JAKARTA (Jakarta Post/ANN): As Twitter imposes more limits on its users' activity, experts say the social media platform will become a less reliable source of information and more susceptible to polarization ahead of Indonesia’s general election next year.
In the past week, Twitter users around the world thought the social media platform had gone down for a while. But as it turned out, a new rule was put in place to limit their activity, courtesy of Twitter’s owner Elon Musk.
Musk placed a limit on Saturday such that unverified users could only read 600 posts a day, while verified users, who pay for Twitter’s premium subscription, could read 6,000 posts.
Bandung-based copywriter Kenny Andriana is among the users affected by the viewing limit. Kenny was scrolling through the app casually last Saturday when he noticed he could not see any posts.
“I treat Twitter like a newspaper, I open it every day to look for anything that’s happening in the world,” Kenny told The Jakarta Post on Wednesday, feeling agitated after getting hit by the viewing limit.
The hashtag #RateLimitExceeded and its variations were trending worldwide for several days, gaining thousands of tweets from those experiencing the same thing.
The limit has now been extended to 1,000 posts for unverified users.
“A fear set in that day. Election year is coming and Twitter is the platform that many people use. What are we going to do?’” he said.
Ardyan M. Erlangga, a journalist who lives abroad, also felt the viewing rate limit impact from Sunday to Monday, lamenting the effect it had on his daily news-gathering on Indonesia.
“I missed out on a lot of things during the early phase and was not able to see public sentiment toward particular news or info,” Ardyan said.
Indonesia has over 24 million Twitter users, according to 2023 research from We Are Social, the fifth-highest number of users by nation.
But more than missing out, Ardyan felt a bigger dislike of the direction Twitter is going under Musk’s reign, which he said contradicted Musk’s own claim to “champion free speech” on the platform.
Danger of more polarization Despite Musk’s reasoning that the limit is to “address the extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation”, experts have warned the limit could cause repercussions in Indonesia ahead of the election in 2024, as it could create smaller echo chambers.
“Unverified users would only be able to see information that they already favor, leading to more polarizations both online and offline,” Institute for Policy Research and Advocacy (ELSAM) executive director Wahyudi Djafar said to the Post on Thursday.
These users, Wahyudi added, would only be exposed to information favoring the candidates they supported and would have little access to other data for comparison.
“We see now that the monetization [Musk has implemented] leans toward access limitation, but when access to information itself is limited, it can trap its users in a bubble created by the algorithm,” he explained.
Twitter has seen massive progress in user activity from Indonesia’s past elections, recording a 30 per cent increase in tweets about elections from the 2014 election year to the 2019 contest, the latter raking in 124 million tweets throughout the campaign period.
In 2022, Twitter registered its service to comply with Communications and Information Ministry Regulation No. 5/2020 on digital services providers, which is a derivative regulation of the controversial 2008 Electronic Information and Transactions (ITE) Law that grants the state sweeping censorship powers over the registrants.
Research from tech publication Rest of World shows that Twitter has complied with most government takedown requests under Musk’s ownership. Musk himself has faced backlash for removing accounts and tweets per the Turkish government’s request ahead of the country’s elections.
Political ads will be rife during the election period in Indonesia, Wahyudi noted. And with the advent of premium users under Musk’s Twitter, Indonesians will have a tougher time separating which information comes from substantial sources or from political “buzzers”, the Indonesian expression for bot accounts, which the country has been dealing with since the divisive 2014 election.
Political analyst Ismail Fahmi said the limitation would not help with the buzzers problem. “Rate limit only limits the number of tweets you can view, not how many you can write.
So buzzers who intend to post hoaxes or maligned framings will still be able to do those things,” Ismail told the Post on Thursday.
In fact, with premium users having a larger viewing quota on Twitter, buzzer accounts can easily pay to become blue-check subscribers and circulate their campaigns freely given that the algorithm prioritizes them over unverified accounts.
“They can now easily buy the blue check marks and become verified accounts, so unknowing users are more prone to sharing disinformation from said accounts,” Ismail added.
Other alternatives? Ardyan felt Twitter’s recent changes would hurt the election cycle with the viewing limit and blue-check-favoring algorithm.
“For us who are far from home, social media is our way of knowing updates from Indonesia. But I don’t think it’s wise to depend on Twitter to make a fully informed opinion now,” he said.
Many users have since moved to different platforms, from the famed Twitter alternative Mastodon to a recent contender, Threads by Meta Platforms, which has acquired over 30 million users since its release on Thursday. Kenny said he still preferred to remain unverified, regardless of the limits imposed.
“I don’t think I will ever pay for something – to Elon Musk no less – that I’ve been freely using for almost 13 years,” he said. “So the choice for me is to maybe create a new account or just pack it up and leave [to other social media platforms].” - The Jakarta Post/ANN
