Pornographic contents don't go well on some countries, and one of them is Indonesia.
As one of the largest archipelago country in the world located in the Southeast Asia, the Indonesian government has threatened Facebook's owned WhatsApp after the spread of pornographic GIFs circulated among its young generations.
The country gave the popular messaging service until November 8th, 2017 for it to remove pornographic GIFs, or be banned from the country.
WhatsApp is an cross-platform app that allows users to send and receive messages security using end-to-end encryption. It also allows users to browse a wide selection of GIF animated images, which are provided by third-party companies.
But the explicit nature of some of those GiF images weren't received well by the Indonesian government. Indonesia’s communication and information ministry said that it would block the messaging app within 48 hours if they weren't taken down.
Initially, on its defense, WhatsApp said that it couldn't actually able to remove them, mainly because communications on the app are protected by encryption, and advised the government to work directly with the GIF providers.
Tenor, Inc., one of the third-parties, had six of its DNS blocked in the country. They had then complied and "already implemented a fix for the content issues." Giphy, Inc., which also works with WhatsApp, offers partners a feature to filter inappropriate images.
As a result, WhatsApp's GIF feature can't e accessed by used using Indonesia's ISP, including Telkomsel, XL, Indosat, Firstmedia, and Bolt.
"We see now that they have done what we asked,” said Semuel Pangerapan, a director general at Indonesia’s communication and information ministry. "Therefore, we won’t block them because they have responded to us."
WhatsApp Messenger is widely used in Indonesia. Civil servants and ministers, including Minister of Communication and Information Rudiantara, are among the heaviest users.
The next stop for the government is to warn other companies, such as Google that has Gboard, a keyboard app that provides comparable GIF search results. "We will call all providers, including Google to clean up their network," added Pangerapan.
The internet is already partly censored in Indonesia with local ISPs restricting access to many websites that include pornographic materials, gambling, criticism of Islam, dating services, sex education and others. And the removal of WhatsApp's GIF is an attempt that marks another escalation against a background of growing conservatism in Indonesia as the world’s most populous Muslim-majority nation.
Rudiantara has vowed in the past to clamp down pornography websites, and after meetings with representatives of Google, Twitter and Facebook in August, he said that his ministry's priority was to protect Indonesians from content that promoted radicalism, terrorism and drugs.