Censorship in Indonesia: No Porn Please!

Popular video sharing site Vimeo was blocked by Indonesias largest telco Telkomsel for a short while. And while it was still being blocked, the only reasonable answer that the companys customer service and staff had was that Vimeo was somehow associated with the only thing that is being widely censored in Indonesia: porn.

As the third largest democratic country in the world, the news media here can still talk about anything that they want (albeit with a few discouragements), even when it is related to the first familys dodgy tax returns. One of the reporters of the above article tweeted about his experience being contacted time and time again by the presidents staff. And The Jakarta Post office was heavily discouraged from publishing the article. But still, the government couldnt do anything other than that, and the article was published, putting the president in the spotlight.

But as the second largest Muslim populated country in the world, it is still very sensitive about pornographic material. The ICT minister Tifatul Sembiring (being also a representative of an Islamic-oriented political party, the PKS) has vowed to curb porn in Indonesia. This is the same minister who has blocked more than one million porn sites, and was even able to force RIM (now known as Blackberry) to filter porn on its Blackberry handsets two years ago.

Just last week Tifatul also made a request to Twitter to see if the US-based company can censor porn-related tweets to protect Indonesian children from accessing those sites. Twitters new country-by-country censorship policy might be able to grant that request, but so far there is no update about the enquiry.

While porn sites are definitely being blocked by the Indonesian government, interestingly porn site Xvideos is sitting securely at the 48th spot in Indonesia according to Alexas rankings. There are indeed ways to overcome the censorship like changing the DNS address, using proxy servers, or using VPN services. And you could do those on your mobile phones too.

Though sometimes the government and telcos get it right concerning which sites should indeed be blocked under the nations anti-porn laws, there are times when they get it wrong. Vimeo is one such example - its an artistic site crucial for young filmmakers in the country to get global, creative exposure.

Indonesia is still a democratic country which respects your freedom of speech - but with a religious twist. But when an unfair block happens, young web users know that there are ways to still access whatever is being censored.

Originally posted here:
Censorship in Indonesia: No Porn Please!