Paid campaigners are deciding who counts in Indonesia's religious arguments

Online, Indonesia's religious arguments usually look like two blocks facing each other: conservative Muslims on one side, liberal ones on the other. Ary Hermawan, a visiting fellow at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore, argues in Fulcrum that a lot of that neatness is built rather than real. It is built by "buzzers", paid campaigners who post to order in coordinated waves. They first appeared during Jokowi's 2012 run for Jakarta governor and grew through the presidential elections of 2014 and 2019. Their work is not to win an argument but to decide who counts as being in it.

His first example is the 2020 Jobs Creation Law, the big package that loosened labour rules. Muslim groups did not line up the way the timeline said. Progressive networks including Islam Bergerak, the Gusdurian Network and Muhammadiyah's Green Cadres opposed the law, saying it broke Islamic ideas about fair treatment. The hardline group HTI opposed it too, under a hashtag claiming a caliphate would make workers prosperous. Some liberal figures, such as the former activist Saidiman Ahmad, backed the law and framed that position as resistance to oligarchy. Pro-government campaigners then pushed a hashtag tying every critic of the law to radical Islamists, which wrote the progressives out of their own protest.

The second case cost people their jobs. In 2021 dozens of staff at the KPK, the anti-corruption commission, failed a new civics test. Pro-government influencers, several of them around the channel Cokro TV, ran a campaign saying radical Islamists had captured the agency. Muslim organisations and civil society groups from across the spectrum defended the staff with a hashtag of their own, roughly "being honest gets you fired". The staff were dismissed anyway. Hermawan's point is that the online defence never became an offline one, and that religious labels made a straightforward fight about corruption look like somebody else's quarrel.

Why it matters

You scroll past these campaigns every day, and the piece is a guide to reading them: when a hashtag sorts a complicated argument into two camps overnight, that is usually the sign of paid work rather than public opinion. The KPK case shows what it buys, since investigators lost their jobs while the country was busy arguing about who was a radical. The cost falls on anyone who wants a real debate about wages, land or graft, because the religious label arrives first and settles the question before the facts do.