![]() Like old friends, support for Russia remains among Indonesians, explained Arief Setiawan, a lecturer in international relations at Brawijaya University in Indonesia, and for some of the same reasons as in the 1950s, including Indonesians’ dislike for “US hegemony”. Moscow’s intervention led the Dutch to eventually give up their claim. The Soviet Union backed the newly independent Indonesia – politically and militarily – in its dispute with former colonial power the Netherlands over the province of Irian Jaya (now West Papua) in the early 1960s. “Russia, as the successor of the Soviet Union is considered as this kind of anti-imperial and anti-colonial power,” Dharmaputra told Al Jazeera, which adds another dimension to local support for Putin and antipathy towards the West. The US and its allies also invaded Afghanistan and Iraq.Īnd there is also the power of nostalgia. Indonesian audiences have also not missed the contradictions in the West’s response to the invasion of Ukraine, which contrasts starkly with its neglect for Palestinians suffering under occupying Israeli forces. ![]() Particular themes shine through on social media, Dharmaputra notes, including a “solid anti-Western narrative” that traces a line back to Indonesia’s independence movement against Western colonial powers and up to the anti-Muslim sentiment of the United States’ so-called “war on terror” following the Septemattacks. Russian President Vladimir Putin and defence minister Sergei Shoigu ride a boat during a hunting and fishing trip in 2017 “Indonesians have a tendency to trust, not more authoritarian, but more like a strong leader, someone that can be very assertive against foreign countries,” he told Al Jazeera. Putin’s hyper-masculine militarised image chimes with Indonesian political culture and its history of uniformed strongmen rulers, Dharmaputra says, noting that while public sentiment is mixed regarding Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, there is a loud and active pro-Russian minority on Indonesian social media.įor Putin’s social media supporters, Russia is seen as a noble anti-Western power challenging the hegemony of a hypocritical West, he says. “The popularity of Vladimir Putin in Indonesia is something quite striking,” said Radityo Dharmaputra, a lecturer in Russian and Eastern European Studies at Indonesia’s Universitas Airlangga. In Southeast Asia, a region dominated for decades by “strongman” political leaders and where nostalgia for the Soviet Union persists in some quarters, Russian President Vladimir Putin has a strong following among social media users who are sympathetic to his invasion of Ukraine and find his macho self-image appealing. There has been growing concern about the role social media plays in political polarization.While the West has united in condemnation of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, opinions differ markedly in parts of the developing world where Russia is not reviled but revered for what some see as its stance against the West and its hypocrisies. We investigated whether out-group animosity was particularly successful at generating engagement on two of the largest social media platforms: Facebook and Twitter. Analyzing posts from news media accounts and US congressional members ( n = 2,730,215), we found that posts about the political out-group were shared or retweeted about twice as often as posts about the in-group. Each individual term referring to the political out-group increased the odds of a social media post being shared by 67%. ![]() Out-group language consistently emerged as the strongest predictor of shares and retweets: the average effect size of out-group language was about 4.8 times as strong as that of negative affect language and about 6.7 times as strong as that of moral-emotional language-both established predictors of social media engagement. Language about the out-group was a very strong predictor of “angry” reactions (the most popular reactions across all datasets), and language about the in-group was a strong predictor of “love” reactions, reflecting in-group favoritism and out-group derogation. ![]() This out-group effect was not moderated by political orientation or social media platform, but stronger effects were found among political leaders than among news media accounts. In sum, out-group language is the strongest predictor of social media engagement across all relevant predictors measured, suggesting that social media may be creating perverse incentives for content expressing out-group animosity.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |