The Triangle Threatening Journalists’ Safety in the Digital Realm

By Andreas Ryan Sanjaya and Fidelis Aggiornamento Saintio

[Disclosure: The original article, written in Indonesian, was published on Medium on June 4, 2025. This article won Second Place in the General Category of the 2024 Journalist Safety Index Data Analysis Article Competition organized by Populix and the TIFA Foundation.]

In October 2021, Project Multatuli’s investigative report titled “My Three Children Were Raped, I Reported It to the Police. The Police Stopped the Investigation” went viral and sparked wide debate in digital spaces. It didn’t take long before Project Multatuli’s website was attacked, making it difficult to access. To this day, the perpetrators of that digital assault have not been definitively identified.

Feeling its reputation was tarnished, the East Luwu Police labeled the journalistic content as fake news. This statement was echoed by a group of online buzzers who accused the work of being “paid news” orchestrated by civil society organizations seeking to discredit the police institution.

Cyber Attacks

Digital assaults on journalistic work are not isolated cases; they recur. The targets are not only media outlets but also journalists’ personal social media accounts. This trend is captured in the 2024 Journalist Safety Index, based on a survey of 760 Indonesian journalists.

The percentage of journalists experiencing digital attacks is relatively small (7%)—compared to coverage bans (46%), publication bans (36%), and verbal harassment (35%). Nonetheless, the figure reveals the digital sphere as a new battleground for journalists, signaling a form of digital authoritarianism that cannot be dismissed.

Moreover, parliament is pushing to expand police jurisdiction into cyberspace through a revision of the Police Law. In this realm, the police would gain authority to provide guidance, oversight, and security (Article 6); and even take enforcement measures such as blocking, disconnecting, or throttling internet access for the sake of “domestic security” (Article 14). Civil organizations and buzzers could be pulled into these efforts.

The Alliance of Independent Journalists (AJI) has noted a rising trend in digital attacks on journalists since 2020. The patterns are increasingly complex: hijacking social media accounts (including WhatsApp), hacking emails, doxing, DDOS attacks, and forced suspension of social media accounts by platforms.

One of the most massive attacks occurred in 2022, when 37 staff members of Narasi were simultaneously targeted. Their WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, and Telegram accounts were hijacked illegally. Around the same time, Narasi’s website was subjected to 3,600 hacking attempts per minute. A chilling threat message also penetrated the newsroom’s server system: “Stay silent or die.”

Cyber threats against journalists come in many forms. But in 2024, the top three were account hacking, digital identity theft, and online threats and intimidation.

Despite being widely reported to the police, investigations into these cases remain stagnant. Democracy suffers, while perpetrators remain untouchable.

The Triangle of Threats

Although perpetrators of these digital attacks remain unmasked, the 2024 Journalist Safety Index highlights three parties that journalists see as potential threats in the next five years: mass organizations (ormas), buzzers, and the police.

These predictions stem from bitter experiences of journalists serving as the eyes and ears of the public. Data from the 760-journalist survey in 2024 illustrates this “threat triangle”:

• Of four journalists who survived attempted murder, three (75%) pointed to buzzers as perpetrators.

• Of 11 journalists sued in court, six (55%) said the plaintiffs were ormas.

• Of 20 journalists subjected to physical violence, eight (40%) identified police or military personnel as perpetrators.

• Of 10 journalists who received death threats, four (40%) said they came from security forces.

The pattern is clear: the more sensitive the issue—such as criticizing government policies or exposing powerful institutions and corporations—the higher the likelihood of journalists becoming targets.

Rather than protecting them, police have at times become perpetrators of repression, especially when journalists cover sensitive issues such as protests against the Draft Criminal Code, the Omnibus Law, and revisions to the Regional Election Law. Between March 20–27, 2025, 14 journalists were recorded as victims of violence while covering demonstrations rejecting the new Military Law.

Digital repression looms larger with the proposed revision of the Police Law in parliament. The purchase of 19 Pegasus spyware tools between 2019–2021 by the police logistics unit has heightened concern.

Digital surveillance has also strengthened under Ministerial Regulation No. 5/2020, which requires private digital platforms to register with the government. Around 48 platforms were blocked in August 2022 for failing to comply. According to Ufen (2024), Indonesia’s government is opening pathways to monitor civil society activists and journalists in cyberspace.

If normalized, such surveillance may be seen as legitimate because it is carried out by state apparatus and anchored in law. The seeds of this legitimacy appear in the official Twitter (X) account @siberpolri, which invokes political stability to justify restricting criticism of authorities and even threatens netizens (Sardini, Wijayanto & Elsitra, 2024).

Buzzers reinforce this false legitimacy by masquerading as the masses. Instead of trusting journalists, authorities rely on digital armies to shape images, silence criticism, and manipulate opinion. Digital attacks on journalists, outsourced to buzzers, weaken public reason and stifle civic criticism. This turns the state into a predator in the digital sphere. Often, those who employ buzzers are actors with image problems—rather than fixing their reputations, they hide behind buzzers to protect them.

In June 2024, a Kompas TV cameraman was assaulted by three members of an ormas following the sentencing of a former agriculture minister in a Jakarta corruption court. The motive remains unclear, but the incident mirrored buzzer tactics. If buzzers dominate cyberspace, ormas dominate physical space. By deploying both, the true masterminds remain untarnished.

As Mazzaro (2023) argues, such efforts constitute anti-media actions: attempts to direct public perception away from trusting journalism. Tactics include portraying the media as manipulative, unethical, or hateful—usually by politicians tarnished by critical reporting. These attacks often target journalists covering corruption and human rights abuses (Hughes & Marquez-Ramirez, 2018).

In the United States, right-wing populist politicians have used ormas-like groups to attack journalists and spread anti-press discourse (Waisbord, 2023). Targets often include journalists critical of government policy, as well as women journalists and minority journalists (Midkiff, 2020).

The use of ormas to attack journalists marks a new era of repression. Attackers are not wholly anonymous or anarchic: they hide behind organizations with legal structures. Their goals align with those of buzzers and the police—spreading narratives that make the public skeptical of, or outright dismissive of, the media.

A Shadow Over Press Freedom

Threats continue to overshadow journalistic work and freedom of expression. The government often demeans the profession with misleading analogies, while critical voices from NGOs funded by foreign donors are dismissed as divisive agendas.

It is hard to imagine true press freedom under a government that reflexively rejects criticism. Yet spaces of resistance will persist: in lively campus discussions, in the cramped newsrooms of alternative media, and in the watchful eyes of fact-checkers. There, the struggle to preserve safe spaces for journalists will endure.

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Authors

Andreas Ryan Sanjaya — PhD Candidate, School of Communication, Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia. He researches collaborative journalism and digital social movements. Contact: andreasryan.sanjaya@hdr.qut.edu.au

Fidelis Aggiornamento Saintio — Lecturer, Communication Studies Program, Soegijapranata Catholic University (SCU), Indonesia. His research interests include hate speech and public opinion. Contact: fidelis@unika.ac.id