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27-07-2023
MEDAN: Elon Musk’s aspirations for X, the social media site formerly known as twitter, have hit a stumbling block in Indonesia after the site X.com was blocked under the country’s curbs on online pornography and gambling.
Indonesia’s Ministry of Communication and Informatics said the site was restricted as the domain had been previously used by sites that did not adhere to the country’s strict laws against “negative” content such as pornography and gambling.
Usman Kansong, the director general of information and public communication at the ministry, said the government had been in contact with X to clarify the nature of the site.
“Earlier today, we spoke with representatives from Twitter and they will send a letter to us to say that X.com will be used by Twitter,” Kansong told local media on Tuesday.
The move means that Indonesians currently cannot access the platform, which reportedly has about 24 million users among the country’s population of 270 million.
The debacle comes after Musk on Monday announced Twitter would be dropping its name and bird logo in favour of a white X on a black background as part of a rebranding of the influential social media platform.
Musk has cast the rebranding, which generated a mixed response among users, as a first step toward transforming the platform into an “everything app” that offers services beyond social networking, such as payments and banking.
Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim-majority country, has form when it comes to blocking, or threatening to block, popular websites.
In 2022, authorities said they would block popular sites including Netflix, Google, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter if they did not make a submission to the ministry detailing the content that appears on their platforms. The sites all managed to avoid the proposed ban by registering before the deadline.
Netflix was blocked by Indonesia’s largest telecommunications company, Telekomunikasi Indonesia, shortly after its launch in 2016 due to fears of “inappropriate content”, including pornography, and remained restricted until mid-2020. TikTok, the popular video-sharing app, was also briefly blocked by authorities in 2018.
“Generally, the ministry blocks websites that are considered to be offensive, criminal or dangerous to social harmony,” Gatria Priyandita, a cyber policy analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, told media. (Int’l Monitoring Desk)
