It is suspected that the Twitter hashtag #TolakDivaksinSinovac that has been trending recently was coordinated. The hashtag pursues an anti-vaccine narrative and contains misleading information.
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Harry Susilo/Satrio P Wisanggeni/ Kurnia Yunita Rahayu/Irene Sarwindaningrum/B Krisna Yogatama
·5 minutes read
JAKARTA, KOMPAS — It is suspected that the Twitter hashtag #TolakDivaksinSinovac that has been trending recently was coordinated. The hashtag pursues an anti-vaccine narrative and contains misleading information.
Tweets bearing the hashtag #TolakDivaksinSinovac, which promotes rejecting vaccination using the Sinovac’s CornaVac vaccine, started circulating on Twitter on Jan. 12, 2021, the day before the government started rolling out its Covid-19 mass vaccination program. The first tweet bearing the hashtag was posted at 6:53 a.m. and had become a trending topic by 10:55 a.m. By late afternoon, the hashtag was still trending with more than 12,000 tweets.
A Kompas probe, conducted with the support of data analysis and management agency Kudu, discovered strong indications that the #TolakDivaksinSinovac hashtag that started trending on Jan. 12 involved a coordinated effort. One indication that the Twitter trend was coordinated appears in the first post using the hashtag at 06:53 a.m., tweeted by an account belonging to shi_shei using the Twitter handle @shei_zuke___1.
The post was a call to action that read: "TNT hashtag for the Alliance today #TolakDivaksinSinovac #TolakDivaksinSinovac Up in unison.” A few days later, the shi_shei account was no longer active, allegedly because Twitter had suspended it.
Indications of a coordinated effort behind the anti-vaccine social media narrative could also be seen through other tweets that carried the hashtag but without any relevant content. It is believed these tweets were simply a vehicle to get the #TolakDivaksinSinovac hashtag trending. For example, Twitter user Kamandanu Ngapak (@JebulMania291) posted 26 tweets in 9 seconds at 7:02 a.m. that contained a series of random letters and the hashtag #TolakDivaksinSinovac.
In addition, further indication of a coordinated effort was seen in the large number of tweets an account posted over a brief period of time that included the #TolakDivaksinSinovac hashtag. It appears that these tweets used a Twitter bot, or automated software, to post a large number of tweets in a short period of time.
Subsequent indications were evident in the several different accounts that retweeted earlier posts containing the #TolakDivaksinSinovac hashtag.
Spike in the number of tweets
The surge in these series of anomalous tweets over a short period of time provides strong indication that a deliberate effort was made to amplify the #TolakDivaksinSinovac hashtag.
An analysis by Kudu found that the number of tweets containing #TolakDivaksinSinovac jumped dramatically shortly after the hashtag first appeared. At 7:03 a.m., the tweeting rate of the
#TolakDivaksinSinovac hashtag was 94 tweets per minute, almost 10 times the average rate of tweets for that hashtag, or 9.86 tweets per minute.
Upon further investigation, it was found that these tweets likely involved bot accounts or were automated, scheduled tweets. For example, user Amelia Rieska (@RieskaAmelia4) posted 25 tweets in 12 seconds starting at 7:03:13 a.m.
In addition to these allegedly manipulated tweets, other indications of a coordinated effort to amplify the #TolakDivaksinSinovac hashtag were evident in user accounts that had readied anti-vaccine content. One example is user demoCRAZYambyar’s account, @demokrasiambyar, which posted the hashtag #TolakDivaksinSinovac with a video of a cleric responding to a clip showing House of Representatives (DPR) member Ribka Tjiptaning making a statement. The video was posted less than 10 minutes after the hashtag first appeared.
The tweets posted to amplify the #TolakDivaksinSinovac hashtag also contained hoaxes or misleading claims. One of these tweets posted the "World Doctors Alliance" video showing a number of people from several countries who claim to be doctors, making statements that refute the existence of the Covid-19 virus or pandemic, as well as Covid-19 vaccines. The claims made in the video have been debunked as fake news by fact-checking teams both in Indonesia and abroad.
The events surrounding the #TolakDivaksinSinovac hashtag were also anomalous because the user accounts that tweeted the hashtag existed only in that group. Usually, real user accounts are part of several different Twitter groups.
The results of the Kudu analysis have identified a number of accounts that played important roles in amplifying the #TolakDivaksinSinovac hashtag. These include the user accounts demoCRAZYambyar, Typo Lagi (@S4r4ngHeyo), R.I.F (@rifofficial_), DEDEafried (@dede_afried), Kelakar Pesirah (@Pesirah_Pensiun), and patin (@Ch4_yunk). Interestingly, these user accounts also played a significant role in amplifying other hashtags used in content that criticized the government, such as #RezimButuhWakaf.
The final indication of a coordinated effort to elevate the hashtag to trend was that most user accounts that tweeted the #TolakDivaksinSinovac hashtag were created just prior to the hashtag’s appearamce. A Kompas probe found that all accounts that played a central role in getting the hashtag to trend, including @demokrasiambyar, @Pesirah_Pensiun, and @S4r4ngHeyo, had joined Twitter in December 2020, only a month before the hashtag was created.
The Kudu analysis showed that 114 out of the 1,336 accounts using the #TolakDivaksinSinovac hashtag were created in either December 2020 or January 2021.
They also used a specific time frame
"From this we can see the likely indication that this was [the result of] a bot," said Kudu chief technology officer Richard Vinc.
Richard evaluated several other indications that pointed to a coordinated effort behind the #TolakDivaksinSinovac trend.
"They also used a specific time frame," he said.
DroneEmprit founder Ismail Fahmi said that only a small group of accounts without a large number of followers were involved in amplifying the #TolakDivaksinSinovac hashtag.
The main accounts connected to the #TolakDivaksinSinovac hashtag, including as @demokrasiambyar, @Pesirah_Pensiun, and @S4r4ngHeyo, were once verified accounts. However, attempts to reach the users by mentioning their usernames in the tweets received no response, and the accounts had not been set up to receive direct messages.
Public policy director Agung Yudha of Twitter Indonesia & Malaysia said the technology company often detected a flurry of new accounts at certain times that interact with each other. Such activities are called inorganic or inauthentic behavior.