Cyber Bullying Against Indonesian Muslim Leaders Through Social Media

Abstract

The development of social media in Indonesia today enters a new phase. Social media is no longer used to obtain and disseminate information or entertainment, but it is also used to attack someone’s personality. Through slander and hoax information, character assassination is carried out on individuals. This study seeks to portray the negative effects of social media, especially related to cyber violence, character assassination through cyberbullying. This study focuses on cyberbullying of Muslim leaders (ulama) on social media. This abuse can be said as a model of killing new characters towards someone's character in the new public sphere. Through the data of the status, comments, tweets, and memes on Facebook and Twitter, this study found that cyberbullying occurred through social media towards ulama was perpetuated by other Islamic groups, which have different political attitudes and choices. In other words, abuse is the fruit of ideological and political wars, which occur both in the real world and in cyberspace. There is a shift in the Indonesian Muslim community which was previously known to be very respectful to their ulama, and currently they are bold to bully their religious leaders This is a symptom of ambiguity from the conservative turn issue. Norms, traditions, and ethics of the community that shows conservative symptoms, actually show resistance to the values ​​of the conservative community. There are two opposing faces:in one place, these accounts display godliness, but in other places, they show the opposite.