JAKARTA: Indonesia said on Tuesday it would summon representatives of messaging services and search engines, including Alphabet Inc’s (GOOGL.O) Google, to demand they remove obscene content, a day after threatening to shut down WhatsApp Messenger.
“We will call all providers, including Google to clean up their network,” said Samuel Pangerapan, a director general at Indonesia’s communication and informatics ministry.
“They have to follow the rules of the host,” Pangerapan said of WhatsApp Messenger, which is widely used in Indonesia – prolifically by some ministers and bureaucrats.
WhatsApp said on Monday that message encryption prevented it from monitoring the animated graphics files, known as GIFs, that are available on the app through third-party services.
Tenor Inc, one of the third parties, said on Tuesday it had “already implemented a fix for the content issues”.
Users of Whatsapp Messenger on iPhones were unable to access Tenor GIFs on Tuesday.
The company “regularly” worked with “local entities to make sure our content reflects the cultural mores and legal requirements,” spokeswoman Jennifer Kutz said in a statement.
Indonesia’s warning did not appear to target Gboard, a keyboard app developed by Google that provides comparable GIF search results but must be installed separately from WhatsApp on most devices.
NETIZENS SCEPTICAL
Indonesia blocks access to websites offering criticism of Islam, dating services and sex education, research published in May by Tor Project, a non-profit maker of Web browsing tools, showed.
Indonesia had 69 million monthly active Facebook users by the first quarter of 2014, ranking it fourth globally after the United States, India and Brazil, company data showed.
Some reaction on Indonesian social media to the threatened block was sceptical.
The country’s regulators have reached settlements with several technology companies after threatening to shut them down. In August, Indonesia announced it would block Giphy’s website for showing gambling-related ads. Access was soon restored after it agreed to cooperate with regulators.
Bans were similarly rescinded in recent years on social media websites, such as Vimeo and Tumblr, and the chat app Telegram, which regulators had said was “full of radicals and terrorist propaganda.”
The Indonesian Consumers Foundation (YLKI) had urged the communications ministry to block pornographic GIF images accessible via emoticons, complaining that children could easily reach them, according to news website kompas.com. Terms of use for WhatsApp, Tenor and Giphy specify users must be at least 13.
