Imagine waking up one ordinary Friday to discover that your name is being dragged across the internet, that strangers are calling you a traitor, that your country’s embassy has had to issue a statement about you, and that thousands of people are now asking who you really are. That is what happened to two men, Mr Saiful and Mr Dino, even though the story at the center of the outrage did not appear to be true. They had reportedly been accused of making a secret visit to Singapore, a visit that was described in social media posts as a suspicious “influence operation.” But by the time the men could respond, the story had already slipped out of anyone’s control. It had been shared in short, rapid bursts, in almost identical language, by dozens of accounts that looked like ordinary news pages but were actually pieces of a coordinated machine. The posts were not simply people expressing anger. They were manufactured with templates, shared captions, and carefully timed uploads. The two men were not just being criticized; they were being digitally staged as villains in a story that had been written for them before they ever had a chance to speak. And that is the part of this story that should worry everyone, because what happened to Mr Saiful and Mr Dino could happen to anyone who suddenly becomes the subject of a false and coordinated online attack.
The timing of the posts tells us a great deal about how this kind of operation works. More than half of the posts targeting the two men appeared on October 25, which was the same day that Mr Saiful and the Singapore embassy issued their denials, and just hours after Mr Dino’s own denial was first reported. That is not a coincidence. In the world of online manipulation, timing is everything. When a denial lands, the window for shaping public opinion is extremely short. The people behind the campaign wanted to flood the zone before the truth could settle. If they could fill search results and social feeds with scary words like “traitor,” “foreign agent,” and “influence operation” within the same news cycle, they might muddy the story enough to make people hesitate. Would-be readers might see the denial, but they would also see a wall of accusing posts, and the two would blur together. The accounts did not wait to see how the story developed. They struck on the most important day, in the hours when journalists were still trying to verify facts and the public was still deciding what to believe. It was a classic tactic: use speed and volume to create the illusion of controversy, even when the underlying story is flimsy. And it worked, at least in the sense that it made the men look guilty in front of audiences that were never going to read past the headline.
The largest group behind this coordinated burst was a network of 68 lookalike, self-styled news pages spread across TikTok, Instagram, X, and Facebook. They were not all the same account, but they behaved as if they were run by the same hand. They shared captions and graphic templates, which means they used the same visual style, the same wording, and the same framing to make their posts look like a grassroots chorus of independent outlets. Among them were 15 TikTok accounts that had been created on a single day in May, a clear sign that someone had prepared an army of fake pages long before the story ever surfaced. These pages made themselves look like news organizations, with names and layouts designed to appear credible, but they were not journalism. They were tools. Their posts included hashtags such as #operasipengaruh, a mashed-together version of the Indonesian phrase for “influence operation,” and #foreigninfluence. On X, three of the network’s accounts posted versions of the same story exactly 26 seconds apart, one after another, as if they were all reading from the same script and simply pressing enter in turn. No organic newsroom works like that. No group of independent journalists posts the same story within half a minute of each other unless they are following instructions. The timestamps were almost too perfect, and they betrayed the very thing the network was trying to hide: this was not a spontaneous expression of public concern, but a coordinated campaign.
There were also smaller clusters doing similar work. One group of nine accounts shared the same text cards, and one of those cards asked whether the two men had “betrayed the nation.” Three of those accounts posted the same piece within two minutes, with captions warning against provocation and “cognitive war.” The use of that phrase is interesting, because it suggests the people behind the campaign wanted to present themselves as defenders against foreign meddling, even while they were doing the meddling themselves. Another separate group of three accounts went even further, claiming that the two men had received Singapore dollars to “cause riots in Indonesia.” But their shared caption contained a strange admission. It acknowledged that the claim needed evidence and should not be treated as fact. This is a common trick in modern disinformation. You make a dangerous accusation, then add a disclaimer that sounds responsible, as if to say, “We are just asking questions.” The disclaimer gives the poster deniability while still pushing the false idea into the world. It is a way of spreading poison while keeping your own hands clean. What is perhaps most striking, though, is how little reach this entire operation actually generated. The network’s posts drew a median of about 760 views each. That is not nothing, but it is also not the kind of viral explosion that would make national headlines. The campaign was not necessarily designed to convince millions of people directly. It may have been designed to create just enough scattered chatter, just enough semi-credible-looking pages sharing the same story, so that later the story could be picked up by real media outlets as something “many people are talking about.” In that sense, the low view count is not a sign of failure. It may be a sign of method.
For Mr Saiful and Mr Dino, however, the numbers do not matter as much as the experience. When your name is attached to an accusation, even a false one, you do not get to see the median view count. You see the worst posts, the angry comments, the screenshots forwarded by friends and relatives who ask, “What is this?” You feel the world closing in around a story you cannot control. The fact that many of the posts were made by anonymous accounts, rather than by real people who had actually thought about the issue, makes the experience even more unsettling. It means that the outrage was not even real, and yet the consequences were. The men had to contend with the possibility that their reputations, their relationships, their careers, and their safety could be damaged by a handful of coordinated social media accounts. They had to watch as their denials were published, only to be met by a fresh wave of attacks. And they had to do this in a public square where the algorithm treats every post the same, whether it comes from a genuine journalist, a concerned citizen, or a bot network created on a single day in May. The human cost of this kind of manipulation is often invisible from the outside. We see the posts, we see the hashtags, we see the drama, but we do not see the sleepless nights, the frantic calls to lawyers, the worry about what will happen when a false story reaches the wrong person. This is why it is so important to remember that the two men at the center of this story were not just names in an article. They were real people, caught in a web that had been built to trap them.
What should we take away from this strange and unsettling episode? First, we should recognize that coordinated inauthentic behavior is not always about election interference or geopolitics. Sometimes it is aimed at ordinary individuals, using the same tools and tricks that are used against governments and institutions. The playbook is familiar: create fake news pages, give them plausible names, craft a story that taps into existing fears about foreign influence and national betrayal, then release the story in timed bursts so that it looks like a wave of public concern. Second, we should understand the importance of digital literacy. When we see a post that seems to confirm our suspicions, we need to ask who is behind it, whether other accounts are sharing the exact same language, and whether the timestamps suggest coordination. If a story is being spread by a network of lookalike pages, that is not a sign of truth; it is a sign of manipulation. Third, platform companies have a greater responsibility. The fact that 15 TikTok accounts could be created on the same day and operate together as part of a network of 68 pages shows that the safeguards designed to catch this kind of behavior are not working well enough. The platforms could look for the signals, the shared templates, the unusual posting patterns, and the fake news-style pages, and remove them before they can cause damage. But that requires resources and commitment, and it often seems easier to wait until a story has already hurt someone. Finally, we should all have a little more compassion for the people who find themselves on the wrong end of a disinformation campaign. It is easy to dismiss them as collateral damage, but they are not. They are human beings whose lives can be upended by a few anonymous posts. The story of Mr Saiful and Mr Dino is not just a case study in online manipulation. It is a reminder that behind every accusation, every hashtag, and every shared screenshot, there is a person who may be waking up to a nightmare. And if we are not careful, if we do not learn to spot the patterns, any one of us could be next.