Spam accounts manipulated Twitter campaigns and hashtags in favor of the incumbent President of Indonesia, Joko Widodo, posting them repeatedly in a bid to make them trend.

The episode shows how social-media platforms, major battlegrounds for political campaigns around the world, are being targeted for manipulation ahead of the Indonesian elections. With the elections scheduled for April 17, 2019, inauthentic activity may become increasingly active in amplifying hashtags.

According to DFRLab’s analysis, the hashtag #JokowiLagi (“Jokowi Again,” translated from Indonesian) received about 25 percent of tweets from automated applications from March 10 to April 10. “Jokowi” refers to Joko Widodo, using a common Indonesian naming convention wherein a person’s name is shortened through combination. Along with these automated tweets, there was a significant amount of duplicate content posted by the accounts.

Indonesia is the world’s fifth largest country in terms of Twitter users. According to a report by Reuters, political parties in Indonesia hire “buzzers,” or local social-media consultants, that help to spread paid but organic content on the platform.

Twitter has been active in purging bot-like accounts as part of its effort against platform misuse and misinformation. In its rules and policies document for automation, Twitter states:

Trending topics: You may not automatically post about trending topics on Twitter or use automation to attempt to influence or manipulate trending topics. Multiple posts/accounts: You may not post duplicative or substantially similar Tweets on one account or over multiple accounts you operate.

According to DFRLab’s analysis, some accounts may have violated automation policy by duplicate posting of substantially similar tweets with same content. These accounts repeatedly shared the same hashtags, suggesting that they belonged to the same network.

As part of its election monitoring effort, the DFRLab analyzed the Indonesian Twitter environment and found spam-like accounts that amplified pro-Jokowi messages.

Spam Activity in Indonesia