When Environmental Disaster Is Silenced: How Algorithmic Power Erased Indonesia’s Flood Crisis
By Dina Chaerani
I was standing under the bright lights of Bogotá, hosting Sex O’Clock News at the International Conference on Family Planning, when my phone began to fill with messages from home. As a 29-year-old Indonesian activist, being invited onto a global stage was meant to signal progress. It was supposed to mean that voices from the Global South were finally being heard.
But as I spoke about youth leadership and digital rights, a very different reality was unfolding back home.
In late 2025, large parts of Indonesia were being swallowed by floods. Entire villages in Aceh, North Sumatra, and West Sumatra were submerged. Roads collapsed. Crops were destroyed. Families were stranded for weeks without access to aid. Yet beyond local news outlets and private messaging groups, almost no one seemed to notice.
The disaster was not invisible because it was small. It was invisible because it was filtered out.
A Crisis That Failed to Travel
Between November and December 2025, extreme rainfall triggered catastrophic flooding and landslides across northern Sumatra. According to Indonesia’s National Disaster Management Agency, more than 1,000 people died, over 200 were reported missing, and more than 3.3 million were affected across multiple provinces. Tens of thousands of homes were damaged or destroyed, and entire communities were cut off from food, clean water, and medical care.
Local authorities warned that in some areas people were no longer dying from the floods themselves, but from hunger and isolation as aid struggled to reach them. The estimated cost of recovery exceeded three billion US dollars.
And yet, outside Indonesia, the crisis barely registered.
There were no sustained headlines. No sustained outrage. While wars and humanitarian emergencies elsewhere dominated global attention, this catastrophe quietly slipped past international awareness.
How Disasters Disappear Online
Indonesia’s information environment sits at the intersection of state power, concentrated media ownership, and opaque platform governance. Over the past decade, authorities have expanded their control over digital spaces in the name of public order, misinformation prevention, and national stability. At the same time, global platforms determine visibility through algorithmic systems that remain largely unaccountable.
Together, these forces produce a form of censorship that does not rely on bans or takedowns.
Content is not deleted. It is deprioritized.
Posts documenting flooded villages receive little distribution. Images of destroyed homes are flagged as sensitive. Updates from affected communities fail to travel beyond immediate networks. What results is a form of digital quieting that leaves no clear trace.
From the outside, nothing appears wrong. The information technically exists. It is simply buried.
When Algorithms Align With Power
This form of silence is not accidental. Indonesia’s media landscape is dominated by a small number of political and corporate actors whose interests often align with state narratives. Stories that expose environmental degradation, policy failures, or unequal development challenge those interests.
Algorithmic systems, designed to optimize engagement and reduce risk, naturally reinforce this imbalance. Content that might provoke scrutiny or controversy is deprioritized. Content that aligns with stability and neutrality rises.
The result is not censorship in the traditional sense, but something more subtle and just as effective.
The Cost of Digital Silence
I have spent years working on digital rights and sexual and reproductive health, watching communities adapt to opaque moderation systems by changing language, avoiding keywords, and reshaping stories to survive online. But when communities facing disaster must do the same simply to be seen, the cost becomes unbearable.
When visibility depends on algorithmic approval, suffering becomes conditional. This is not merely a failure of communication. It is a failure of accountability. If the floods in Aceh had occurred in a region already centered in global media narratives, would the response have been faster? Would aid have arrived sooner? Would political pressure have mounted more quickly? Silence protects those in power. It delays action. It normalizes abandonment.
Breaking the Silence
If we are serious about climate justice, digital rights, and humanitarian accountability, we must confront the systems that determine whose suffering is visible.
That means demanding transparency from platforms about how crisis content is ranked and suppressed. It means building mechanisms that allow urgent information to circulate without being penalized. It means recognizing that algorithmic governance is not neutral infrastructure but a form of power.
When disasters disappear from our feeds, they do not disappear in reality. They simply become easier to ignore.
And in a world increasingly shaped by algorithms, silence is not accidental. It is engineered.
References
Badan Nasional Penanggulangan Bencana. (2025). Update dampak banjir dan tanah longsor di Sumatra. Government of Indonesia. https://www.bnpb.go.id
Freedom House. (2024). Freedom on the Net: Indonesia. https://freedomhouse.org
Gillespie, T. (2018). Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, content moderation, and the hidden decisions that shape social media. Yale University Press.
Katadata Databoks. (2025). Jumlah pengungsi rentan akibat banjir di Aceh dan Sumatra Utara. https://databoks.katadata.co.id
Kaye, D. (2019). Speech police: The global struggle to govern the internet. Columbia Global Reports.
Reuters. (2025a). Indonesian officials warn of hunger risks after Sumatra floods. https://www.reuters.com
Reuters. (2025b). Indonesia says more than $3 billion is needed to rebuild after the Sumatra floods. https://www.reuters.com
Tufekci, Z. (2018). YouTube, the great radicalizer. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com
University of Gadjah Mada. (2025). Forest degradation worsened Sumatra floods, experts say. https://ugm.ac.id