Social Media is the New Front Line in Indonesia's War on Terrorism

The arrest of Aman Abdurrahman, the spiritual head of the homegrown terrorist organization Jamaah Ansharut Daulah (JAD), was heralded as an important blow to Indonesia's jihadist networks. But while Aman has remained behind bars since 2016, his radical teachings are still easily accessible to anyone who takes the time to type a few keywords into YouTube.

Aman is, in many ways, emblematic of just how difficult it is to combat the spread of radicalism in this increasingly connected nation. More than half of the nation is online in some form, either through laptops and personal computers or, more likely, their smartphones. And while the country's rising internet penetration has opened the door to a vast new world of information and ways to make money for many Indonesians, it's also allowed radicals like Aman to reach a wider audience than ever before.

The radical preacher was an early adopter of the internet, posting his sermons on YouTube as early as 2003. Today, his followers continue to spread these videos over secure messaging apps like Telegram and police now believe that these sermons were behind the radicalization of some of the country's worst terrorists.

Syawaluddin Pakpahan first joined a radical group back in 2004. But before he decided to leave to fight alongside Islamic militants in Syria in 2013, he had watched dozens of Aman's videos online, and even downloaded Seri Materi Tauhid, Aman's book arguing that democracy and Islam cannot co-exist in countries like Indonesia.

Then, in June of 2017, Syawaluddin attacked a police station in Medan, North Sumatra, fatally stabbing one officer in the chest before he was subdued. Investigators believe that Syawaluddin was radicalized online long before the attacks took place.

The Ministry of Communications and Information, known as Kominfo here, has since gone to great lengths to block this kind of content from the country's regulated internet. The ministry has algorithms that crawl the internet, searching for, among other things, sites and videos about radicalism and in support of terrorism.

But the government's filtering machine is still far from perfect and a lot of sites slip through the cracks. Donny Budi Utoyo, who works in the ministry's censor division, told VICE that they were still trying to improve the algorithm.

“Then it will start blocking contents that match the keywords,” Donny said of sites that support terrorism.

Since the deadly prison riot involving JAD members and supporters of the Islamic State (ISIS) broke out at a detention center on the outskirts of Jakarta earlier this month—and the string of terrorist attacks that followed it in East Java and Riau, the ministry has blocked more than 2,000 websites, Twitter accounts, Facebook groups, and Telegram channels promoting radicalism in Indonesia.

But every time a site is blocked, new ones crop up in its place. All it takes is a change of domain name or a new group or account in Facebook, Twitter, or Telegram to circumvent the government's ban. Between 2010 and 2015, Kominfo had blocked more than 800,000 radical websites. It even tried to block Telegram entirely before folding under pressure from users and it now employs more than 7,000 people tasked with manually crawling social media for terrorist, radical, and hateful posts.

But even with all of those resources, radical content keeps appearing online. It's a modern-day war of attrition that, in all likelihood, will never end.

"There are dozens of radical channels on Telegram, and every day each of them can spread hundreds of pieces of radicalized content," Solahudin, a terrorism expert at the University of Indonesia, told VICE.

Massive global internet companies like Google, which owns YouTube, have entered the fray as well. Google Indonesia failed to respond to an interview request from VICE's Indonesia office by publication, but according to a recent transparency report, YouTube had removed an estimated 8 million videos in the last quarter of 2017 alone. Close to 500,000 of them, or about 1.6 percent, were removed for promoting terrorism.

Online radicalism is the biggest issue hampering Indonesia's efforts to combat terrorism today, Solahudin told VICE. According to his research, it used to take a terrorist organization like Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) between five and ten years to get someone from an early interest in radicalism to participating in an attack. Today, sympathetic Indonesian Muslims are becoming radicalized in less than a year, Solahudin explained.

And while the real recruitment still occurs face-to-face, often at small fundamentalist Quran study groups, those being recruited first come across radical ideologies online before seeking the group out. They've been primed for terrorism long before meeting someone who would actually push them to carry out an attack in real life, Solahudin said.

In this new battleground, the country's war on terrorism is being fought with blocks, likes, and shares. But without banning social media sites outright, something that's been threatened in the past, it's a battle that is likely never going to end.

"Social media is now seen as very important for militant groups because it's directly related to their radicalization efforts," Solahudin told VICE.