Not Medsos Is Blocked, Kominfo Will Clean Up Hoaxes Of Omnibus Law

Menkominfo Johnny G Plate (doc. Humas Kominfo)

JAKARTA - News has circulated that the Ministry of Communication and Informatics (Kominfo) will block social media (medsos). This issue developed in line with the mass action in various regions against the draft of the Omnibus Law.

The Minister of Communication and Information, Johnny G Plate, has denied the issue. Instead, what he will do is clean up hoax news and information related to the Job Creation Law. Where was part of the patrol of the AIS Kominfo team.

"Hoax. The task of AIS Kominfo (Komifo Cyber Patrol) is to keep the digital space clean and healthy. That is the mandate of the ITE Law to Kominfo," said Johnny G Plate as quoted by Antara, Friday, October 9.

This answers a busy issue on Twitter related to the tweet from the @PartaiSocmed account which states that the Ministry of Communication and Information will block social media as a result of rejecting the Omnibus Law. The tweet has been liked by more than 61.2 people and was re-tweeted 24,000 times, with 8.5 thousand comments.

ANNOUNCEMENT OF SOCIAL MEDIA BLOCKING PLAN BY KEMKOMINFO!

- # 99 (@PartaiSocmed) October 8, 2020

Indeed, social media restrictions have occurred several times in 2019. Where the Ministry of Communication and Information conducted throttling or slowing down internet access / bandwidth related to the chaos in Wamena City, Papua.

The same thing allegedly happened during student demonstrations at the DPR / MPR RI. This includes when the government limits the use of social media to combat hoaxes in the midst of mass riots that reject the results of the election recapitulation announced by the General Election Commission.

So, is the government allowed to block this social media? Social media observer, Eddy Yansen, said that it is okay to do this by Kominfo in order to control wrong information.

"As long as the technology conglomerates are unable to have control and policies that are truly effective in controlling hate speech and hoaxes, the government may indeed make efforts to control this," Eddy told VOI.

Eddy explained that this October, the three giant platforms, namely Facebook, Google, and Twitter, are indeed paying serious attention in controlling the spread of hate speech and misinformation or hoaxes. So that Kominfo's steps to combat hoaxes and misleading information are in line with what the three social media platforms are doing.

"In this case, the government's strength is because it is impossible to interfere with the internal policies of companies such as FB, Google, Twitter, so the government's course is of course only to block them, as a whole for a while," explained Eddy.

For the record, Eddy said that independence in an information democracy also has a negative side, just as other countries' interference in spreading propaganda and misinformation will be easier to do, if all information channels are left open without defense.

"For this reason, I see that in the future, regulations that bind not only users (users) but including platform providers (FB, Google, Twitter) are urgently needed, because like media companies whose reporting is subject to journalistic codes of ethics," he added.