Indonesia has blocked more than 70,000 websites displaying "negative" content such as pornography, gambling or extremist ideology in the first month of using a system to help purge the internet of harmful material, according to the Rudiantara, Indonesia's Minister of Communication and Information.
4 years later in October 2018, almost a million, or 912.659 website to be exact, have been blocked.
Most of them contained pornographic material or gambling applications, and some were simply spreading hoaxes.
As the world’s most populous Muslim-majority country, Indonesia has stepped up its efforts to control online content after a rise in hoax stories, fake news and hate speech, and amid controversial anti-pornography laws pushed by Islamic parties.
With the so-called "crawling system' developed by the state-run Telekomunikasi Indonesia Tbk (Telkom), the ministry uses 44 servers to conduct internet searches to then issue alerts when inappropriate material is found.
According to ministry data, the system costs it around $15 million.
"We just put some sort of keywords there, most of them are pornographic," said Rudiantara. "Because after 2017 we have blocked almost 800,000 sites and more than 90 percent (of these were) pornographic."
The ministry also acts to get content removed from social media and messaging platforms if there are complaints from the public.
In 2018 alone, the ministry has handled thousands of negative contents from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube.
Breaking the numbers down, the ministry has received and processed 6.123 cases coming from Facebook and Instagram, 517 cases involving file sharing, 502 cases found on Telegram, 1,530 cases from YouTube, 5 from BBM (BlackBerry Messenger), and 3,521 from Twitter.
In previous years, Indonesia has blocked numerous popular websites due to this reason. The country also had threatened to block Facebook's WhatsApp, a messaging app widely used in the country, unless obscene Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) images provided by third parties were removed.
The authorities have also asked Telegram to block its netizens' access to some channels that were "full of radical and terrorist propaganda."
Indonesia has also asked Google to turn on SafeSearch permanently in the country, and asked it remove almost a hundred LGBT-related apps from its Play Store for citizens of the country, including the gay dating app, Blued. Besides pornography, Indonesia sees contents related to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender as a contradiction to cultural norms.
Rudiantara said the relationship with social media companies and tech giants was improving, and the two parties have put some disagreements down to differences over what, for example, constitutes pornography.
"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," he said. "But now it’s getting better, particularly when we consider content associated with radicalism, terrorism... On that content, I think they respond very fast,"
The minister also said that nine tech companies, including Google and Facebook, had pledged to help the Indonesian authorities to tackle fake news and hate speech during upcoming elections in the world’s third-biggest democracy.