engagement, repurposing the content learned from the MOOC and feeding-forward new resources to the network. Super-posters can be seen as representatives of participation inequality in forums. They position themselves as the most prestigious and most influential nodes in the networks created by participants as they engage in forums. In some networks super-posters served as bridges, connecting people from different discussion threads and helping information to flow through the network. This study provides to MOOC designers and MOOC instructors an affordable method to identify and classify super-posters in any MOOC. Findings of this study could be used by MOOC designers and MOOC instructors to develop pedagogical interventions to give these participants a special role in the next MOOC cohort, which may foster engagement in MOOC forums and nurture the cyclical process of learning described in Connectivism. Regarding implications for research, this study attends the need for qualitative methods when analyzing participants’ engagement in MOOC forums and contributes to our knowledge of participation inequality. It also extends the literature of super-posters by showing their characterization in a MOOC focused on teachers’ professional development.

GENE: Graph generation conditioned on named entities for polarity and controversy detection in social media

This study examines the intersection of sentiment discourse in news texts and user comments on Facebook Detikcom, focusing on government policies during the Covid-19 pandemic. The research explores institutional discourse in news articles that align with government narratives, while user comments reflect a spectrum of responses, from support to opposition. Using qualitative content analysis, this study applies critical discourse analysis (CDA) and sentiment analysis to examine linguistic strategies, ideological framing, and sentiment polarity. The data were taken from news texts and the comment section on Facebook Detikcom, collected through documentation and following several stages of observation, careful reading, selection, and classification. The findings show that social media transforms news consumption into a participatory discourse. This indicates that traditional narratives are challenged and reinterpreted by users. Sentiment clustering and engagement metrics further shape the visibility and influence of competing ideologies. This study contributes to digital discourse research by demonstrating that sentiment functions as an ideological tool in crisis communication. The analysis also highlights the evolving role of social media in public discourse and emphasizes the need for critical engagement with online news narratives and user-generated content.

This study aims to reveal the difference between opinions of individuals who do sports at home by watching videos on YouTube, which gained popularity all over the world before and during the pandemic. In order to examine the change in subject of "sports at home" before and during the pandemic, the most watched "exercise" themed video titled "Do This Everyday to Lose Weight" was selected as data source and user comments were categorized thematically. To analyze data set, Mozdeh Big Data Text Analysis (2020) was used to collect user comments from videos and the number of interactions of these comments via API connection. Qualitative content analysis was used to analyze user comments. The themes were categorized as feedback as a result of regular participation, feedback to content creator, body image anxiety, being happy with body changes, insights focused on weight loss, motivation, challenge and struggle, barriers to participation, flow experience, health status reporting, leisure and enjoyment. It was determined that especially the groups of challenging and struggling, use of leisure time, enjoyment were the themes that received more interaction.

The odds in stumbling over extremist material in the internet are high. Counter speech videos, such as those of the German campaign Begriffswelten Islam (Concepts of Islam; Bundeszentrale fur politische Bildung, 2015a) published on YouTube, offer alternative perspectives and democratic ideas to counteract extremist content. YouTube users may discuss these videos in the comment sections below the video. Yet, it remains open which topics these users bring up in their comments. Moreover, it is unknown how far user comments in this context may promote hate speech—the very opposite of what counter speeches intent to evoke. By applying a qualitative content analysis on a randomly selected sample of user comments, which appeared beneath the counter speech videos of Concepts of Islam , we found that comments dominated, which dealt with devaluating prejudices and stereotypes towards Muslims and/or Islam. However, we also discovered that users in a large scale discussed the content of the videos. Moreover, we identified user comments, which hint at hateful speech either in comments themselves or the discourse the comments are embedded in. Based on these results, we discuss implications for researchers, practitioners and security agencies.

In January 2024, the high-profile Danish literature critic and postfeminist influencer Katherine Diez was scandalised when users on Reddit exposed that she had plagiarised in some of her posts on Instagram and in some of her cultural reviews and columns produced for magazines and news media. In this article, we analyse the unfolding of the scandal across media through a qualitative thematic analysis of the intermingling of three types of media content: news articles, user comments on Reddit, and user comments on Instagram. We argue that two logics – the logic of influencers and the logic of news media – worked together to create an authenticity scandal, compromising not only the main component of the persona construction in influencer culture – that is, the performance of authenticity – but also the foundation of the news media logic – that is, trustworthiness, truth, and fact-checking.

ONE MIGHT THINK because Regulation W had expired that it is a dead issue and that further consideration of it is academic. That is not the case. When advocacy of consumer credit regulation is expressed by a presidential candidate, as it was by Governor Stevenson, and when many economists and bankers indorse this form of selective credit control, as was indicated in replies to a Congressional Subcommittee on General Credit Control and Debt Management, this is ample evidence that while the regulation itself may have expired the thinking which would reinstate it is but dormant. A discussion of direct regulation of consumer credit today, however, need not be the same as it was ten years ago. Then it seemed plausible that restrictions upon credit buying by consumers would lessen demand, check price rises, and even counteract cyclical tendencies. Having meanwhile seen that those ends were not accomplished by it, and having learned more about such credit than was previously known, we are in a position today to appraise regulatory theories in the light of experience and facts. Behind the reasoning that through consumer credit regulation inflation could be curbed and scarce materials diverted to wartime uses were certain basic assumptions: 1. That a consumer's normal purchasing power is increased by his use of credit. 2. That consumers will use all the credit they can get. 3. That general economic activity rises and falls in response to consumer credit buying. 4. That an increase in consumers' use of credit results in an increase in money (demand deposits) in circulation. 5. That in the use of credit consumers are impelled by emotional rather than rational considerations. These assumptions lead to the conclusion that consumer credit can be dealt with like commercial credit or like the supply of money, and that by general and selective credit controls the economy might be expanded or contracted as the need may be. These con-

Explicit civility (Online Discussions/Discussion Quality)

It has been argued that the media ownership is an influential factor determining the content production and performance of the media. However, knowledge about the characteristics of the media ownership and its impacts on the coverage of general election by the media has been less researched. Judging by such developments, this work raises the following question: how did the oligarchic ownership of the Indonesian news television channels determine the ways in which they covered two candidates who ran for president in 2014? By selecting TV One and Metro TV as a case study, this work extracts reports on the ways in which these news TV channels have produced news content related to the 2014 general election using qualitative and thematic content analyses. The findings are as follows: In the 2014 Indonesian presidential election, both TV One and Metro TV failed to comply with the ideal journalistic principles of covering both sides, objective and balanced reporting, as required by the Indonesian Broadcasting Commission, while broadcasting news about the two presidential candidates. Instead, the television stations preferred to broadcast the polarized news coverage of the presidential candidates. TV One appeared to show more support for the Prabowo-Hatta Rajasa presidential candidate pair, while Metro TV favoured the Joko Widodo-Jusuf Kalla presidential candidate pair. This suggests that oligarchic media ownership strongly influenced the content production and performance of these news TV channels. They were used by oligarchs who have the media company to convey their personal political agendas in the hope that it will influence, or even set, the public’s agenda.

The rapid expansion of digital media has reshaped political communication in Indonesia, creating fragmented pathways through which issues diffuse across mainstream and participatory platforms. Despite this transformation, limited research has examined how public debates surrounding major government programs spread within hybrid media systems or what mechanisms determine issue centrality. This study addresses that gap by analyzing discourse dynamics related to Free Nutritious Meals (MBG) and Danantara. Using a sequential explanatory mixed-methods design, the study first mapped structural patterns quantitatively and then deepened interpretation through qualitative analysis. The dataset comprised 1,696 online news articles, 363 YouTube videos, more than 26 million user comments, and survey responses from 620 participants, offering a comprehensive representation of Indonesia’s digital discourse landscape. Structural Topic Modeling (STM) was used to identify dominant issues, while Social Network Analysis with QAP and MRQAP assessed co-occurrence patterns. Engagement metrics captured audience polarization, and thematic plus Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) examined contrasts between institutional and participatory framing. Findings reveal that issue frequency—not semantic similarity—is the strongest predictor of diffusion. High-frequency issues consistently emerged as hubs in discourse networks. Mainstream media largely legitimized policy through socio-economic frames, whereas YouTube channels amplified criticism, satire, and counter-narratives, reflecting sharp audience polarization. Qualitative analysis reinforced these divergences, demonstrating how institutional and participatory media construct competing interpretations of the same policies. The integrated findings produced a conceptual model—”Frequency-Driven Co-occurrence”—which explains how mention intensity drives issue centrality and narrative evolution. The model advances agenda-setting and framing theories by shifting emphasis from semantic similarity to issue salience as the primary diffusion mechanism in hybrid media environments. Practical implications highlight the need for transparency, stronger digital literacy, and collaboration with credible influencers to reduce polarization, while future research should examine longitudinal trajectories, algorithmic amplification, and affective dynamics in digital discourse.