Sanitising Social Media and the Production of Non-political Creative Content

Abstract

Exhausted by the circulation of online hate speech during recent elections in Indonesia, members of the Facebook-based group Agus-Agus Bersaudara Indonesia (Agus Brotherhood Indonesia) agreed to maintain peaceful conversations by censoring political conversations, jokes and memes. To fill the loss of such contemporary chat subjects and provide members with other conversation topics, the community initiated offline activities to improve members’ social awareness and negate political differences. This paper analyses the community’s creative production of a mediatised peacemaking discourse through the creation of non-political spaces as a response to political polarisation and discusses three representations of online community self-censorship. First, the community’s non-political peace discourse denotes an emerging popular view that ‘politics’ and ‘peace’ are two contrasting notions. Second, the decision to exclude politics from online space shows an embrace of repressive censorship and citizens’ struggle to extend their repertoires of peacemaking. Third, self-censorship, however, can generate civic practices and can thus be understood as the rebellious language of silence that signifies the online brotherhood’s agency in disrupting the flow of elite-driven political conversations.