The Impact of Citizen Journalism on the Presidential Elections in Indonesia in 2024

As we know, the eighth presidential election is getting closer, there is more and more news that is conflicting with each other without clarity and sometimes has the character of bringing down or defaming one of the potential candidates. Various mainstream mass media report various developments or matters related to elections, each with its own agenda and interests. 

Even though one of the media's principles is neutrality, it cannot be denied that some media are also more inclined to one side. Accompanied by people's consumption patterns that easily believe hoax news without any clarification, this makes naughty media deliberately divert people's perceptions in the wrong direction.

However, Indonesian society is no longer fixated on mass media, free access to social media has also become an influential alternative for reporting on elections. According to data obtained by Kompas, 29.4 percent of respondents admitted to accessing social media to view or read election-related content, at least several times a week  (Sakti, 2023). 

These are really the numbers that show that the current generation prefers to access news via social media, However, one of the things that needs to be noted about information originating from social media is that everyone is very free to voice their opinion or share their perspective on a phenomenon such as this election.

The many classifications of citizen journalists that the author understands are the differences in each citizen journalist's capacity to analyze and present the results of their information collection to the public. 

Analytical skills are the traits and abilities that allow you to observe, research and interpret a subject to develop complex ideas and solutions (Indeed, 2023), for example, the difference between someone who is an expert in the socio-political field when writing the results of his analysis of the presidential or vice-presidential debate and explaining the understanding of someone who is a layman without the appropriate educational background. 

This basic difference in knowledge will also create a different understanding when consumed by the wider community, where the Indonesian people themselves have the habit of accepting blind statements without looking for the correct facts.

The different analytical abilities of media users who become citizen journalists are what we need to pay attention to when we read every post or article on social media when reading news about elections and politics that are happening. 

Moreover, there are many buzzers whose aim is to distort facts or divert more important issues to unimportant ones, and because citizen journalists are not bound by any rules, they are free to use catchphrases or clickbait titles. In line with the high level of public consumption in searching for election information on social media, this can greatly influence their voting choices.

Citizen journalists also act as a tool in campaigning on social media, by creating content that is interesting to Gen Z and Millennials, they can seek sympathy from people who are still undecided. And people who tend to follow people with lots of followers or subscribers will contribute to the 2024 presidential and vice-presidential elections. But most of the Indonesian people are followers who have lost their way or are easily misled by people who have big influencers. It doesn't matter what their background or capacity is in understanding and analyzing a phenomenon, as explained in the paragraph above.

So the conclusion is that citizen journalism has quite a big influence in determining people's perceptions of a candidate pair or political phenomena related to elections, more than half of Indonesian people now tend to access social media more when looking for information related to elections so that everything written by influencers or Citizen journalism plays a role in shaping public perceptions. Moreover, there are no restrictions for citizen journalists to express their opinions regardless of whether the opinions they express are ethical or not, resulting in many disputes between each candidate pair.