Harmful Discourse on Social Media: The Triggering Factors of Persecution Acts in Post-Truth Era

Abstract

The harmful speech on social media in the post-truth vortex has triggered various cases of persecution during the political contestation in Indonesia in 2017. The transfer of violence from the virtual space to the real space was caused by the fact that every individual seeks for having a power vessel in the truth regarding ethnic, religious, racial and intergroup issues that ultimately encouraged them to behave outside the bonds of social structures. This phenomenon is examined by a qualitative approach to a criminological perspective using the Foucault archaeological/ genealogical method. The purpose of the research is to know the factors that cause harmful speech in social media which can trigger physical violence and Space Transition Theory is used the assess the same. The results show that not all dangerous speech containing ethnic, religious, racial and intergroup issues could lead to violence from virtual spaces to real space. There are contextual factors in the form of 'space', 'time' and 'place' which enable a dangerous speech on social media to evoke implications on persecution and non-persecution actions.