Indonesia has blocked more than 70,000 websites since January

Since Indonesia introduced a ‘crawling system’ to identify inappropriate Internet content in January, its Ministry of Communication and Information has blocked more than 70,000 websites with ‘negative’ and pornographic content. The ministry is also attempting to resolve disagreements with Internet companies over what constitutes pornography. According to the Indonesian Minister of Communication and Information, ‘To us probably it is pornographic, because we refer to the laws of pornography in Indonesia. But for other parts of the world, they say it is not pornography, it is art.’ The country has recently been criticised for cracking down on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) content. For example, it requested Google last month to remove 73 LGBT-related applications from its PlayStore.