Digital Literacy Survey 2022: "Digital Culture" Increases, But "Digital Safety" Is Still Low

The Ministry of Communication and Information together with the Katadata Insight Center launched Results of the 2022 Digital Literacy Status Survey. The report revealed several interesting facts, including the National Digital Literacy Index with a score of 3,54. The Digital Culture pillar generally gets the highest index score (3,84), while the Digital Safety pillar gets the lowest index score (3,12).

Measurement of the Digital Literacy Index was carried out through a face-to-face survey conducted in August-September 2022. The Indonesia Digital Literacy Status Survey involved 10.000 respondents in 34 provinces and 514 districts/cities using a multistage random sampling method.

According to the Director of Informatics Empowerment Bonifasius W. Pudjianto, the results of this survey which produced data in the form of an index became a reference for the government to see performance success and make improvements in areas that were still lacking. This will increase collaboration with ministry from others to related parties to improve digital literacy of the Indonesian people.

"This index is important to measure what we have produced over the past few years. digital literacy as a national program that we will launch until 2024, we have a target of reaching around 50 million Indonesians with digital literacy. And everything can be done through collaboration with all related parties."

The 2022 Indonesia Digital Literacy Index measurement refers to the framework in the 2020-2024 Digital Literacy Road Map. This framework is used as a basis for designing programs and curricula for the 2020-2024 Indonesian National Digital Literacy Movement Program.

Access to internet usage

The report revealed that most respondents (85%) accessed the internet via handphone, so they can access the internet anywhere. Respondents most often access the internet in the evening from 19.01 to 21.00 local time after they carry out their daily activities. When compared to previous years, the intensity of internet use tends to decrease, especially after 07.00.

Gen-Y and Z tend to access the internet longer than other age groups. In this young group, more respondents access the internet for more than 6 hours per day, while most GEN-X and Boomers access it for 1 to 4 hours.

The report also revealed that social media is the biggest source of information for 72,6% of respondents. Likewise with television and news online which consistently occupy the position of second and third sources of information, with percentages of 60% and 27,5% this year.

Social media has consistently been the second most trusted source of information over the past three years. The percentage of respondents who trust this media has significantly increased. WhatsApp, Facebook and YouTube are the three social media used by more than 70% of respondents in the last three years.

According to the General Chairperson of Sibercreation Donny Budi Utoyo, the amount of trust the Indonesian people have in social media in terms of searching for information deserves special scrutiny. This allows for the magnitude of the spread of incorrect or disinformation news, seen from the way social media works which not only provide correct information but also incorrect news or hoaxes.

"Social media is the second most trusted source of information after television. This certainly doesn't matter if the information sought is true or has positive content, but it would be dangerous if the news was hoax," said Donny.

According to Donny, it is important for government agencies and related parties, such as other television news, to pay attention to the results of this report. Even though there is a decreasing trend in the number of respondents who trust television as a source of information in 2022, this media is still the media most accessed by 43% of respondents.

Importance digital safety

The interesting thing that was later revealed in the report was that Digital Safety was one of the pillars that experienced the least increase. In this pillar, the indicator contributes mostly to creating secure passwords with a combination of numbers, letters and punctuation marks. While the indicator of the ability to distinguish e-mail containing spam/virus/malware contributes the least.

The issue of personal data is also one of the points discussed in the report. The increasing number of cases of leakage of personal data that are happening at this time makes it difficult for people to get protection for their personal data. UU no. 27 of 2022 concerning Protection of Personal Data which was passed in October 2022 is expected to provide protection to the public from data leakage and misuse and other risks of cyber crime.

This survey of 10.000 respondents nationwide shows that public awareness not to upload personal data to social media is relatively good. However, people still need to be more careful in order to avoid various possible cyber attacks.

According to Donny, it is important for related parties to provide support and guidance on an ongoing basis hands-on making, or directly to the people of Indonesia regarding data protection and sharing it online online. In this way, they can increase their awareness of its importance digital safety.

"Application digital safety must hands-on making,. That means will see how to adapt the program associated with digital security, not just a way to use Zoom, but for practice you have to hands-on making,, starting from how to install related to digital safety," said Donnie.