Media Sosial dan Perubahan Otoritas Keagamaan Islam: Analisis Literatur dalam Perspektif Sosiologi Agama

Abstract

This article analyzes how social media is reconfiguring Islamic religious authority and explains these changes through the perspective of the sociology of religion. The study used an integrative literature review with a qualitative approach. The main corpus comes from seven records of Scopus indexed articles, then enriched with cutting-edge articles searched through Sinta, as well as international literature obtained through cross-reference search. A total of 24 journal articles published in 2016-2026 were synthesized thematically based on sources of legitimacy, platform mediation, audience participation, institutional adaptation and socio-religious consequences. The results of the study show that digitalization does not replace the authority of traditional scholars in a linear manner, but rather results in a hybrid configuration that brings together scientific genealogy, institutional recognition, communication performativity, algorithmic visibility, and audience engagement. Social media decentralizes access to religious knowledge, makes metrics and recommendation systems a mechanism of visibility, and places followers as co-producers of legitimacy through the act of following, commenting, sharing, defending, and criticizing religious figures. At the same time, Islamic boarding schools, Islamic organizations, and established scholars are adapting to digital platforms so that traditional epistemic capital survives. This article proposes the concept of hybrid-algorithmic-participatory authority. The consequences are ambivalent: the expansion of access, the emergence of new actors, and more dialogical communication go hand in hand with fragmentation, polarization, simplification, commercialization, and misinformation. Therefore, digital religious literacy and accountable platform governance are needed to maintain the epistemic quality and ethics of Islamic public spaces.