Political Propaganda: Indonesian Communism & Anti-Communism in the Mass Media

After the Indonesian reformation, communist and anti-communist propaganda debated each other, and the digitalization of mass media enabled the speed of propaganda transmission, so this research points out that communism still often appears in Indonesian mass media. For the purposes of the research, 260 news items were collected, the data of which was processed using NVivo Pro and RStudio software. Text mining and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) methods were used and data were analyzed using tools such as Strip Plot, Scatter Plot, Timeline and Word Frequency. The results of this research conclude that in the last few years in Indonesia, anti-communist propaganda has become irrelevant and is no longer a concern. Analysis of the time sequence reveals that anti-communist propaganda consistently occurs in September and October each year. Even repetitive narratives play a role in propaganda. Communist propaganda was tracked through analysis of the frequency of words, news narratives about Marxism and figures of the Indonesian communist movement, and through reports on communist massacres and human rights violations from the end of 2023, to which the Indonesian government provided access.