PLAN TO FINE SOCIAL MEDIA FIRMS

Indonesia to issue guidelines for tech companies that will be enforced in 2021

INDONESIA will meet social media companies to discuss plans to impose fines of up to US$36,000 (RM151,000) if they allow pornography, violence or other “negative” content on their platforms, a Communications Ministry official said.

The Southeast Asian country aims to push firms to better monitor and delete content the authorities deem obscene, Semuel Abrijani Pangerapan, the ministry’s director of information applications, said on Tuesday.

He said the ministry would issue a regulation governing the mechanism for fines following discussions with the companies.

The fines could go into effect in 2021.

“The point of this is that control of content will no longer be the job of the government,” Pangerapan said, adding that he would invite companies including Google Facebook and Twitter.

Representatives of Twitter and Facebook did not respond to requests for comment.

At an earlier press conference, Semuel said “negative” content included pornography or radicalism, and fines could range from 100 million rupiah (RM30,072) to 500 million rupiah.

The move comes amid wider regional efforts by Southeast Asian governments to demand action from tech giants on content regulation and tax policy.

The stakes are high for governments, which are counting on the digital economy to drive growth amid domestic political tensions, and Internet companies, which view Southeast Asia’s social-media-loving population of 641 million as a key growth market.

Indonesia is a top-five market globally for United States tech giants Facebook and Twitter.

Authorities have succeeded in getting social media companies Telegram and TikTok to establish content monitoring teams in Indonesia after briefly banning them over “negative content”.

Communications Ministry officials said in August they were working on a “three-letter system”, meaning that if a platform fails to respond to three government requests to engage on an issue, then it would be banned from the country.

Indonesia has blocked more than 70,000 websites displaying “negative content” last year using a so-called “crawling system” that searches Internet content and issues alerts when inappropriate material is found.