Scrolling Through Democracy
From shared facts in Indonesia’s early democracy to what we’ve lost in today’s digital age. And some hopeful signs.
From Journalism to Algorithms
In 1999, just one year after the fall of General Suharto’s decades-old authoritarian regime, Indonesians enthusiastically went to the polls in the country’s first truly democratic election in a generation. I was there. A graduate student at the time, I was working alongside communities still reeling from the devastation of the 1998 Asian Financial Crisis. I also served as a volunteer election observer with Forum Rektor, one of the many civil society groups that flourished in the early years of reformasi.
I visited polling stations set up in schools, neighborhoods, and roadside tents. I watched communities gather to count ballots in the open, surrounded by cheering crowds, occasional firecrackers, and the buzz of possibility.
But the image that has stayed with me longest is from a polling station inside a jail. The inmates weren’t just enthusiastic to vote — they were informed. They read newspapers. They watched campaign coverage on television. They debated ideas. And they could agree on the facts.
Back then, Indonesian journalists and media associations were rebuilding their profession in service of democracy. They worked to uphold ethics and improve the public’s access to reliable information. It wasn’t perfect — it never is — but it was Democracy Working. The very foundations of a functioning democracy were visible: facts, debate, trust.
What a contrast to today.
When Indonesians went to the polls again in 2024, they did so in a vastly different information environment. More citizens accessed news from social media (and likely non-journalists) than from public interest journalism. Disinformation and digitally amplified conspiracy theories crowded out conversations about policies and visions for the future. The digital public square, once full of open debate, has become increasingly dominated by opaque algorithms, polarizing content, and surveillance-fueled commodification of human attention.
The decline of the public interest information ecosystem in Indonesia is not just a local tragedy. I think it's a part of a global trend.
A year before that 1999 vote, the world watched as then-IMF Director Michael Camdessus stood arms crossed, stern and colonial, over Suharto, who signed away Indonesia’s economic autonomy in exchange for $43 billion in IMF bailouts. Fifty structural, neoliberal demands in exchange for survival — a neocolonial deal televised live.
That moment remained stuck into my mind. And now I think it takes on new meaning.
In 2025, its not so much white men in suits demanding neoliberal economic reforms on national television. It is multinational tech platforms profiting silently, invisibly, and immensely. Their arms aren’t folded, but their algorithms are folded tightly behind layers of corporate secrecy. Indonesia is among their biggest markets — a young, tech-savvy, socially connected country. Yet Big Tech has faced almost no meaningful obligations to reinvest in protecting the very information ecosystem they’ve destabilized.
Imagine if those same companies had to meet fifty conditions to extract billions from Indonesia’s digital economy — not unlike the demands placed on a struggling nation in 1998. But they don’t. Not even close.
Instead, surveillance capitalism has taken root, monetizing polarisation, undermining trust, and weakening democracies — not only in Indonesia, but around the world.
This is a new form of imperialism, where power is concentrated and exercised not through tanks or treaties, but through data, technology, and algorithms. It is undermining the democratic institutions that reformasi tried so hard to build.
Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Maria Ressa reminds us: “Without facts, you can’t have truth. Without truth, you can’t have trust. Without trust, we have no shared reality, no democracy.”
We’re watching this unfold across countries — from India to Indonesia, the Philippines to Poland. And yet, policy responses remain tentative, fragmented, reactive.
That’s why I’ve been really happy to contribute to efforts aimed at improving our information ecosystem, especially in the Global South. When I was Executive Director of the Forum on Information and Democracy, we worked with partners like International IDEA and Democracy Reporting International to create actionable recommendations for safeguarding elections in the digital age.
And the global majority aren’t standing still. Just to share two examples from my part of the world of democratic innovations to defend truth:
In the Philippines, Rappler created Rappler Communities to serve as a digital town hall centered on facts. They build it with tech free from coded bias to allow us to organise around our concerns and passions.
In Thailand, a coalition of journalists, technologists, and civil society groups came together to build Co-Fact Thailand, a collaborative fact-checking platform designed to counter viral falsehoods, modelled on the very successful Cofacts Taiwan.
Both Rappler and Co-Fact (and Cofacts) remind us that solutions don’t have to come from Silicon Valley to be smart, scalable, and democratic.
What’s this all mean? I believe what we’re facing is a breakdown in the conditions that make democracy possible — much like Maria Ressa speak about often. We keep talking about misinformation like it’s a glitch in the system. But it’s not. It’s the system doing exactly what it was designed to do: extract attention, data, and profit. And in the process, it erodes our shared sense of reality. Because not doing so would cost big tech lots of revenue.
And isn’t just a tech problem either. It’s a democracy problem. It’s a power problem. And yes, it’s a colonial problem — just in digital form. In 1999, I watched people debate policies they cared about because they shared a common set of facts. In 2024, we watched people pushed further apart by algorithms designed to provoke, not to inform. That’s not progress. And it’s certainly not the technological innovation we want.
If 1999 showed us the promise of democracy, then 2025 demands we protect it. We need to rebuild the digital public square with democracy — not engagement metrics — at its center. We need to insist that the platforms making billions off our data also invest in the integrity of the spaces they control. And we need to stop letting them write the rules of the game while we scramble to catch up.