Case study reveals netizens' sentiments and protests against political elites, indicating digital civil society's role.
This study discusses the dynamics of digital politics through a case study of netizens' reaction to Gibran Rakabuming Raka's video speech with the theme "Demographic Bonus". YouTube's comment column is used as a discursive arena where netizens express symbolic resistance to the narrative of the political elite. Netizens' comments are analyzed as expressions of digital civil society that not only voice public opinion but also create affective solidarity and micro-political participation in the context of digital democracy in Indonesia. This study uses a mixed methods approach, that combines qualitative-descriptive analysis based on critical discourse analysis with quantitative methods based on Large Language Models (LLM). Qualitatively, the analysis focused on substantive criticism, sarcasm, and moral delegitimization in purposively selected comments. Meanwhile, the quantitative analysis used three API-based models, namely OpenAI, Grok, and Gemini, to process more than 44,000 comments collected through Python web scraping techniques. The dimensions analyzed included sentiment, sentiment objects, emotion categories, writing styles, cognitive engagement levels, and potential bot engagement. The results of the quantitative analysis showed a significant dominance of negative sentiment based on manual validation. These results reveal a significant gap between LLM analysis and manual validation, which is a key finding that AI models currently struggle to capture the nuances of sarcasm and irony that characterize digital political resistance in Indonesia. The comments mostly use informal language and a critical and humorous style, representing a subtle pattern of resistance in the context of cyberactivism. These findings show that the comment column functions as a spontaneous deliberative space that reflects a crisis of substantive legitimacy, in which the public builds horizontal solidarity through political affection based on ethical values and social justice. By integrating in-depth discourse analysis and generalization of quantitative findings, this study contributes to understanding how public moral judgment challenges procedural authority within Indonesia’s evolving digital political landscape.
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Hafid et al. (2025) studied this question.