In preparation for Ramadan, which began at sundown on Thursday July 19, the Indonesian Communication and Information Ministry blocked \u00a0over 1 million pornographic websites from local access. \u00a0Most of the sites were hosted outside of the country, and the government estimates that there are over 2 billion websites providing pornographic content worldwide.<\/p>\n
The Ministry says that the measures are being taken in accordance with Indonesia\u2019s Electronic Information and Transaction Law and Telecommunications Law, which allows the government to block \u201cnegative content,\u201d including pornography, libelous statements, and malware. \u00a0This is the same law that forced Research in Motion to filter<\/a> all pornographic content on Indonesian Blackberrys in January of last year.<\/p>\n Minister Titaful Sembiring said<\/a>\u00a0that the Ministry would block more sites during Ramadan, and that the sites would likely remain blocked after the Islamic holiday. \u00a0He noted the Ministry\u2019s limitations and requested that Indonesian citizens \u201cactively report to the Communication and Information Minister if they find a link to negative website.\u201d<\/p>\n In recent years the Indonesian government has increased and strictly enforced the censorship of both pornography and negative comments about Islam. \u00a0Last year, Indonesia\u2019s censorship laws led to a three and a half year jail sentence<\/a> for a local pop star after two sex tapes were leaked online. \u00a0Earlier this year, 31 year-old Alexander Aan, who declared himself an atheist over Facebook, was sentenced to five years in prison<\/a>.<\/p>\n While censorship is not new to Indonesia, censorship of this scale is unprecedented. \u00a0Historically, Indonesia has not had a comprehensive Internet filtering system in place. \u00a0Instead, it relies on government censors, tips from individuals, and cooperation with ISPs and Internet cafes to effectuate the regulation of online content.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In preparation for Ramadan, which began at sundown on Thursday July 19, the Indonesian Communication and Information Ministry blocked \u00a0over 1 million pornographic websites from local access. \u00a0Most of the sites were hosted outside of the country, and the government estimates that there are over 2 billion websites providing pornographic content worldwide. The Ministry says […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4635,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4236],"tags":[3687,2103],"class_list":["post-1455","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-herdict-web","tag-censorship","tag-indonesia"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4LdGs-nt","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/herdict\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1455","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/herdict\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/herdict\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/herdict\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4635"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/herdict\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1455"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/herdict\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1455\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1460,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/herdict\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1455\/revisions\/1460"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/herdict\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1455"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/herdict\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1455"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/herdict\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1455"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}