Beyond Digital Access: Social Resilience to Political Misinformation in Rural Indonesia

This article interrogates the information deficit model in studies of political misinformation by examining how a rural Indonesian community with recent and shallow digital connectivity responded to electoral misinformation during the 2024 presidential campaign. Digital divide scholarship assumes that limited access and skills leave rural populations vulnerable to misinformation and reliant on external intervention. Drawing on a survey (n = 400), 20 interviews, and field and digital observation in the transmigrant communities of the Banyuasin waterways, where mobile internet arrived only in late 2019, we find a different pattern. Although residents rely heavily on social media they distrust for electoral information, a large majority neither forwarded nor amplified political content, and recorded disputes were absent during the period observed. We identify three socio-cultural mechanisms that account for this: bonding social capital that embeds information evaluation in dense face-to-face networks; partisan identity that, under conditions of economic interdependence, is expressed through restraint rather than confrontation; and dual-sphere norms that separate offline political talk from a deliberately quiet online presence. We argue that these mechanisms produce social resilience – the community absorbs false claims without fracturing – but that this is distinct from, and costly to, democratic vitality: the same practices that limit the circulation of misinformation also limit its correction and mute those least embedded in local networks. Theoretically, the relationship between digital access, skill, and democratic outcomes is not merely non-linear but differently specified: communities may be socially resilient to misinformation without being epistemically resilient to it. Empirically, the study offers rare micro-level evidence from rural Southeast Asia. Practically, it cautions against reading the absence of visible conflict as evidence that a community is managing information well.