Bawaslu Encourages Multi-stakeholder Collaboration in Regions for the 2024 Regional Elections

Expert from the Indonesian General Election Supervisory Agency (Bawaslu) Division of Prevention, Community Participation, and Public Relations, Ronald Monoach, encouraged Bawaslu in the regions to form multi-stakeholder collaborations with civil society organizations and digital platforms to prevent and deal with disinformation in the 2024 Simultaneous Regional Head Elections (Pilkada). . Multi-stakeholder collaboration has been built by Bawaslu RI in the 2024 elections, and this model is considered effective in dealing with election disinformation.

“Bawaslu encourages provincial and district/city Bawaslu to collaborate to maximize prebunking and debunking so that the problem of disinformation does not become a trigger for conflict. In several areas of the 2020 regional election experience, there was chaos due to the circulation of hoaxes on Facebook. “In Yalimo, for example, it was PSU (re-voting) up to three times,” said Ronald at the discussion “Ensuring Information Openness and Handling Disinformation in the 2024 Simultaneous Regional Elections” in Jakarta (29/5).

Ronald explained that Bawaslu RI and Meta had created community standards based on the Election Law. Bawaslu recognized community standards and collaboration with Meta as helping in monitoring and cracking down on election disinformation content.

“That really helped us, because when Bawaslu lacked a cyber team, our platform was encouraged to take responsibility. “That was very helpful in dealing with yesterday’s disinformation,” he said.

Bawaslu is also collaborating with the Ministry of Communication and Informatics (Kominfo) and the National Cyber and Crypto Agency (BSSN) to carry out digital patrols in the 2024 election. Collaboration with many parties is expected to be initiated by regional Bawaslu for the 2024 regional election. The Command Center being built by Bawaslu RI is aimed at being able to mitigate information, disinformation, and malinformation that could potentially emerge during the regional elections. []