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Minister of Communications and Information Technology Tifatul Sembiring said that the Indonesian government was obligated to serve as a gatekeeper for the Internet, including social media.
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| Indonesian Minister of Communications and Information Technology Tifatul Sembiring (Antara Photo) |
According
to Tifatul, stricter controls were necessary to prevent Indonesia from
suffering the same fate as Tunisia and Libya, where huge portions of those
populations rose up to depose autocratic rulers.
“The
government is obligated to control the Internet," he said on Thursday.
"Don't let uprisings, like what happened to Tunisia and Libya — who failed
in controlling the social media like Facebook and Twitter — happen to us,”
His remarks
came at an event in Menteng, Central Jakarta, to inform children about safe and
healthy use of the Internet.
“In the
past, control toward the government was done through the House of
Representatives, but now the control and critics toward the government is done
through the social media. The public is free to express their opinion but they
have to be responsible,” Tifatul said.
His call to
arms garnered swift reaction. A Prosperous Justice Party lawmaker Mahfudz
Siddiq said the government should not meddle with limiting speech in social
media.
“Twitter is
a public communication media, thus there is no need to limit or control it,”
Mahfudz said.
“Besides,
how will the government control Twitter? The social and online media are not
constrained to time and space, how will we limit something like that?”
Indonesian
Twitter users responded harshly to the minister's latest statement.
@samleinad
wrote, “Did Tifatul think when he tweeted about AIDS?'
Last year,
the minister raised the hackles of gay rights activists with a series of
homophobic tweets in which he blamed “perverted sex acts” for the spread of
HIV/AIDS.
In one
tweet, he quoted a passage from the Koran that told of Allah “smiting
[homosexuals] with rocks from a burning land.”
Another
Twitter user, @Amulia, wrote, “Why are you taking care of something which is
totally not important?”
@Achtungkoro
wrote, “Pak Tif, uprisings didn't happen because of social media but there is
something wrong with the government and it had to be criticized and improved.”
On his
Twitter account, Tifatul once again stressed that social media could have a
major effect on many aspects of the nation.
"What I'm saying is social media can
affect politics, economy and even social structure so we have to pay
attention,” he tweeted.
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