Emotion classification can be a powerful tool to derive narratives from social media data. Traditional machine learning models that perform emotion classification on Indonesian Twitter data exist but rely on closed-source features. Recurrent neural networks can meet or exceed the performance of state-of-the-art traditional machine learning techniques using exclusively open-source data and models. Specifically, these results show that recurrent neural network variants can produce more than an 8% gain in accuracy in comparison with logistic regression and SVM techniques and a 15% gain over random forest when using FastText embeddings. This research found a statistical significance in the performance of a single-layer bidirectional long short-term memory model over a two-layer stacked bidirectional long short-term memory model. This research also found that a single-layer bidirectional long short-term memory recurrent neural network met the performance of a state-of-the-art logistic regression model with supplemental closed-source features from a study by Saputri et al. [8] when classifying the emotion of Indonesian tweets.