From popular misogyny to crowdsourced Ibuism: Platform surveillance and the digital reproduction of Indonesian motherhood

This study revisits the top-down state institutions Ibuism in the New Order, arguing that it has been reconfigured into a crowdsource model on social media platforms, particularly TikTok. Drawing on Sarah Banet-Weiser’s popular misogyny, Mark Andrejevic’s lateral surveillance, Rachel Hall’s aesthetics of transparency, and crowdsourcing literature, the study examines how everyday users collectively perform the labour of peer-to-peer surveillance and disciplining mothers through public microaggressions and mom-shaming. Employing digital ethnography, this study analyses interactions in TikTok, and converges evidence from interviews with mothers, the findings reveal that social media becomes a locus of a transparent, panoptic space in which women’s maternal performances are made perpetually visible and subject to collective judgment. The study introduces the concept of crowdsourced Ibuism to theorise this shift from state-driven to user-driven and platform-mediated gender governance. This crowdsourced system operates without direct state intervention. Instead, undefined users collaboratively outsource tasks, ideas, and supply the unpaid disciplinary labour of enforcing idealised motherhood, while platforms extract value from the resulting data, engagement, and attention. It argues that this model is more resilient and pervasive than its predecessor, as it is sustained by participatory surveillance and the economy of visibility, especially within the context of Indonesia.