Threat to ban X risks hurting Indonesia's digital economy

Experts say boosting internet safety education a better way to combat porn on social media

- Hariz Baharudin

A familiar approach was floated by Indonesia when news broke about social platform X’s decision to officially allow pornographic content: Ban and block it.

Should this happen, X will join the list of “problematic” online platforms and sites Indonesia has previously blocked, including social news website and forum Reddit, gaming marketplace Steam and payments solution PayPal.

But in an age of virtual private networks (VPNs) and other workarounds, simply disallowing access to parts of the internet might not be effective in getting Indonesians to stay away from them, said experts, who advocated more robust internet safety education.

In an update on its website on June 3, X said users “should be able to create, distribute, and consume material related to sexual themes as long as it is consensually produced and distributed”.

The San Francisco-based company said it will now formally allow users to post, view and share adult nudity and consensual sexual content, as long as it is clearly labelled as such. The move makes official a policy already in place when the platform was known as Twitter, before billionaire Elon Musk purchased it in 2022.

Indonesia’s Communications and Informatics Minister Budi Arie Setiadi said on June 5 that X has to abide by the country’s laws, which prohibit the dissemination of pornographic content, if it does not want to be sanctioned or banned.

On June 10, he said that he had sent a letter to X conveying his concerns, and reiterated that Indonesia will block access to the platform if it displays such content. There has been no official response from X to the minister so far.