We are Social publishes data on the number of internet users in 2023 reaching 5.16 billion out of a total world population of 8.01 billion. This means that 64.4% of the world’s population or more than half are already Internet users. From the same source, it was stated that Indonesia recorded 212.9 million Internet users with a total Indonesian population of 276.4 million, which means that 77% of Indonesia’s population already uses the Internet. “So, the percentage of Internet users in Indonesia is greater than in the world,” said Prof. Dr. Indra Budi, S.Kom., M.Kom., in his inauguration speech as professor at the Faculty of Computer Science (Fasilkom) Universitas Indonesia (UI), this morning (20/12).
He further said that one of the most dominant uses of the internet is the use of social media. With people actively using social media, more data and information is being spread on the internet, especially on social media. The data and information circulating can be positive, but there is also a lot of it that is negative, for example fake news (hoaxes), internet fraud, hate speech, bullying and so on. The amount of negative content appearing on social media can have a negative impact on society, for example hate speech which can trigger conflict in society.
Prof. Indra emphasized that the existence of social conflict in cyberspace could have the potential to create new problems in the real world, such as direct debates or even fist fights. “Considering that the content published by users on social media uses human language known as natural language, where in computer science, natural language can be processed in the field of natural language processing. Natural language processing has its own challenges, for example ambiguity, the grammatical structure of word meanings, and very varied sentence meanings. Therefore, social media analysis is needed,” said Prof. Indra in delivering his inauguration speech entitled “Social Media Analysis as an Early Effort to Detect Potential Community Conflicts in Cyberspace” at the Convention Hall, UI Depok Campus.
Social media analysis can be applied to various domains or fields, such as government, commerce, and society. He explained that there were many challenges when, for example, social media data analysis coincided with the momentum of the Indonesian people’s democratic party in the 2014 General Election. The Twitter platform (Now X) revealed that election winners can be predicted using sentiment analysis tasks. Apart from that, social media analysis can also be used to identify abusive speech or hate speech that appears on social media, especially on Twitter.
According to him, in developing applications based on social media analysis, it is necessary to use a computer science approach in general. However, the text mining approach is particularly effective in processing social media data to obtain certain insights. This is an early effort that can be taken to prevent potential conflict in society in cyberspace as a result of the spread of hate speech, especially now that Indonesia is entering an election year.
Until now, Prof. Indra actively produces scientific works which have been published in various national and international journals. Some of these scientific publications include the titles Hate speech and abusive language detection in Indonesian social media: Progress and challenges (2023); Purchase Intention and Sentiment Analysis on Twitter Related to Social Commerce (2023); Application of named entity recognition method for Indonesian datasets: a review (2023); and Understanding the meaning of citations using sentiment, role, and citation function classifications (2022). Prof. Indra, who has been a lecturer at Fasilkom UI since 2008, has completed his undergraduate and doctoral education at Fasilkom UI. He completed his bachelor’s degree in 2000, master’s degree in 2003, and received a doctorate in computer science in 2008.
