Indonesia’s controversial and vaguely defined Information and Electronic Transactions Act (UU ITE) is once again being utilized to silence freedom of speech.
Yesterday, Muhammad Guntur, a member of the Jakarta City Council, reported a Facebook user by the name of Cahyo Harimurti to the Jakarta Metro Police for online defamation.
According to reports, Cahyo wrote a rant about Jakarta City Council members on Facebook in which he repeatedly described them as “monkeys” as an insult.
His post went viral online, and came to the attention of the City Council, many of whom are supporting the police report against Cahyo.
“40 out of 106 [council members] gave their support for the police report,” Guntur said yesterday, as quoted by Warta Kota.
“With technology these days, we must be more careful when commenting on social media like Facebook, especially with insults that could hurt people’s feelings.”
The maximum penalty for online defamation, as stated in the Criminal Code and UU ITE, is four years imprisonment.
In the past, UU ITE has been used to punish numerous individuals exercising their freedom of speech in Indonesia, such as a woman who criticized a hospital’s customer service, a man who argued against the existence of God and a woman who chatted “immorally” with a man other than her husband on Facebook.
