The Battle of SARA Politicization as a Threat to Virtual Public Spaces and Indonesian Cyber- Democracy (Semiotics Analysis on 2019 Presidential Election Campaign Narrative on Twitter between The Incumbent and The Opposite)

Abstract

Currently Indonesia is slowly starting to enter the era of community 5.0 or also called integrative virtual community created by the help of big data technology. This phenomenon then affects all aspects of Indonesian people's lives, such as social, economic, cultural, and so on. Even virtual reality continues to expand in the lives of Indonesian people, because the development of new media makes the political domain come to switch to cyberspace. Not a few social media accounts are used as buzzers, both for upgrading coalition, or downgrading the political opponents. This is very visible in the campaign of the 2019 Presidential Election in Indonesia. That is why this research uses a critical paradigm with Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) from Teun van Dijk to analyze the narratives of the political campaign at the 2019 Presidential Election critically concerning the construction of Indonesian democracy. As a theoretical basis, the author combines the concept of Lebenswelt by Jürgen Habermas and Zwischenraum by Hannah Arendt to develop the meaning of democracy participatory-substantive, which in practice today tends to put more priority on procedural aspects. The results showed that both the incumbent stronghold (Joko Widodo and Ma'ruf Amin), as well as the opposition (Prabowo Subianto and Sandiaga Uno) both use social media to amplify their political campaigns respectively. However, many supporting accounts from each faction actually use attacking campaigns in the form of propaganda, provocation, SARA, and Hoax. Each camp only focuses on mere procedural aspects with the aim to win, without providing good political education and democracy for the people of Indonesia. This then makes Indonesian democracy a thick style plurality, tolerance, and Unity in Diversity actually began to fade. In short, the narratives that were built during the 2019 Presidential Election campaign on Twitter made the public partly divided and certainly greatly threatens substantive democracy in Indonesia.