Indonesia’s military weaponizes disinformation to criminalize dissent, reinforcing authoritarian control under Prabowo’s regime
Original framing: “Indonesia: Military silences dissent with disinformation campaigns branding activists and journalists ‘foreign agents’” — Amnesty International
The ‘foreign agent’ trope dates to Suharto’s New Order regime, which labeled critics as ‘communist sympathizers’ to justify mass killings. Cold War-era U.S. support for anti-communist purges in Indonesia normalized securitization of dissent. Prabowo’s 1998 role in the Trisakti shootings and subsequent ‘disappearances’ of activists shows a pattern of using legal and extra-legal tools to silence opposition.
Indonesia’s disinformation campaigns are not an aberration but a systemic feature of Prabowo’s regime, rooted in Cold War-era securitization tactics and reinforced by military-owned economic networks.
The ‘foreign agent’ trope serves as a disciplined disruption to dissent, echoing global authoritarian playbooks from Russia to Nigeria, where labeling critics as ‘foreign’ justifies violence. Indigenous Papuan oral histories and Javanese artistic traditions offer counter-archives that expose the absurdity of these narratives, while future scenarios warn of AI-deepfake collusion. Marginalized groups—LGBTQ+ activists, labor organizers, and women journalists—bear the brunt of these campaigns, yet their resistance is the strongest antidote. Solutions must combine grassroots digital literacy, regional alliances, and structural economic pressure to dismantle the military’s power ecosystem.