Are Indonesians Digitally Uncivilised?
Indonesia scored poorly on the Digital Civility Index, but “uncivilised” may be the wrong conclusion. Scams, literacy and online culture tell another story.
There is something satisfying about a ranking. It takes a subject that is complicated, reduces it to a number, and gives everybody permission to stop thinking quite so hard.
Universities can be ranked,
Cities can be ranked,
Passports can be ranked
…and apparently even the manners of billions of people can be compressed into a score which fits in a spreadsheet. We may not know exactly what makes a civilisation civilised, but fortunately Microsoft has a column for it.
The Digital Civility Index, produced by Microsoft, is intended to measure people’s experiences of online risks and interactions. In its 2020 edition:
Singapore scored 59,
Malaysia 63,
The Philippines 66,
Thailand 69,
Vietnam 72, and
Lower is better, so Indonesia came last among the Southeast Asian countries surveyed and 29th out of 32 countries and territories overall. It is the sort of result that practically writes its own headline: Indonesia has one of the least civilised internets in the world.
Anyone who has spent time online knows that the internet can bring out a peculiar side of humanity, and Indonesia, with its enormous social-media population, is hardly immune. There are scams, misinformation, abuse and the particular species of online argument in which two people who have never met somehow arrive at the conviction that the other should be removed from society.
The index does not actually measure whether people are nice. It measures exposure to a collection of online risks, including bullying, harassment, hate speech, trolling, reputational attacks, unwanted sexual attention, doxing, scams and fraud. It is therefore partly an index of civility, but also an index of safety, vulnerability and digital literacy. The distinction matters because a country can have a perfectly ghastly comment section and a relatively safe online environment, while another can have remarkably courteous users who are being scammed by the thousand.
That makes Indonesia’s 76 neither meaningless nor quite what it appears to be. The number tells us about the digital environment Indonesians were experiencing when Microsoft conducted its survey. It does not, however, give us a scientific measurement of how civilised Indonesians are as people.
And that is where the story gets interesting.
Civility. By Microsoft. 🧴
Microsoft introduced the Digital Civility Index in 2016, partly in response to growing concern about the quality of online interactions. The idea was straightforward: ask people about the unpleasant things that happen to them online and use the answers to construct a picture of the digital environment. By 2020, the survey covered 21 different risks and involved roughly 16,000 respondents across 32 countries and territories.
Much of this methodology is sensible. If people are routinely harassed, threatened, scammed or sexually abused online, it would be strange to declare their country’s digital environment healthy simply because everyone remembers to say “please” before doing it.
The difficulty begins with the word civility.
In ordinary conversation, civility means something like manners: the ability to disagree without behaving like an enraged toddler, to treat strangers with a minimum of dignity and perhaps to resist the urge to turn every minor disagreement into a referendum on somebody’s moral worth. Microsoft’s definition is broader. A scam is uncivil in the sense that it is harmful to the victim, but it is also a crime.
That becomes especially important when looking at Indonesia because the country’s poor result was heavily associated with risks such as hoaxes, scams and fraud. Indonesian reporting on the 2020 results highlighted exposure to hoaxes, scams and fraud at 47%, while 27% of respondents reported exposure to hate speech.
Those figures should concern anyone interested in Indonesia’s digital development. But they do not necessarily tell us that Indonesians are unusually rude.
They may instead tell us that Indonesians are unusually exposed.
Imagine discovering that a particular city has unusually high levels of road accidents. There are several possible explanations.
Perhaps its drivers are uniquely reckless.
Perhaps the roads are badly designed.
Perhaps traffic enforcement is weak.
Perhaps millions of inexperienced drivers have suddenly arrived.
Perhaps all of these things are happening at once.
It would be rather ambitious to conclude that the city’s inhabitants have a national character defect called “bad driving”.
Digital environments work in much the same way. People bring their habits and prejudices online, but the platforms, institutions, incentives and technological infrastructure influence what those people encounter and how they behave. An online environment is society put inside a machine that has its own incentives, and then given an algorithm.
The machine wants engagement.
Human beings, unfortunately, are extremely engaging when they are angry.
Indonesia, Online.
Indonesia’s digital transformation has been extraordinary. The country has developed one of the world’s most dynamic digital economies, with online commerce, fintech, ride-hailing and social media becoming embedded in ordinary life. The scale is enormous, but what is more interesting is the speed with which this has happened.
There is a tendency to treat digital adoption as evidence of digital sophistication. If somebody is constantly using a smartphone, surely they must be good at using the internet… right?
But this is rather like assuming that someone who has driven a car for ten years necessarily understands how an internal-combustion engine works. They may be an excellent driver. They may also have no idea what happens under the bonnet and would probably prefer not to find out.
Thus, someone can be perfectly comfortable using WhatsApp and still have little understanding of phishing. They can spend hours on TikTok without understanding why the platform keeps showing them increasingly provocative material. They can operate an online business without knowing how their data is collected, how scams exploit social engineering or how easily a convincing piece of false information can be manufactured.
This matters enormously in Indonesia because the smartphone has, for a large part of the population, been less the final stage of a long digital education than the entrance itself.
Older, richer internet markets had the luxury of making mistakes gradually. People learned about spam, fake websites, suspicious attachments, chain emails and online scams through a long sequence of minor humiliations. The internet was initially a strange place where someone might email you to announce that you had won a competition you had never entered. Eventually most people learned that the competition was probably not real.
Indonesia has had to acquire many of those instincts while simultaneously becoming one of the world’s largest digital markets.
That creates an unusual problem. The country can be extraordinarily advanced in digital commerce while still having significant weaknesses in digital literacy.
The presence of digital-literacy programmes is a useful reminder of this. The fact that people may need workshops on how to navigate the online world does not mean that Indonesians are technologically backward; it means that the technology has become sufficiently important, complicated and dangerous that knowing how to operate a smartphone is no longer enough.
And this is where the DCI’s Indonesian result becomes much more interesting than its ranking position suggests.
A person who falls for a sophisticated scam is not necessarily uncivilised. They may have been poorly equipped to recognise it.
A person who forwards a hoax may not be malicious. They may believe it.
A person who encounters more hate speech may simply inhabit a digital environment in which such material circulates more freely.
The DCI records the bad experience.
It does not always tell us why.
That makes Indonesia’s 76 look more like a snapshot of a society undergoing an enormous technological transition, with all the usual consequences of learning a new environment while already living inside it.
Meanwhile… in Singapore.
The Southeast Asian rankings would be much easier to interpret if the countries at the top were obviously full of extraordinarily well-mannered people and the countries at the bottom were obviously full of people who communicate by throwing virtual furniture at one another.
But Singapore gets in the way.
Singapore scored 59 in Microsoft’s 2020 index, making it the fourth-best performing country globally and by far the highest in Southeast Asia. Microsoft described the result as evidence of Singapore’s strong digital civility. Its score had also improved from 63 the previous year.
There are perfectly good reasons why Singapore might perform well. It is wealthy, highly educated, technologically advanced and institutionally capable. It has strong infrastructure and a population accustomed to living in a society where rules are not optional suggestions.
But anyone who has spent much time in Singapore’s online communities may recognise a slight wrinkle.
Singaporeans can be extraordinarily civil in person and surprisingly savage behind a username.
This is especially noticeable in forums and comment sections, where the national talent for efficiency occasionally seems to extend to moral judgement. A disagreement that might in real life produce an awkward silence can online become a surprisingly detailed assessment of another person’s intelligence, upbringing and general contribution to society.
The phenomenon is not unique to Singapore, of course. Every country has discovered that anonymity is a remarkable solvent for social restraint. Give people a username and a little distance from consequences and some will suddenly acquire the confidence of a constitutional lawyer addressing Parliament… except that the subject is usually someone’s parking habits.
This is why Singapore’s high DCI score is so elucidating.
It does not mean Singaporeans are nicer online. It means they report fewer of the particular risks incorporated into the index.
A society in which people are less likely to be scammed, threatened, sexually harassed or subjected to serious online abuse is doing something right. But it is entirely possible for that same society to contain a sizeable population of people who become spectacularly unpleasant when arguing anonymously about public transport.
The DCI doesn’t capture that.
Perhaps it should. A future edition might introduce a category called “someone has disagreed with me on Stomp and I am now considering whether democracy was a mistake.”
It would probably score quite highly in every country.
The larger point is that there are two different things hiding under the word “civility”. There is digital safety, which can be measured through exposure to specific risks, and there is digital social behaviour, which includes the subtler ways people make online communities unpleasant without necessarily crossing the threshold into measurable abuse.
The second is where civilisation gets messy.
76.
It would be easy, having identified the weaknesses of the DCI, to dismiss Indonesia’s score entirely, but that would be a mistake.
The underlying problem is real. Indonesia’s respondents reported significantly greater exposure to the risks measured by Microsoft than respondents in the other Southeast Asian countries surveyed. The prevalence of scams, fraud, hoaxes and hate speech deserves attention, particularly in a country whose digital economy is expanding so rapidly.
But there is an equally serious mistake at the other end: treating the score as though it were a measurement of national character.
Survey results are shaped by culture. People have different thresholds for what counts as offensive, threatening or merely annoying. They use different platforms, participate in different communities and spend different amounts of time online. They also have different expectations about what the internet is supposed to be like.
A person who regards an aggressive comment as routine internet noise may answer a survey differently from someone who regards the same comment as harassment.
The number therefore contains a genuine indicator, but it also contains the noise generated by comparing human beings who do not all use the internet in the same way.
There is also another problem: the famous Indonesian figure is old.
The 2020 survey was conducted in April and May of that year. Microsoft subsequently produced a 2022 edition, but the country coverage changed to 22 countries, so it can’t be used as a new edition of the Southeast Asian league table.
So, when somebody quotes Indonesia’s 76 today as though a current measurement, they are effectively using a six-year-old photograph to describe a person who has since changed jobs, moved house and gotten a completely different haircut.
The internet of 2026 is not the internet of 2020.
Generative AI has transformed the production of content.
Deepfakes have become vastly easier to create.
Scam operations have become more sophisticated.
Social-media platforms have changed their incentives and audiences.
The gap between information, entertainment, advertising and political persuasion has become increasingly difficult to maintain.
A current DCI survey might show Indonesia improving.
It might show it getting worse.
It might show that Singapore’s advantage has narrowed, or that the regional hierarchy looks almost exactly the same.
We just do not have a comparable current measurement.
And that matters because rankings have a tendency to become permanent facts. Once a country receives a number, people remember the number and forget the survey.
Indonesia did have a serious digital-civility problem in Microsoft’s 2020 survey. There is no good reason to pretend otherwise. Its respondents reported greater exposure to scams, fraud, hoaxes, hate speech and other online risks than respondents in the other Southeast Asian countries surveyed, and those are problems that matter.
But it does not follow that Indonesians are inherently less civilised online.
What the evidence suggests is that Indonesia has been undergoing an unusually rapid and expansive digital transition, and that digital literacy, social norms, consumer protection and institutional capacity have not always been able to keep pace with it.
That is much more than ‘bad manners’.
It also happens to be a problem that many supposedly “digital civilised” countries have not entirely solved themselves. Singapore may have a safer digital environment than Indonesia according to Microsoft’s measures, but safety is not the same thing as grace. The internet has an ability to turn perfectly respectable citizens into tiny unpaid prosecutors… once somebody gives them a username and removes the possibility of eye contact.
This is the real lesson of the DCI.
A digitally mature society is one in which people can recognise manipulation, avoid scams, evaluate information, protect themselves, understand the systems shaping what they see and participate in online life without being routinely exploited. Being pleasant to strangers is certainly helpful, but it is not enough.
And that makes Indonesia’s position more nuanced than the league table suggests.
The country may simply be one of the places where the enormous experiment of putting human beings online at scale is still visibly under construction.
There will be scams while the wiring is being installed.
There will be misinformation while people learn which switches do what.
There will be arguments.
There will be people shouting in comment sections.
There will be someone explaining that all of this would be solved… if everyone simply listened to him.
That last problem may require a little longer.
The internet has not yet produced a country without idiots.
At StratEx - Indonesia Business Advisory provides Indonesia-focused advisory and leadership intelligence for investors that need to understand what is really moving beneath the surface. Contact us for better visibility before making your next move in Indonesia.