International Seminar on “Cyber Troops and Computational Propaganda in the Indonesian Presidential Election 2019” at CSEAS, Kyoto University

Date: Saturday, July 20nd, 2019
Time: 16:00 -19:00
Venue: Kyoto University Inamori Memorial Hall, 2rd floor Seminar Room

Presenter: Ismail Fahmi (Drone Emprit & PT. Media Kernels Indonesia)
Moderator: Masaaki Okamoto (CSEAS Kyoto University)

ABSTRACT:
The last Indonesia’s 2019 presidential election shown a different landscape of cyber war compared to its previous 2014 presidential election. In 2014, the use of social media and online media to create propaganda during campaigns was relatively new. However, in 2019 the number of people engaged in the cyber war is significantly increased especially from the opposition side. The use of bots to manipulate public opinion by amplifying or combating political content, disinformation, hate speech, and junk news was also increased in both parties.

In this presentation I will present how cyber troops from both parties (incumbent and opposition) engaged cyber wars to win their campaign messages. Furthermore using Drone Emprit, our big data analytics tool for online media and social media, I will show how computational propaganda using sophisticated bots, patterns, and techniques to trick the social media platforms was engaged.

I also will explain our efforts using the Drone Emprit analytics, that regularly and continuously analyzed the conversation and shared our findings through article posts in social media and mainstream media during the campaign periods. Our purpose was to build public awareness about the situation of the cyber war in order to they can see how hidden teams conduct computational propaganda that was targeted to win their opinion.

At the end of the presentation, I will conclude with lesson learned from the Indonesia’s 2019 presidential election.

PRESENTER:

Ismail Fahmi (Drone Emprit & PT. Media Kernels Indonesia)

MODERATOR
Masaaki Okamoto (CSEAS Kyoto University)

PROFILE
Ismail Fahmi, Ph.D is an information scientist and the founder of PT Media Kernels Indonesia with experiences in developing a big data system called Media Kernels a.k.a Drone Emprit supported by a set of natural language processing techniques. The purpose of the system is to analyze online media and social media contents. He also developed Indonesia OneSearch, a knowledge portal for accessing all database and digital repositories from universities and public libraries in Indonesia. His bachelor is in Electrical Engineering from the Institute of Technology Bandung, and his master and doctoral is in Information Science from the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. His main interests are in natural language processing, information extraction, automatic term extraction, relationship extraction, social network analysis, ontology development and population, digital library, plagiarism detection, and big data.