Hoax! Prabowo instructs schoolchildren to play DOTA game

A Facebook post claimed that President Prabowo Subianto instructed all students in Indonesia to learn to play the DOTA game. The post featured a video clip of President Prabowo’s speech, which appeared to contain an order for all school levels to play the online game. The post then criticised the statement, arguing that presidential instructions should be used for more important policies rather than regulating games. The statement attributed to Prabowo in the post was: ‘Now I have instructed that all levels of schools in Indonesia must learn to play DOTA.’ The post was accompanied by a narrative questioning the urgency of issuing a presidential instruction for a game, noting that such instructions are significant and should not be issued carelessly, and warning that frequent trivial instructions could undermine the president’s authority. However, based on investigation, no official information or statement was found confirming that President Prabowo instructed students to play DOTA. An examination using the AI Detector Hive Moderation indicated the circulated video had a 79.8 percent probability of being an artificial intelligence manipulation or deepfake. The original video is from a broadcast by the Presidential Secretariat titled ‘LIVE: Official State Welcoming Ceremony for President Prabowo in the French Republic, Paris, May 28th 2026’. In that speech, President Prabowo never mentioned the DOTA game nor instructed students to play it. In the original context, Prabowo conveyed the importance of enhancing educational cooperation between Indonesia and France. He stated that all levels of schools in Indonesia need to start learning French as part of preparations for future global developments. The statement ‘must learn French’ was manipulated into ‘must learn to play DOTA’ through audio and video engineering, creating the false impression that President Prabowo issued such an instruction. Thus, the claim that President Prabowo instructed all Indonesian students to play DOTA is false information or a hoax.