Digital Political Delegitimization in Indonesia: Framing the “Antek Asing” Narrative in Hybrid Media
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.30863/palakka.v7i1.11672Keywords:
Digital political communication, political delegitimization, foreign-threat rhetoric, hybrid media, Indonesian politicsAbstract
This study examines how the antek asing (“foreign lackey”) narrative operates as a digital political delegitimization system in contemporary Indonesian political communication, focusing on discourse surrounding Prabowo Subianto. Using an integrated mixed-method design, the study combines framing analysis, social network analysis, and knowledge graph retrieval-augmented generation to analyze a multi-source corpus of 340 YouTube videos from 131 channels, 609 political discussion transcript segments, and seven web-based sources. The analysis examines narrative clusters, actor–claim relations, framing competition, and diffusion structures across Indonesia’s hybrid media ecosystem. The findings show that the antek asing discourse functions not as isolated rhetoric, but as a structured delegitimization repertoire organized through accusation escalation, symbolic enemy construction, and distributed amplification. Five framing types emerged: pro-narrative, critical, analytical, clarification, and neutral amplification. Neutral amplification dominated circulation volume, while analytical and clarification-oriented frames showed high engagement efficiency. The narrative also escalated from “foreign lackey” labeling toward betrayal frames, producing fragmented but interconnected communities of accusation and critique. The study contributes to debates on digital populism, information integrity, and political delegitimization by showing how foreign-threat rhetoric becomes a relational and platform-mediated system of contested legitimacy.
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