The Influence of Social Media on Religious Moderation among University Students

Abstract

Indonesia's social and religious diversity makes religious moderation an important concern in higher education, particularly as students increasingly obtain religious information through social media. This quantitative ex post facto survey examines the influence of social media use on religious moderation among 120 students in the Informatics Engineering Program at Universitas Pamulang. Data were collected through an online five-point Likert questionnaire and analyzed using simple regression. Descriptively, 54.2% of respondents used social media for more than four hours per day, 78% reported that social media helped them understand respect for religious differences, 62% had encountered religious hate content, and 40% acknowledged having been influenced by provocative religious information before verification. The source reports a statistically significant regression result (p < .001) and R-squared of .64. These results indicate that social media is closely associated with students' religious-moderation attitudes, while also functioning as a channel for inclusive knowledge, intolerance, misinformation, and polarization. Digital and religious literacy are therefore essential for strengthening critical content selection. Because the source does not report the population size, instrument-test statistics, regression coefficient, standard error, or ANOVA table, the magnitude and direction of the model should be interpreted cautiously and not generalized beyond the surveyed students.