The Indonesian government recently announced plans to put together a special cyber agency in its move to tackle the spread of fake news online, especially on social media. But the effort is facing a new challenge: How to make sure the channel does not stand as a threat to the people's freedom of speech?
After blocking 11 news portals considered to have violated the Electronic Information and Transactions (ITE) Law, the Communications and Information Ministry opened a complaint channel to facilitate the generalpublic in reportingnegative content such as fake news, hate speech, or defamation found online. The target? Everything from online news portals to personal social media accounts which means if you're an avid social media user, you might need to be more careful before posting or sharing anything on your page.
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Ministry spokesman Noor Iza told Brilio the newly opened complaint channel is part of a bigger effort to diminish the spread of content with ethnic, religious, racial and social group sentiments (SARA), pornography, radical values, defamation, violence and children violence, fraud, malware and phishing, and other negative messages on social media, websites and blogs, as well as online news portals.
Newly opened complain canal (Photo via Kemenkominfo)
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Reports will be received and inspected by a team from the ministry, said Noor Iza. Should there be [any negative contents or fake news], the reported party could fall under the jurisdiction [of law enforcement], and we will follow up in accordance with the law.
Though the channel and other government's efforts are built on noble intentions, there is a concern that these operations might harm people's freedom of speech. In addition, ITE Law, that is used as the base of the whole operation, has been long criticized of being too flexible that it can be used with too many interpretations, including putting someone to jail over offensive messenger status.
Institute for Criminal Justice Reform (ICJR) researcher Erasmus Napitupulu told Brilio that the use of criminal sanctions to restrain people's expression through the internet has always been a threat to freedom of speech.
Government should be more careful in applying the law. Be more careful in blocking (contents), he said. In fact, we already have articles in Criminal Code (KUHP) that areidentical to the ITELaw. So why do we even need ITE Law?
Erasmus claimed that the law regulating hate speech should be enough and there is no need to specify a regulation for messages that "offend" or "humiliate" people as the interpretation are too flexible.
The lack of clear indicators of "negative content"is another problem.
The ministry did not provide detailed information to Brilio on the kind of hate speech that could be deemed as a violationto the ITE Law nor the benchmark of 'negative content' that might result in blocking and/or legal charge.
According to a written statement by ICJR, the government's full authority to terminate access to the prohibited content, website, and social media accounts, paired with the inadequate indicators of the prohibited contents on the Internetcould risk power abuse and leaves people proneto being legally charged fortheir opinions.
[Even with the newly revised ITE Law], freedom of speech is still threatened, said Erasmus.
The House of Representative passed a revision on the ITE Law back in November 2016, which includes the "right to be forgotten", allowing one to request stories about him/herself to be taken down from the internet upon the conclusion of a case. The law also stipulates the government's right to erase electronic documents with contents that stand in violation of the law, the cutting of maximum prison timem for ITE Law violaters from six years to four years, and aso states thatelectronic evidence retrieved through bugging without a court warrant could not be used in trials.
Erasmus noticed that ICJR has not decided to take any further stepsrelated to the revised ITE Law, but they will continue their research and advocacy related to provisions that threaten the freedom of expression and speech.