TOKYO — Japanese Finance Minister Taro Aso won’t attend a gathering of global economic leaders in Argentina next week, according to people familiar with the matter, costing him the chance to push back against US tariffs and voice his views on currencies.

Mr. Aso, who is facing calls to resign after his ministry doctored files at the center of a cronyism scandal, will be represented by a deputy at the March 19-20 meeting of Group of 20 (G-20) finance ministers and central bankers in Buenos Aires, said to two ruling coalition lawmakers with knowledge of plans. Bank of Japan Governor Haruhiko Kuroda is expected to attend.

Vice Finance Minister Minoru Kihara will go instead of Mr. Aso, said the lawmakers, who declined to be named because there hasn’t been an official announcement. Masatsugu Asakawa, the chief of foreign-exchange policy, will also attend. A spokesman for the finance ministry declined to comment.

As finance minister and deputy prime minister, Mr. Aso leads all economic discussions with the US, overseas Japan’s currency policy and is also head of the agency regulating cryptocurrencies, which will be hot topic at this meeting. His absence at the G-20 will weaken Japan’s voice as other nations seek to resist US protectionism.

“This comes at a bad time,” said Masaaki Kanno, chief economist at Sony Financial Holdings, Inc. “If he can’t go to G-20, that could cost not only the government but also the Japanese economy.”

The scandal stems from the sale of land to an educational institution with ties to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and his wife, and the finance ministry’s subsequent tampering with documents. While Messrs. Aso and Abe have both denied any wrongdoing, the prime minister’s approval ratings have taken a turn for the worse.

While policy makers in Tokyo have been relatively quiet on the currency recently, there is some concern about the yen’s appreciation, which hurts exporters and undermines effort to push inflation higher. The yen has gained about 6% against the dollar this year. — Bloomberg

JAKARTA — Indonesia is battling a wave of fake news and online hate speech ahead of presidential elections in 2019, as a string of arrests underscore fears it could crack open social and religious fault lines in the world’s largest Muslim-majority country.

The pluralist nation’s reputation as a bastion of tolerance has been tested in recent months, as conservative groups exploit social media to spread lies and target minorities.

Police have cracked down, rounding up members of the Muslim Cyber Army (MCA), a cluster of loosely connected groups accused of using Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to attack the government and stoke religious extremism.

Two of the group’s most high-profile falsehoods were claims that dozens of Islamic clerics had been assaulted by leftists and that Indonesia’s outlawed communist party was on the rise, according to police.

Communism — and its hallmark atheist beliefs — remains a taboo subject in Indonesia, where bloody purges under the Suharto dictatorship in the mid-1960s killed half a million suspected leftists.

Gatot Eddy Pramono, the National Police’s head of social affairs, has said the group wants to destabilize government and “create social conflict”.

Although the Southeast Asian nation has seen Internet hoaxes before — including smear campaigns against President Joko Widodo during the 2014 presidential elections — the recent clampdown reflects authorities’ mounting unease about their possible impact on election campaigning.

Indonesia will hold simultaneous regional elections in June, ahead of a presidential ballot in 2019.

Last month, the communications ministry announced it was deploying new software to identify fake news websites, while Widodo — who has battled false Internet claims that he is a communist — inaugurated a new cyber security agency in January.

Indonesia’s problem with internet hoaxes and misinformation campaigns reached fever pitch in the lead up to elections in Jakarta in late 2016 and early 2017, with incumbent governor Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, nicknamed Ahok, bearing the brunt of it.

Ahok — the city’s first Christian and ethnically Chinese leader — was lambasted by Islamic hardliners after an edited video appeared to show him insulting the Koran. The allegations drew hundreds of thousands of conservative Muslims onto the streets of Jakarta in major protests, and led to the once-popular Ahok – an ally of Widodo — being jailed for blasphemy after losing the election to a Muslim challenger.

The Muslim Cyber Army played a pivotal role in disseminating content attacking Ahok and non-Muslims.

“MCA was organizing and agitating with this case,” said Savic Ali, director of the media department at Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), Indonesia’s largest moderate Muslim organization.

“There was a clear sentiment about religion in many of its accounts.”

The group has at least four ideologically driven clusters that spread inflammatory material with the help of bots — software programs that run repetitive tasks — or by hacking into opponents’ online accounts, said Damar Juniarto, Indonesia coordinator for digital rights group SAFENET.

One cluster pushed radical Islam and the establishment of a caliphate, while others supported conservative political and military figures opposed to Widodo.

“They pose a threat to the national election in 2019,” Juniarto said.

“What they want to do now, in 2018, is copy what happened in Jakarta in other parts of the country.”

Police have pledged to be on high alert for hoaxes, but they have their work cut out.

Some 130 million Indonesians — about half the population — spend an average of nearly three-and-a-half hours a day on social media, one of the highest rates in the world, according to data from London-based creative agency We Are Social and social media management platform Hootsuite.

The country was also late to introduce digital literacy programs, experts say.

“Many Indonesian people maybe think that every article and video on the internet is right,” Ali said.

“They don’t know it is false.”

Indonesia has long been praised for its moderate, inclusive brand of Islam, and it officially guarantees freedom of worship for six religions.

But minorities — including Non-Muslims and LGBT people — have been increasingly targeted in recent years and fake news is adding fuel to the fire, SAFENET’s Juniarto said.

“This can easily become real segregation and conflict if nobody does anything about it,” he added. — AFP