Keywords

1 Introduction

Understanding the dissemination of information about the G20 Summit in Bali is critical, particularly for the Indonesian government. President Joko Widodo (Jokowi) stated that Indonesians should be proud of the G20 presidency. According to the President, becoming the first developing country to hold the G20 Presidency is significant because it shows respect, value, and development. The Indonesian people should overcome their “colonized” mindset and become more confident before other countries [1]. The election of the G20 Presidency [2] is meaningful because it raises various hopes for strategic benefits. With the theme “Recover Together, Recover Stronger”, Indonesia hopes to gain at least three advantages, namely (1) economic - driving domestic consumption, (2) social development - increasing vaccine production and distribution, and (3) political - demonstrating Indonesia’s success in implementing the Job Creation Law and the Sovereign Wealth Fund (SWF) [3].

The question is, “How is the information dissemination in Indonesia as G20 Presidency at the general public level?” amid high expectations from the government. To respond to this query, it is vital to conduct social media research to understand the spread of information and identify the issues that the general public is debating concerning the G20 Presidency. Twitter is a social media platform that has gained popularity and is a useful tool for comprehending the social discourse taking shape. However, the unrestricted nature can also propagate hoaxes or false information, as was the case with the Covid-19 pandemic [4].

The majority-Muslim nation understands the idea of “tabayyun” or confirmation as a crucial means of halting the spread of false information and ensuring integrity. A research found that most respondents did not conduct “tabayyun” or confirm the news heard [5]. Since Twitter (Web.2.0) allows interactions between information disseminators and other users, this research intended to evaluate the online dissemination of the G20 presidency in 2022. It unpacks the information about the influencers, the most popular hashtags, and sentiment analysis concerning the G20 presidency. The analysis can serve as a policy recommendation to the government, the primary party responsible for realizing the concept. Therefore, the following paragraphs will discuss ICT and Twitter as public diplomacy.

2 Literature Review

2.1 ICT and Public Diplomacy

Public diplomacy was still conventional before the rapid development of ICT. Diplomacy is carried out using a variety of methods, such as cultural diplomacy as practiced by Korea [6], the United States [7], Turkey [8], and Taiwan [9], as well as efforts to establish diplomatic relations at the regional government level or paradiplomacy [10].

The emergence of social media, which falls under the Web 2.0 umbrella, is one of the key advances in ICT. This indicates that the pattern of information dissemination has changed dramatically compared to earlier technologies. For instance, it seems to be a monologue, and there is no interactivity on the website platform (Web 1.0). In contrast, social media (Web 2.0) is more interactive because it involves direct two-way dialogue between information suppliers and recipients [11].

The existence of social media platforms such as Twitter has compelled policymakers to adapt to these changes in information dissemination. Direct contact with the general public also influences the pattern of diplomacy. Therefore, social media is a reality that the government should deal with to manage information and communicate with the public directly. Other countries recognize that social media should be utilized to communicate and gain public support for policies. For instance, public diplomacy using social media is carried out by China [12], Russia [13], India [14], the United States [15], and others. The construction of the literature that examines social media and public diplomacy especially related to the G20 Presidency, is still relatively minor.

2.2 Twitter as a Public Diplomacy

Several experts researched Twitter’s use in public diplomacy. For example, the Chinese government strongly encourages diplomats to engage with the global community through this social media [16]. As a result, sentiment analysis is generally positive, indicating widespread public support for the Chinese government’s diplomacy. The same tendency exists in Turkey, where Twitter supports the government’s diplomatic policies. The Turkish government has used this strategy to popularize news information sources that are becoming increasingly popular, such as The Republic of Turkiye Directorate of Communications, TIKA, Yunus Emre Institute, and TRT [17]. Even Twitter is useful for spreading propaganda during the South China Sea crisis, which involved numerous accounts from the US, China, and India [18]. It is also used successfully in many cases of public diplomacies, such as Iran – US relations [19], US – Cuba relations [20], and Indonesia [21]. This research is expected to provide a fresh perspective on Twitter and public diplomacy studies, which have received little attention from academics.

3 Methodology

A qualitative approach was employed with content analysis of discussions about Indonesia’s G20 presidency on social media, particularly Twitter. The data were collected during the G20 summit on 15–16 November 2022 using the keywords “#G20Indonesia” and “KTT G20” and utilized computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software (CAQDAS), namely NVivo 12 Plus (QSR International, Burlington, Massachusetts, USA). The two keywords were selected since they were becoming a trending topic on Twitter. Additionally, each of the two keywords represented different segments, namely “#G20Indonesia” for the global and “KTT G20” for the local audience. Once the dataset was collected, NVivo 12 Plus was used to conduct the coding process and generate sentiment analysis, top influencers, dominant hashtags, top mentions, and dominant words. Furthermore, the research strategy of Ahmed, Vidal-Alaball, Lopez Segui, and Moreno-Sánchez [22] on the Twitter analysis was adopted. The protocol of this research can be described in the following Fig. 1.

Fig. 1.
figure 1

Data Analysis Process

Full size image

4 Findings

Twitter has given several pieces of information about Indonesia’s G20 presidency. After the coding process using NVivo 12 Plus, the subsequent paragraphs present specific analyses from a Twitter discussion on those particular issues. Using #G20Indonesia the sentiment tends to negative (>55%), while searching keyword “KTT G20” the sentiment tends to positive (>68%). This indicates that on the global level, Indonesia’s G20 presidency was dominated by negative sentiment. In contrast, this achievement was greatly appreciated at the local level. Jokowi’s desire to make Indonesia proud of the G20 presidency has prevailed, and the positive sentiment shows the information disseminated effectively across society. The differences in sentiment analysis correlated with the received message of the audience both at the global and local levels. Measuring Twitter hashtags is crucial to understand the message with the same subject. In this case, NVivo 12 Plus has generated top hashtags for the two different keywords, as shown in Table 1.

Table 1. Top Hashtags on Indonesia’s G20 Presidency
Full size table

Table 1 provides an overview of the most used hashtag during this time frame. At the global level, “#g20indonesia” (n = 8651) and “#g20” (n = 3902) appeared among the most used hashtags. At the local level, the hashtag “#g20pulihlebihcepat” (n = 1980) was ahaead of #g20indonesia (n = 873), #kttg20 (n = 541), #masyaallahgiselle (n = 432), and #presidensig20 (n = 420). Indeed, among the top, irrelevant hashtags constantly appeared, such as “#uae” (n = 1150) and “#masyaallahgiselle” (n = 432). The hashtag in Arabic also appeared as “” (ref: head of state) (n = 1813) and “” (ref: G20 summit) (n = 1636). The hashtag “#masyaallahgiselle” is irrelevant since it is the celebrity-related hashtag of a girls’ band, namely JKT48, which went viral due to one of the members wearing a hijab. The emergence of various hashtags conveys that even though the G20 discourse is held in Indonesia and globally, it also benefits many parties.

Related to influencers, during G20 Summit in Bali, there were Twitter accounts that deliberately influenced the social media discussion. Interestingly, there are significant differences in the influencers in the two keywords, with the global influencers using #G20Indonesia being international figures or institutions who are influential and relevant to the theme. According to Table 2, the top five influencers are @forsan_uae (UAE media & news agency), @bkksnow (a Thai academic), @g20_india (Indian G20 secretariat), @rishisunak (UK Prime Minister), and @thestanislawski (Ukrainian Journalist). Meanwhile, domestic influencers include @jokowi (President of Indonesia), @narendramodi (Prime Minister of India), and @cakiminow (Indonesian politician). Anonymous influencer accounts, namely @ndagels and @txtdarihi, emerged on Twitter and influenced the Indonesian G20 presidency discourse. This demonstrates that international Twitter accounts truly control the flow of information on the G20 presidency. Table 2 provides a listing of the numerous most influential individuals. A huge number of followers does not ensure that other users will positively receive a Twitter account.

Table 2. Top Influencer on Indonesia’s G20 Presidency
Full size table

President Jokowi (@jokowi) was consistently the most-mentioned account on Twitter among domestic users, surpassing other well-known domestic accounts, as seen in Table 3. However, the popularity of the accounts lags far behind compared to others, such as @g20org (India’s G20 Presidency), @mohamedbinzayed (President of the UAE), @narendramodi (Prime Minister of India), and @uaeembassyjkt (UAE Embassy Jakarta). This gap appears to correspond with the posting locations, as seen in Table 3. Referring to Table 3, foreign Twitter accounts predominate from the dominance of hashtags, influencers, and user locations. The Indonesian account performs exceptionally when the tweet contains the keyword “G20 Summit”, but the outcomes differ when “#G20Indonesia” is used. This indicates that Indonesian Twitter users’ conversations are still not very intense, affecting how information spreads worldwide. Instead, Twitter users dominate conversations using the keyword “G20 Summit”, probably because it is more well-liked and accepted than #G20Indonesia. However, among the mentioned accounts, the official Twitter of Indonesia’s G20 Presidency, namely @Indonesia_G20, is absent in all categories.

Table 3. Top Five Users Most Mentioned on Indonesia’s G20 Presidency
Full size table

In terms of word distribution, it closely aligns with the data presented above. For example, when the keyword #G20Indonesia is used, the NVivo 12 Plus auto-coding results showed that the hashtag is dominant, as evidenced by the bold print on the word-cloud image followed by “https”, indicating a high intensity of the website. Similarly, the keyword “G20 Summit” dominates the spread of words in word-cloud images, followed by “https” printed in bold. Therefore, Twitter has a limited number of characters for sending messages, and users frequently provide additional information through the website URL. The primary aim is for users who intend to learn more about the G20 presidency to log on to related links that provide more detailed information (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2.
figure 2

Word-Cloud Analysis

Full size image

Besides the limited number of characters, Twitter conversations are highly dynamic and can be altered. Concerning the limitations, it only covers the period between 15 and 16 November 2022, the day of the G20 Summit. Future research should be able to dismantle data about the G20 leadership throughout various periods. The content analysis only addresses one component of information distribution, which is quite simplistic. However, this has not delved deeper into the Twitter conversation’s themes as a research on the 2017 French presidential election [23]. Keywords can also be added in future research, as evidenced by the hashtags for anti-vaccine propaganda [24]. The NVivo 12 Plus software greatly aided this research, and the results may differ. For example, the visualization and display of the results are more appealing and complete when using alternative software, such as NodeXL, Python, and R Programming.

5 Conclusion

This research discovered that information dissemination related to Indonesia’s G20 presidency significantly contributed to the literature on digital diplomacy. It uncovered how Twitter data represented information disseminated to the public among Indonesians and the global community. Indeed, using local keywords such as “KTT G20”, a message was widely distributed and received positive sentiment from the locals. Using the hashtag “#G20Indonesia”, the presidency drew international attention and gained more negative sentiment. Despite being one of the largest social media users, Indonesia’s Twitter influencers remain untold compared to global influencers. In the future, the government should focus on improving digital diplomacy in cyberspace, which is critical for a country’s public diplomacy.