Coordinated disinformation campaigns target Singapore over Indonesia markets and made-up meeting

Across multiple social media platforms, CNA Verify found close to 400 posts pushing falsehoods tying Singapore to Indonesia’s stock market rout and to a secret meeting that never took place. Together, they drew nearly 12 million views, and some were circulated by accounts that appeared to be working in concert.

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29 Oct 2026 05:00PM (Updated: 29 Oct 2026 05:04PM)

SINGAPORE: The post emerged on Instagram late on a Friday evening, claiming that Singapore’s ambassador in Jakarta had “received” two prominent Indonesians at his residence.

It identified former Indonesian deputy foreign minister Dino Patti Djalal and academic Saiful Mujani and asked, in Bahasa Indonesia, if there was a hidden agenda behind the alleged visit. The Instagram post’s caption also used a Javanese colonial-era slur for locals who serve foreign masters.

Posted by a satirical meme page with over 710,000 followers, it appears to be the earliest attempt at generating online attention for the supposed meeting, which the two men have denied as completely fictitious, and the Singapore embassy dismissed as “clearly disinformation”.

Both men had recently drawn attention for different reasons. The day before, Mr Dino publicly dismissed claims that Singapore was behind a crash in Indonesia’s stock market. And the week before, Mr Saiful’s polling firm published a survey showing declining support for Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto.

The post was one of the nearly 400 posts that CNA Verify found pushing or repeating false and unfounded claims about Singapore, across Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, X and Facebook. The posts have attracted a total of nearly 12 million views across the four social media platforms. Half of these views came from just 10 posts.

Among the main allegations: Singapore engineered Indonesia’s market crash; Singapore should be punished for it; and Dino and Saiful were doing Singapore’s bidding.

The posts, detected through an AI-assisted search before being reviewed manually by the CNA Verify team, appeared from Oct 19 to Oct 27 – a week during which haze from Indonesian forest fires drifted across the region and Indonesia’s stock market suffered its worst two-day fall on record.

Further analysis by CNA Verify also found clear signs that several of the accounts posting these allegations were coordinated – set up on the same day, posting the same words and pictures, and at nearly the same time. However, it could not be established if there was a single operator behind these posts.

Asked about CNA Verify’s findings, Mr Muhammad Faizal Bin Abdul Rahman, a research fellow with the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS) think-tank's regional security architecture programme, pointed to studies showing that Indonesia’s online space was full of individuals known as “buzzers”, who try to influence political opinions in the country.

“Some may be coordinated by local political actors, and some may be organic at the grassroots level. We may be seeing a mix of both,” said Mr Faizal, who specialises in influence operations and geopolitics among others.

“Their primary objective is likely quelling local dissenting voices, but if nationalistic fervour also tries to link foreign actors to these voices, other countries inevitably end up in their crosshairs.”

“IF SINGAPORE TRIES ANYTHING”

The first of the false claims stemmed from Indonesia’s recent stock market rout. On Oct 15, global index provider MSCI said it was considering downgrading Indonesia’s market status over governance concerns, sending shares into a freefall.

On Oct 19, former trade minister Muhammad Lutfi posted a video alleging, without evidence, that Singapore state investors GIC and Temasek had pressured MSCI into the move. Both have rejected the claims as untrue.

On Oct 22, Indonesia’s energy minister said he would “not hesitate to consider stopping exports to countries that do not respect Indonesia”. He named no country and made no mention of MSCI.

Two days later, Indonesia began reducing gas exports to Singapore, saying it needed to safeguard the reliability of domestic supplies. Singapore’s Energy Market Authority has said that the cut amounted to less than 2 per cent of daily gas demand.

Online, some accounts had earlier already attempted to tie gas cuts to Mr Lutfi’s MSCI claim.

Accounts named “Indonesia 2045” on Instagram and Facebook posted that “the Indonesian government is considering halting gas exports to neighbours amid the issue of Singapore’s interference in MSCI”.

Within hours, six TikTok accounts had copied the caption and image into posts of their own. One post drew close to 360,000 views.

The next morning, at least a dozen TikTok and X accounts began pushing a slogan – “Pelanggaran Hukum MSCI, Stop Ekspor Gas” (“MSCI legal violation, stop gas exports”) – mostly tacked onto the end of different post captions. Nine accounts used the same image which explicitly connected the slogan to “if Singapore tries anything”.

Some of these posts were published anywhere from 23 seconds to 25 minutes apart.

#FOREIGNINFLUENCE

Indonesian ex-diplomat Dino was targeted by a larger wave of social media posts that contained more incendiary language and narratives.

On Oct 22, he had dismissed the idea of a Singapore conspiracy against Indonesia as “unrealistic”.The next night, posts began claiming that he and political scientist Saiful – who was also reported to police earlier this year over remarks critics framed as a call to topple the president – had met with Singapore’s ambassador in Jakarta Kwok Fook Seng.

The earliest Instagram post contained a misspelling of Mr Dino’s middle name – Pati instead of Patti – that turned up on 30 other accounts. It was also labelled “INFO A001” – riffing on “Info A1”, Indonesian slang for accurate information from a trusted source and borrowed from military intelligence grading matrix.

The label and its variants were used by more than a dozen other accounts across multiple other platforms. On TikTok, five accounts posted the hashtag “#infoa001” within nine minutes of each other.

Mr Dino, Mr Saiful and the Singapore embassy subsequently issued denials about the alleged meeting. Indonesia’s ruling Gerindra party said it was looking into the reported meeting between “opposition figures” and Singapore’s envoy.

More than half of posts targeting the two men appeared on Oct 25 – the day Mr Saiful and the Singapore embassy issued their denials, and hours after Mr Dino's was first reported. Some of these posts cast the men as traitors or foreign agents, and described the supposed visit as an “influence operation”."

Many of these posts were published in short bursts of seconds or minutes apart, and by different groups of accounts, the largest of which appears to be a network of 68 lookalike, self-styled news pages spread across TikTok, Instagram, X and Facebook.

This group shared captions and graphic templates and included 15 TikTok accounts which were created on a single day in May. 

Some of their posts included hashtags such as #operasipengaruh (Bahasa Indonesia for “influence operation”) and #foreigninfluence. On X, three of the network’s accounts posted versions of the same story 26 seconds apart, one after another.

For all that activity, the network’s posts drew a median of about 760 views each.

Elsewhere, another cluster of nine accounts shared the same text cards, one of which asked whether the two men had “betrayed the nation”. Three accounts posted this within two minutes, with captions also warning against provocation and “cognitive war”.

A separate group of three accounts claimed the pair had received Singapore dollars to “cause riots in Indonesia”. Their shared caption, however, also acknowledged that the claim needed evidence and should not be treated as fact.

“CONVENIENT TARGETS”

Experts previously told CNA that Indonesian politicians have long blamed other countries in times of domestic difficulty – helping them evade accountability while serving as a “rallying cry” at home.

RSIS’ Mr Faizal noted Indonesia was dealing with a mix of issues which “provides the ingredients and motivation for nationalistic voices to find a target to blame, to protect the state from popular dissent”.

“For nationalism to be convincing, it must aim at others that make convenient targets, such as smaller states,” he added.

Mr Faizal said any information contest or its escalation in response to anti-Singapore narratives would not help bilateral ties, which are particularly crucial with Singapore assuming chairmanship of the regional ASEAN bloc in 2027.

“We can highlight the positive aspects of longstanding bilateral relations and distance ourselves from any voices that could perpetuate tensions,” he added. 

“Singapore wants to be a good neighbour and (a) prosperous Indonesia and Southeast Asia are good for Singapore.”