Today, Indonesia said that it would call the representatives of the social media services, including Google, and demand the removal of obscene content. This followed yesterday’s threat the nation to shut down WhatsApp.
In fact, the internet is partly censored in the country – and the latest action directs against its own gradual conservatism growth. Samuel Pangerapan, an executive of the communication and informatics department of Indonesia, said that they are to ‘call all the providers including Google to clean up their network.
Regarding the threat to WhatsApp, Pangerapan strictly said that the messaging platform has to ‘follow the rules of the host.’ In response, WhatsApp said that it couldn’t monitor GIFs for its message encryption, and these GIFs are provided by third-party services in the app.
Tenor Inc, a third party for WhatsApp, said today that they have already provided a fix for the relevant content issues. Another third party, Giphy Inc of New York, kept themselves unresponsive to requests for comment. Giphy is known to offer filters for inappropriate content.
Coming back to Indonesia’s warning, the most populous Muslim-majority country did not target Gboard of Google, but it should be separately installed on most devices – according to the norms.
Furthermore, research by Tor Project published in May states says that Indonesia is into blocking access for her citizens – to the websites providing criticism on Islam, sex education, and dating services.
In 2014, Indonesia was ranked fourth after USA, India, and Brazil; in terms of Facebook usage, with 69 million users being active monthly.
Then, there were criticisms of Indonesia’s actions on blocking websites, but the nation came to a settlement with some of the tech companies. Bans were thusly revoked for the social media providers in the country, as cooperation with the regulators has been agreed.
All said and done, it’s interesting to see how the world’s leading social media service providers respond to Indonesia’s summoning and how they take action against the growing abusive content.
Among the globally shared contents of today, while subjects like sex education are essential for future generations, there are numerous other subjects that hamper cultures and beliefs – which need to be taken note of. We hope that the leading social media platforms step up in accordance with the same.
