Facebook, TikTok, and Clubhouse may be banned in Indonesia within six months if the Information and Communications Ministry's order for them to be legally registered in the country proves to be more than a mere bluff.
On November 24, 2020, the ministry issued a regulation requiring digital services to register as Electronic System Providers (PSE), for the purposes of cyber security and user protection, within six months. The three aforementioned social media platforms were among those that were said to be targeted by the regulation.
The deadline for registration was supposed to be today, but the ministry said it has extended the deadline by another six months as its online registration system will only be launched on June 2.
"So the deadline that fell on May 24, 2021 has been extended to six months since the launch of [the online registration system]," the ministry's Director General of Applications and Information Samuel A. Pangerapan was quoted in a press release today.
The major social media platforms have not publicly stated their intention to register as PSE in Indonesia since the ministry passed the regulation last year.
The ministry has been known to ban apps and platforms on legal and/or moral grounds in recent years. These include gay dating app Blued, which was banned for its "immoral" LGBT content, TikTok for its general "negative content," and Telegram for allegedly facilitating the spread of radical content, though the bans for the latter two have since been lifted.