The Alliance of Independent Journalist enlists Bates CHI & Partners Jakarta to combat damaging political hoaxes with the HoaxBuster

Since Indonesia’s 2014 presidential elections, social media has been flooded with hoaxes. Post the election, the hoaxes have become even more common; undermining the public’s confidence in politicians and lowering the level of political debate.

The Alliance of Independent Journalist (AJI), an independent association whose mission focuses on media literacy, teamed up with Bates CHI & Partners to solve this problem.

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Called AJI HoaxBuster, the campaign duplicates the most recent and provocative hoaxes via Facebook ads. For instance, we replicated three high-profile hoaxes about President Jokowi being a communist, Jakarta governor Ahok legalizing dog meat and Indonesia going bankrupt under the reign of Jokowi.

However, on clicking the ad the user is taken to a landing page that provides links to related articles from legitimate news sources – as featured on Google News.  Thus allowing the user to learn the truth about these irresponsible hoaxes.

The landing page also reminds the user to be a responsible reader, by always cross-checking whatever they read on social media with trusted news sources before jumping to conclusions. We also encourage the user to be responsible on social media, and not to blindly share hoaxes.

This simple strategy seems to be working. As Mr. Suwarjono, the Director of AJI states, “This is a great “judo” tactic, it uses the strength of a social media hoaxes against itself. Our feedback from the public about the campaign has been extremely encouraging.”

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