From FYP to Fraud: A Quantitative and Multimodal Content Analysis of Religious Charity Scams on TikTok Ajeng Fajarwati Sumarna
Department Communication and Islamic Broadcasting, Islamic University of Sayyid Ali Rahmatullah Tulungagung
Abstract
Charity scams are a form of cybercrime involving fraud disguised as religious charity. Messages are manipulated using dramatic audiovisual content to elicit sympathy from the audience and encourage them to donate. Supported by the use of the algorithm-based social media platform TikTok, these cyber-begging messages have reached a much wider audience in Indonesian society. Moreover, Indonesia is known as one of the most charitable societies in the world, a fact that has led to charity scams becoming increasingly prevalent in the country. Based on the above phenomenon, this study aims to analyze how such scams are narratively framed, constructed multimodally, and structurally reinforced by platform design. This study employs a three-theory approach: Platform Affordances (Media Architecture), Framing Theory (Robert Entman), and Multimodal Social Semiotics (Kress & van Leeuwen). This study employs a mixed-methods approach that combines two methods: quantitative content analysis using data scraping techniques to collect data from the social media platform TikTok and multimodal content analysis (MCDA) to dissect charity scam content on social media. The findings reveal that charity scam messages are distributed via TikTok by combining audio, visual, and narrative elements in a convincing manner designed to encourage the audience to donate voluntarily. This study contributes theoretically to the field of digital communication regarding the commodification of religion on social media and to fraud mitigation literacy for the Indonesian public.
Topic: Strategic Communication in the Digital Sphere: Cultivating Civic Trust through Data-Driven Approaches (Digital Communication- Public Communication Strategy- Civic Trust)
