Minister reveals online gambling operators' strategy to flood social media comments

Jakarta (ANTARA) - Minister of Communication and Digital Affairs Meutya Hafid has explained the process by which online gambling content is spread through the comment sections of social media accounts, with perpetrators beginning their operations by monitoring social media activity in real-time. “Based on reports received by the Ministry of Communication and Digital Affairs, the spam operations are run using a system capable of monitoring social media activity in real-time,” Meutya said during a press conference at the ministry’s office in Jakarta on Tuesday. The perpetrators’ system monitors social media activity until it detects a surge in interactions on a particular account. Once a spike in engagement is identified, the system sends comments containing promotions to that account. She assessed that the increasingly organised nature of the attacks, which exploit technology, means that handling judol comment spam cannot be done by the government alone. Therefore, Meutya continued, cross-agency collaboration and support from digital platform companies are necessary to strengthen prevention and enforcement efforts against the spread of judol content in the digital space. On the same occasion, Meutya stated that spam comments containing judol promotional material are most frequently found on the accounts of regional influencers with high interaction rates. “The primary target has shifted. The distribution of targets shows that the accounts most spammed are those with high engagement,” she said. She detailed that 52 percent of detected judol comments were found on regional influencer accounts, 31 percent on government agency accounts, 12 percent on mass media accounts, and five percent on public figure and politician accounts.