Blocking Youtube & Myspace
The government and ISP’s blocking of video sharing and social sites, and the reasons behind it.
The government, through the Information ministry, has required Internet Service Providers to block the following websites, where the anti-Islam short film Fitna can be viewed:
- Youtube.com
- Myspace.com
- Liveleak.com
- Rapidshare.com
- Multiply.com
- Video.Google.com
- Themoviefitna.com
The minister Muhammad Nuh wrote to ISP’s last week asking them to block access to the sites on the grounds that Fitna could [1]
“disturb religious and civil harmony at a global level.”
The parliament recently passed a law on internet blocking, although apparently it has not been signed by the president yet. [2]
Muhammad Nuh met with a number of prominent Indonesian bloggers on 7th April such as Romi Satria Wahono and asked for advice, apparently it seems, on the best way to go about blocking the said sites.
One of the bloggers who attended the meeting, Avianto, blamed the government’s attitude on Indonesian low self-esteem and over-sensitivity:
Indonesian government told YouTube to take down a movie……YouTube didn’t respond because well, it’s YouTube, all of the content is user generated. But instead of following the spirit of the web by flagging the movie as negative or offensive, the government grumpily chose to block the entire YouTube. Yeah, I said grumpily because the government thought that YouTube didn’t respect Indonesian government request. So low self-esteem. So low that the government didn’t have guts to create a creative way to counter the movie on the content level. So low that instead of encouraging its own people to create a counter movie, the government chose to close down the infrastructure. It’s pathetic, really.
That action was also very New Orderly. In the New Order era, if the government did not like one article then the government would ban the newspaper that have the article. The history repeated itself. Welcome to the New Order 2.0.
One of the officials from the Information ministry complained that Indonesians were so often subject to racism and xenophobia in the international community. Avianto spoke up
As if Indonesian were not xenophobic and racist toward others? I always said this and people kept getting angry with my statement: “Indonesians are one of the most xenophobic and racist people in the world”. Do you think it’s not true?
Even worse, Indonesians are just not racist, Indonesian are tribalist.
Putting the blame to the international world for being xenophobic and racist against us was like a childish act. We are racist, we are xenophobic, we are tribalist.
Read the entirety of Avianto’s article: Commanding not Governing.
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