Social media and political protest: framing and agenda-setting in the Indonesian demonstrations, August 2025

Overview

This study examines the mechanisms through which social media platforms shaped protest dynamics during the August 2025 Indonesian demonstrations by integrating framing theory and agenda-setting theory. The protests, catalyzed by public reaction to a Rp50 million monthly legislative housing allowance and intensified by the death of a ride-hailing driver, represented a significant wave of political contention in the post-Reformasi period. The research combines framing and agenda-setting perspectives to analyze how diverse organizational actors—activists, labor unions, religious organizations, and citizens—constructed diagnostic, prognostic, and motivational frames while specific hashtags functioned as coordinated agenda-setting mechanisms to amplify protest messaging.

Methods and approach

The study employs content analysis and cross-media comparison to examine discourse production across social media platforms and traditional media. The analytical framework integrates framing theory, which focuses on how actors construct interpretations of grievances and solutions, with agenda-setting theory, which addresses how media attention influences public and institutional priorities. The research traces the deployment of hashtags including #BubarkanDPR, #PotongPrivilege, #JusticeForAffan, and #SaveDemocracy as instruments for coordinating collective action and establishing dominant issue frames across hybrid media ecologies. Multiple organizational constituencies are analyzed to assess differentiation in frame construction and strategic messaging.

Key Findings

Findings indicate that social media platforms facilitated decentralized mobilization structures that enabled coordination among geographically dispersed and organizationally distinct participants. The analysis reveals that social media functioned to synthesize fragmented and potentially divergent grievances into coherent reform agendas through recursive processes of framing and counter-framing. Hashtag-based agenda-setting mechanisms demonstrated measurable capacity to generate institutional responses, including media coverage shifts and documented government engagement. The research documents how frame amplification through digital platforms expanded protest legitimacy claims and intensified pressure on mainstream media institutions and state apparatuses.

Implications

The study contributes theoretically by demonstrating mechanisms through which framing and agenda-setting theories operate interdependently within contemporary hybrid media environments. The integration of these frameworks illuminates how digital platforms enable simultaneous processes of meaning-making and priority-setting that can generate disproportionate institutional responses relative to numerical participation. This theoretical lens addresses analytical gaps in understanding digital-era political contention and provides methodological guidance for examining protest dynamics in comparable contexts.

Scope and limitations

This summary is based on the study abstract and available metadata. It does not include a full analysis of the complete paper, supplementary materials, or underlying datasets unless explicitly stated. Findings should be interpreted in the context of the original publication.