Nearly 70 Percent Of Porn Sites In Indonesia Are Blocked By Kominfo, Following Gambling And Hoax Content

JAKARTA - Expert Staff to the Minister of Communication and Informatics (Kominfo) Henri Subiakto stated that his party mostly blocked sites that contain negative content, namely pornography in recent years.

"Most blocking in Indonesia is 70 percent pornography, until now the biggest is pornography because we do have a crawling machine", said Henri in Banda Aceh as quoted by Antara, Thursday, February 18.

Before 2018, he explained that Kominfo had to wait for reports or content complaints from the public to block pornographic sites.

This makes blocking slow, even only able to block about 3 thousand porn sites in a period of a year. However, he said, it was different when the Ministry of Communication and Information had the scraper or crawling machine.

"Now three thousand sites (porn) are only in one month because this machine is the one looking for it because people are waiting for reports, no one will report it. Now we are very fast”, he said.

Crawling is a machine used to ward off negative content on the internet. This machine blocks negative content such as pornography from spreading widely in cyberspace.

Until 2020, he continued, the number of blocking pornographic sites would reach 70 percent, compared to other content blocking.

"The number (sites blocked) I do not memorize. Pornography, the most gambling, is the same as a hoax but not too much”, he said.

So some of the blocking is active, Kominfo looks for using a crawling engine, some are passively waiting for public reports, content complaints, including online fraud", he said.

According to him, what makes blocking it difficult is when the negative content is behind other applications.

"Like hiding on Twitter, we have to cooperate with Twitter. So it is not as easy as imagined, because something that is considered pornographic in Indonesia, is not necessarily porn in other countries", he said.