Political Actors Participation within Nation-Wide Social Distancing during CoVID-19 Pandemic in Twitter
Abstract Government of Indonesia’s decision after concerning the increasing of CoVID-19 confirmed case evidences is conducted by stating that there must be required an initial step to reduce its spread, that is by nation-wide social distancing (PSBB). Accordingly, this PSBB issue was then responded by citizen in many ways, including through social media Twitter. The aim of the research is to extract the issues and key actors within the social network of Twitter in Indonesia. The research mined around 5,000 tweets on May 6th, 2020, which included the keyword ’psbb’ and hashtag ‘#psbb’. The implementation of PSBB in nation scale actually impacted some sectors in society. By using text mining and Social Network Analysis (SNA), it is found some important key points. First, the issue of PSBB in social media Twitter in Indonesia are mostly about annecdotal terms of PSBB became ‘social distancing ends up to relationship break’ which is initially popularized by entertainer named FiersaBesari rather than the origin ‘nation-wide social distancing’. Second, looking deeper into the core network, it is found that the most influential Twitter user is named yunartowijaya, an executive director of political consultant institution Charta Politika. Third, online news media which actively involved within PSBB issue are detikcom and CNNIndonesia. And fourth, despite each actor’s political interest, especially those of Demokrat Party, almost all key users in this networks are critizing the Government of Indonesia’s ideas and policies of PSBB during CoVID-19 pandemic.