This post is a continuation of an investigation I published on the pro-Indonesian bot network which used Twitter, as well as other social media platforms, to distort the truth about what what is happening in West Papua. The campaign does this through posting infographic propaganda to audiences in English and Indonesian. You can read more on this on the Bellingcat blog, or Twitter.

Identifying the Pro-Indonesian Bot Network

In my previous investigation, the bot network was identified by capturing tweets using the #WestPapua and #FreeWestPapua tags. This data was streamed directly into a visualised data table in the open source platform Gephi.

The finals visualisation of the tweets captured and their user networks can be seen below.

Using a basic network analysis of the influencer nodes, it was evident that unusual activity was occurring by a ‘cluster’ of nodes. In the circumstances of that investigation, the nodes were Twitter accounts.

Since publishing the work, the accounts in that bot network have since been suspended by Twitter.

I found that the accounts performing the unusual activity were bots from the following indicators:

The accounts were using the same text and videos in their posts

The accounts were retweeting only each other, and were not interacting with ‘human operated’ accounts

The profile pictures, upon image-reverse search, were from celebrities or other people

The timestamps of their posts were working in an automated pattern with repetitive signs

All of this work can be seen in the Twitter thread below:

Now that I have provided a background as to how the bot accounts were identified, I will turn to their Facebook-led activity.

Propaganda Facebook Pages On West Papua

The focus of this post will be based on three Facebook Pages that I have identified are part of a much larger pro-Indonesian propaganda network being used to distort information about West Papua on large social media platforms.

The Facebook pages are:

How are these pages identified as part of the network?

As seen in the Twitter bot analysis, there was a network of bots identified. They linked to larger ‘influencer accounts’. Those accounts have since been suspended by Twitter, but are PapuaWestCom, WestPapuaID and Info_WestPapua.

Those accounts linked to standalone websites where the same media and text was repeated. Those websites are here, here and here. I have used archive.org links for them, so that they may remain for research purposes.

In the social bars of those sites are links to their respective social accounts Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and Facebook. The latter of which has been used for the purpose of this research.

Propaganda Facebook Page #1: WestPapuaID