Nuurrianti Jalli – TikTok Live's anticipatory suspension during nationwide protests in Indonesia last month shows the influence of Jakarta's interventionist digital governance. Such suspensions hurt small businesses and can fuel misinformation.
On 31 August 2025, TikTok temporarily suspended its "live" feature across Indonesia, citing safety concerns as nationwide protests escalated after Affan Kurniawan, a 21-year-old ride hailing driver, was killed by a police vehicle during demonstrations in Jakarta. For 107 million Indonesians, the livestream vanished overnight and remained inaccessible for four days.
TikTok described the suspension of its live feature as "voluntary". Meanwhile, Indonesia's Communication and Digital Affairs Ministry denied ordering the move and framed it as the result of precaution on the company's part. Yet, in a country with a history of restrictions, such assurances are hard to take at face value. The timing of the suspension amid protests highlighted how global platforms are intertwined with state power and digital infrastructure can be treated as a switch flipped in moments of political crisis.
This episode did not occur in a vacuum. Indonesia has long favoured an interventionist approach to digital governance, asserting its sovereignty, disciplining foreign platforms, and promoting domestic players. Ministry Regulation No. 5 (MR5), introduced in 2020, requires platforms to remove flagged content within hours or risk sanctions, from fines to deregistration.
The state has also used blunt instruments: in May 2019, authorities restricted access to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and WhatsApp during post-election riots in Jakarta, and later that year imposed a full internet shutdown across Papua and West Papua provinces during violent protests there. In 2023, Jakarta banned TikTok's e-commerce arm, forcing it to merge with Tokopedia, a domestic e-commerce platform. Together, these moves signalled that foreign platforms could only operate on government terms.
Platforms, for their part, have learned to anticipate regulators' expectations, acting pre-emptively to avoid harsher measures. Parent company Meta signed up Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp to MR5 regulations just one day before the government's deadline in order to avert being blocked.
TikTok, facing restrictions on its e-commerce arm, secured a majority-stake merger arrangement with Tokopedia, less a victory than a concession to Jakarta's demands. Such acts of anticipatory compliance show how power operates through pressure and expectation rather than explicit orders, a dynamic that rarely receives judicial or public scrutiny.
The four-day blackout of TikTok's live feature had immediate consequences. Livestreaming had served as real-time infrastructure for journalists, civil society organisations and citizens to document events. Once that capacity disappeared, people relied on asynchronous content from platforms like X and even TikTok, but since information was now delayed, it created space for misinformation that was difficult to counter once widely shared.
The disruption also hit the economy: thousands of small businesses and creators relied on live features to reach customers. Even the temporary suspension cut off income streams overnight, exposing how dependence on a few platforms creates synchronised shocks.
Indonesia is not alone in restricting social media. Across Southeast Asia, governments have increasingly intervened in platform operations, though in different ways and with varying intensity. Vietnam enforces one of the region's most sweeping localisation regimes, while Thailand regularly orders takedowns under its lese-majeste laws. Cambodia has blocked news sites and Facebook during elections, and Singapore, often portrayed as more calibrated in digital governance as it seeks to be a smart nation, has nonetheless required platforms to restrict foreign-origin content during elections. Against this backdrop, Indonesia's approach may not be the most stringent, but it reflects a broader regional pattern of governments asserting control over digital spaces.
The unfortunate trend across Southeast Asia is that each time platforms bow to political pressure, they become more restrictive in anticipation of future crises. In turn, each time authorities notice such compliance, they are encouraged to lean more heavily on platforms when it serves their interests. Over time, this feedback loop produces systemic fragility: a connected ecosystem where interventions in one area cascade rapidly into others.
There are ways to avoid this trap. In the immediate term, governments should refrain from treating livestream bans as default responses to unrest. International standards, such as the UN Human Rights Council's 2016 resolution, stress that restrictions on expression must be lawful, necessary, and proportionate, a criterion that blanket suspensions rarely meet. Authorities could instead require platforms to maintain crisis-specific channels for verified reporting and emergency communication.
Responsibility, however, should not rest solely with regulators. Platforms also have a duty to safeguard civic communication in moments of crisis and, over the longer term, must build trust by increasing accountability in their reporting practices. Transparency reports should be more granular, going beyond broad categorisations of government takedown requests so that there is greater public awareness of requests that are politically inspired and how platforms respond to them.
At the regional level, ASEAN could play a convening role. While its non-interference norm limits binding action, frameworks like the ASEAN Digital Masterplan 2025 show how members can coordinate voluntary digital standards. The blackout of TikTok Live in Indonesia was more than a matter of platform policy. It illuminated the contradictions of Indonesia's digital sovereignty drive: while control may bring short-term reassurance to the authorities, it also generates systemic risks for citizens who lose transparency, for businesses that depend on digital platforms for their income, and for institutions whose credibility is eroded when shutdowns replace accountability.
The suspension was especially contentious given reports of authorities using disproportionate force during the protests, when real-time documentation was vital for transparency. A "voluntary" restriction under tacit regulatory pressure is neither self-censorship nor a neutral corporate decision. The real question is how to design governance that mitigates harm without triggering cascading failures. In an era where digital tools underpin daily life, treating any single platform as an on-off switch is misguided and destabilising.
[Nuurrianti Jalli is a Visiting Fellow at the Media, Technology and Society Programme at ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute. She is also a Research Affiliate at the Data and Democracy Research Hub at Monash University, Indonesia, and an Assistant Professor at the School of Media and Strategic Communications at Oklahoma State University.]
Source: https://fulcrum.sg/when-tiktok-live-went-dead-in-indonesia-digital-sovereignty-and-systemic-risk