Fadiyah Alaidrus, Jakarta – A new bill in Parliament would widen the authority of the Indonesian Broadcasting Commission and increase its ability to censor content on digital platforms, including social media. The bill, which was leaked in March 2024 and put back on lawmakers' priority list in November, explicitly prohibits content presenting lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender "behavior" from being published online.
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Dave Laksono, a member of Parliament working on the bill, known as the Broadcasting Bill, says it's important that Indonesia follow global trends in digital platform regulation.
"It is our responsibility to build a control, make a filtering on social media, on information that children will receive," he says. Censorship of content on digital platforms is a simple extension of what's already going on with movies, television and radio, he adds.
At the same time, another new bill being discussed would expand the authority of police to surveil and shut down internet access. That's on top of the new Military Law, enacted in March, which increases the military's authority in the digital space.
LGBTQ+ advocates say the Broadcasting Bill, combined with the Military Law and the proposed police bill, adds a new layer of risk for sexual minorities. It will lead to further discrimination against the already-vulnerable LGBTQ+ community – controlling rather than protecting them, says Richa Shofyana, known as Chacha, who works at Crisis Response Mechanism, which aims to prevent and respond to crises involving sexual and gender minorities.
A history of discrimination
The current atmosphere in Indonesia is a digital repeat of 2016 – a year during which transgender women lost their jobs in the entertainment industry en masse, due to a censorship law focused on television and radio, says Kanzha Vinaa, a transgender woman who leads Sanggar Swara, a nongovernmental organization focusing on transgender rights in Indonesia.
That year marked the rise of an anti-LGBTQ+ movement. Even then, many LGBTQ+ people began to close their social media accounts, Vinaa says. There were comments on her accounts that attacked her identity and even threatened her life, she adds, and they weren't erased by the platform.
"It was not considered violence," she says.
Chacha says that during that time, particularly in 2023, her name and old pictures of her without a headscarf appeared on social media, and she lost access to her WhatsApp account. There were multiple reasons for the uptick in anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment, advocates say. There was new political leadership at the provincial level – one candidate was Chinese and not Muslim, which sparked protests from Muslim conservatives. In addition, the United States legalized same-sex marriage in 2015, which triggered many Indonesian politicians to be increasingly cautious about the LGBTQ+ rights movement. That was all during the administration of President Joko Widodo, popularly known as Jokowi, who was in power from 2014 to 2024.
Indonesian police already regularly arrest groups of people gathered for parties.
Nenden Sekar Arum, executive director at Southeast Asia Freedom of Expression Network, called SAFEnet, says criminalization of and censorship toward LGBTQ+ people significantly intensified during the Jokowi administration. Between 2016 and 2018, the Ministry of Communication and Information moved to block 169 websites with "immoral" LGBTQ+ content, as well as the dating app Grindr, and Blued, a gay social network application. That ministry no longer publishes the names of blocked apps and sites, so it's unclear how many remain inaccessible.
Indonesian police already regularly arrest groups of people gathered for parties. In February, police arrested 56 people in Jakarta. And last November, Isa Zega, a transgender woman and social media influencer, became a suspect in a blasphemy case after uploading content showing her going on the Umrah pilgrimage wearing a headscarf. Both of those cases happened under the administration of Prabowo Subianto, the current president.
"The current government is actually continuing [Jokowi's works]," Nenden says.
'I will stay'
Laksono, the lawmaker, says the Broadcasting Bill is still in the discussion phase in Parliament, and there's no decision on when to finalize it. But it's common for lawmakers to finalize bills suddenly, as was the case with the Military Law.
Yovantra Arief, director of Remotivi, a media study organization, predicts Parliament will rush the discussion on this bill and finalize it soon. The Indonesian Broadcasting Commission, known as KPI, views the issue as simple: The new bill is about protecting children, says Ubaidillah, the KPI head.
"We are focusing on how to ensure children who are watching are not influenced to justify the behavior," he says. Vinaa, meanwhile, says she plans to face the new bill differently than she responded to events in 2016, when she disappeared from social media for years.
"At this point, I don't want to make them able to silence me again," she says. "So, whatever happens, I will stay in the digital space to reclaim the spaces, with all the risks that I am aware of."