INDONESIA BLOCKS 70,000 PORN SITES
The country has blocked 800,000 sites, with 90pc of them pornographic, says minister
IDemocratic National Committee chairman Tom Perez NDONESIA has blocked more than 70,000 websites displaying “negative” content, such as pornography or extremist ideology, in the first month of using a new system to help purge the Internet of harmful material, the communications minister said.
The world’s most populous Muslim-majority country stepped up efforts to control online content after a rise in hoax stories and hate speech, and amid controversial anti-pornography laws pushed by Islamic parties.
The “crawling system” developed by a unit of the state-run Telekomunikasi Indonesia Tbk was launched last month, using 44 servers to search Internet content and issue alerts when inappropriate material was found.
“We just put some sort of key words there, most of them are pornographic,” said Communication and Information Minister Rudiantara, who uses one name.
“Because, after 2017, we have blocked almost 800,000 sites and more than 90 per cent (of these were) pornographic.”
According to ministry data, the system, installed at a cost of around US$15 million (RM58.3 million), helped block 72,407 pornography sites last month.
The ministry was also responsible for getting content removed from social media if there were complaints from the public.
Indonesia threatened last year to block Facebook Inc’s WhatsApp Messenger, widely used in the country, unless obscene Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) images provided by third parties were removed.
Authorities blocked access to some channels on encrypted messaging service Telegram last year, saying it had several forums that were “full of radical and terrorist propaganda”.
Google, owned by Alphabet Inc, removed 73 LGBT-related apps from its Play Store last month, including the world’s largest gay dating app, Blued, on a request by Indonesia, a communications ministry official said.
The lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community faced a crackdown in Indonesia, and the official said the apps’ contents contradicted cultural norms and had pornographic content. Google declined to comment.
Rudiantara said the relationship with social media firms and tech giants was improving, and put some disagreements down to differences over what, for example, constituted pornography.
“To us, probably it is pornographic, because we refer to the laws of pornography in Indonesia. But for other parts of the world, they say it is not pornography, it is art,” he said.