Control-Alt-Shift Action: Indonesian Activist Youth Navigating the Double-Edged Sword of Social Media

Abstract: For today's student and youth activists in Indonesia, the use of social media as a tool of protest and mobilization seems to be a natural expression of their technologies of the self as the "digital generation." It allowed them to create new forms of protest that blend repertoires of digital and popular cultures, and to mobilize simultaneously online and on the streets on a peer-to-peer basis, as seen in the nation-wide protest movements against controversial bills in September 2019 and October 2020. Yet, as these protest movements also met with new forms of cyber-repression, activist youth developed an ambivalent relationship to social media. This article examines how they navigate the double-edged sword of using social media in activism. It shows how activist youth, on the one hand, have made creative use of social media to engage peers and stimulate their participation in protest; and, on the other hand, how they experience a sense of digital fatigue—growing tired of fighting online battles with pro-government cyber troops and of countering online disinformation about their movement—as well as fears for the state's deepening hegemony on social media. It is argued that such sentiments signal a turning point in their navigation of social media's contradictory attributes, prompting activist youth to redefine their relationship to social media, and to reclaim the "social" in social media activism.