Assessing Trends in Religious Moderation Campaigns to Counter Extremism Using Social Network Analysis (SNA)

The religious moderation campaign, which is part of the 2019-2024 National Medium-Term Development Plan (RPJMN), is assed to have been unsuccessful in dominating the trend of public discussion on social media. This case is due to more than 62% of extreme religious narratives dominating public issues. The research aim is to investigate conversation trends and patterns in the religious moderation campaigns established on Twitter. This study employed Social Network Analysis (SNA) via Drone Emprit software as a research method. The data were collected through crawling techniques on Twitter for one year, from April 2022 to March 2023, with a total of 16,407 data. The results showed that the trend of religious moderation campaigns fluctuated wildly within one year. The social network patterns indicated that the campaigns for religious moderation were popularized by opinion leaders as influencers from netizens through tweets on Twitter which were then mentioned, revised, and retweeted. Opinion leaders associated it with issues of nationalism and politics as the driving force for religious moderation campaigns by optimizing hashtags. The novelty of the research is that influencer engagement with issues of nationalism and politics is one of the trends to encourage and increase the dominance of religious moderation campaigns on Twitter. The research results contribute as recommendations for governments, religious actors/organizations, and stakeholders to optimize the utilization of social media in counteracting extremism. Keywords: Religious moderation, extremism, trends, Social Network Analysis (SNA), Twitter.