Sandiaga Uno claims he’ll report his own supporters to police if they spread hoaxes about opponents

Former Jakarta Vice Governor Sandiaga Uno. Photo: Instagram/@sandiuno
Former Jakarta Vice Governor Sandiaga Uno. Photo: Instagram/@sandiuno

Yesterday, Sandiaga Uno, running mate to 2019 presidential candidate Prabowo Subianto, attended a ceremony at the National Monument (Monas) in Jakarta and joined his fellow candidates in signing a declaration promising that their campaigns would be peaceful, honest and not engage in attacks based on race or religion.

The former Jakarta vice governor and businessman went even further in follow-up comments to the media, saying that he and his political coalition would not tolerate anybody, including their own supporters, spreading hoaxes about the candidates.

“We have zero tolerance for campaigning with any indication of hoaxes and we will report our supporters directly to the authorities (if they spread such hoaxes),” Sandi said after attending the event in Monas yesterday as quoted by CNN Indonesia.

Sandiga also claimed that his campaign had formed a special team to monitor the messages of their coalition’s key influencers and opinion leaders to evaluate whether the information they were spreading was verified and not defamatory to the other side.

Those are certainly noble sentiments and, for the sake of Indonesian democracy, we hope Sandiaga is true to his word.

However, we have to note that supporters of Sandiaga and current Jakarta Governor Anies Baswedan were known to have spread numerous hoaxes about their rival in the 2017 Jakarta gubernatorial election, former Jakarta Governor Basuki “Ahok” Tjahaja Purnama.

Now, whether you consider the infamous accusation of blasphemy against Ahok to be a hoax might depend on your viewpoint, but the judges of the Bandung District Court sentenced Buni Yani, the person who uploaded the video that directly led to that accusation, to 1.5 years in prison for inciting hatred through his misleading Facebook post.

Sandiaga was not the person to report Buni Yani to the police. Nor did he or Anies Baswedan ever directly dispute the accusation within his post for being based on an incomplete transcript of Ahok’s speech. Instead, they took advantage of the anti-Ahok protests spurred by the video to win the election.

In fact, some officials connected to Prabowo-Sandiaga’s campaign have said that Buni Yani would be welcomed to join them as a social media manager.

But even if you believe the blasphemy accusation against Ahok does not count as a hoax, there were plenty of other hoaxes spread by Anies-Sandiaga supporters and, as far as we know, Sandiaga made no effort to report any of them to the police.

So we hope Sandiaga is actually serious about his anti-hoax stance this time, but forgive us if we remain skeptical for now.



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