Scott E. Hartley

In the Future, Crystal Balls Will Be All Silicon

Last Wednesday, Indonesia swiftly completed the second direct democratic presidential election in the country’s history. Early results by the General Elections Commission (KPU) indicated that across 40,000 of the 451,000 national polling stations, incumbent president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono won 60.7 percent of the vote, with Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) candidate Megawati Sukarnoputri grabbing 29.7 percent and Golkar Party’s Jusuf Kalla taking 9.6 percent. And despite tepid claims by Megawati’s billionaire financial contributor, Hashim Djojohadikusumo, that 5.9 million fictitious names had been included among the eligible voters, the election took place without incident.

With today’s technology there is no reason why the results should come as a surprise. Silicon Valley has yet to create a veritable crystal ball, but certain online tools are providing voyeurs with the ability to interpret political events in terms of observable changes over time. In some cases, comparing relative change over time against an expected baseline of activity can indicate predictive deviations. Explosive growth in use of the term “SBY” across Internet platforms corroborated what polls said offline: Yudhoyono was re-election bound.

Observation of relative trends over time has been used in many contexts. For example, Raymond Fisman, co-author of “Economic Gangsters,” observed corruption by monitoring stock prices and news. Under the Suharto regime, insider information of Suharto’s health moved what was then the Jakarta Stock Exchange before news became public. In this case, insider information, driven by concealed concern over political change, facilitated opportunistic buying and selling of stock that, in moving the market price, helped reveal corrupt practices.

Today, Internet users reveal themselves publicly in a variety of ways that collaboratively paint a picture of preferences and concerns that, if not generally applicable to the populace, are immediately reflective of the online demographic in the region. In Internet ecosystems such as the United States, where 72 percent of Americans have access, Internet trends can be more widely extrapolated to deduce the public ethos. In Indonesia, despite its low Internet penetration of roughly 5 percent — 13 million of its some 240 million citizens — the Internet is still a useful tool to observe opinion on important issues as well as regional strongholds of support.

Over the course of 90 days leading up to the election, top Google queries across Indonesia almost exclusively included references to popular networking sites such as Facebook and Friendster. As such, among connected Indonesians, use of social networking platforms is important. “Facebook Lexicon,” a tool that allows one to observe trends of terms or topics used in “wall posts” between friends, becomes relevant in indicating shifting ethos. Within the Indonesian Facebook demographic — admittedly a small and likely young group — Facebook Lexicon reveals that over the last year there has been significant change in topics of on-site political discussion.

According to Facebook Lexicon, in July 2008 presidential candidate Megawati was a rising topic of discussion, while politicians in office, namely Yudhoyono and Vice President Kalla, nearly dropped off the radar. In December 2008, the volume of Facebook postings on SBY surpassed the volume of discussion on Kalla, but was still 10 percent less than discussions on “Mega” (most likely inflated because the term “Mega” covered subjects beyond the candidate’s name). Worth noting, however, is that between Jan. 1, 2009, and the day of the election on July 8, Facebook wall postings on “SBY” grew by roughly 1,000 percent. While conversations on “Mega” and “Jusuf Kalla” flatlined, discussions on “SBY” rose steadily.

While Facebook is a platform for networking and discussion, active use of the Google search engine indicates explicit interest. And over the same period, data from Google Insights for Search queries confirmed a swelling Internet interest in the incumbent candidate. Since Jan. 1, 2009, Google queries across Indonesia on “SBY” grew by 625 percent, compared with 40 percent on “Mega.” While relative searches on “Jusuf Kalla” increased by 1,100 percent, his absolute search volume was 89 percent lower than SBY and 45 percent lower than Mega.

Retrospective analysis is always problematic. One must be wary of ex-ante conditions observed ex-post, and the ease of false attribution. And as was seen in the telephone polls of American voters prior to the 1948 presidential election, the misinterpretation of niche trends for alterations in public opinion can yield headlines such as “Dewey Defeats Truman,” perhaps the most popular front-page gaffe in history. But as Google.org and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have shown, aggregated search engine query data can, by observing online health-seeking activity, “accurately estimate the current level of weekly influenza activity in each region of the United States.” In politics, if the frequency of Internet user queries about candidates correlates with the percentage of votes cast, then perhaps this information can also be applied to pre-election statistics, which could augment offline polling data on connected demographics.

In the seven days before the election, SBY received 104 percent more Google queries than Megawati. Early tallies on election day had Yudhoyono receiving 104 percent more votes than Megawati. Perhaps it’s mere coincidence. Then again, perhaps the online information-seeking behavior of a geographically diverse sample of connected Indonesians is illustrative of broader pre-electoral interests. It’s not perfect, and its scope is limited to Internet penetration, but I’m betting that tomorrow’s crystal ball could be made of silicon.



Scott E. Hartley is a researcher at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society and a former employee of Google.

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