Social media app TikTok is allowed to operate again in Indonesia. The Indonesian government withdrew the permit on Friday, but subsequently reversed it.
According to the director general of the Indonesian Ministry of Communications and Digital Affairs, Alexander Sabar, this happened because TikTok still provided data that the Indonesian authorities had requested. That’s what Sabar said in a statement on weekends. Previously, the social media app, owned by Chinese tech company ByteDance, refused to provide the data, according to the Indonesian government. The company would be bound by “internal procedures and rules”.
Sabar stated on Friday that “TikTok has violated its duties as a private operator of an electronic system, and as part of our supervision we are taking suspension measures.” The suspension was initially administrative: TikTok remained accessible.
Housing allowance
The requested data concerned the use of live streams during demonstrations at the end of August. These demonstrations, between August 25 and 30, focused, among other things, on parliamentarians who had granted themselves a generous housing allowance. This led to great anger because many Indonesians can hardly make ends meet and have to work under poor conditions.
Thousands of demonstrators took to the streets. The protests intensified when a food delivery worker was killed by a police vehicle.
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The Indonesian government formally requested the data from the demonstration days because it wanted to take action against illegal earnings from gambling accounts. Sabar also said last weekend that the Indonesian government will continue to monitor electronic platforms.
On August 30, TikTok itself chose to block the app’s livestream function. The company then announced that it wanted to keep the platform “safe and civilized” and to prevent the spread of violence.
Fine
A spokesperson for TikTok said in the Singapore newspaper The Straits Times that the company “respects the laws and regulations of the countries in which it operates.”
The Indonesian government also took another action against the company last week. It was fined 700,000 euros because it allegedly announced too late a takeover of parts of the company Tokopedia (a marketplace site).
TikTok is one of the most important social media platforms in Indonesia with a hundred million users. Social media have played an important role in protests in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal in recent years. In Nepal, a ban on social media use in September led to so much resistance that the government fell.
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